Hickory Bible Church

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ

Pastor Adam Ashoff

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The Resurrection of Jesus Christ

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Well. It is a privilege and joy to open God's Word with you this morning. Turn to John chapter 20. Uh, this is a particularly special Sunday as we look at the resurrection of Jesus. It was our own, I guess we'll call him a local legend down in Charlotte, Billy Graham, who said, if I did not believe that Christ rose bodily from the grave, I would quit preaching. Amen. Kurtis mentioned it earlier because Paul said it If Christ is not raised, our preaching is in vain. Your faith is worthless because you're still in your sin. That's where we left off Friday night when Jesus said, it is finished on the cross. What is the last proof of evidence that that actually went through? That it was paid in full. And if Christ is not raised, we're not convinced by the text in front of us today, then what are we actually doing here? If there ever is a time and a place to be reminded of the wonderful Catechism, what is our only hope in life and death? It's Christ. That he lived and he died, and he rose again. It's found in John 20. So if you have a Bible, follow along. If you don't, check the seat back in the chair in front of you for a copy. This is arguably the most important chapter in the Bible. The resurrection of Jesus Christ. It holds it all together, and it deserves our full attention today. And I will read it in its entirety starting in verse one.
"Now, on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came early to the tomb while it was still dark, and saw the stone already taken away from the tomb. So she ran and came to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and said to them, they have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him. So Peter and the other disciple went forth, and they were going to the tomb. The two were running together, and the other disciple ran ahead faster than Peter and came to the tomb first. And stooping and looking in, he saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. And so Simon Peter also came following him and entered the tomb. And he saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the face cloth which had been on his head, not lying with the linen wrappings, but rolled up in a place by itself. So the other disciple, who had first come to the tomb, then also entered, and he saw and believed. For as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead. So the disciples went away again to their homes. But Mary was standing outside the tomb weeping. And so as she wept, she stooped and looked into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white sitting, one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had been lying. And they said to her, woman, why are you weeping? And she said to them, because they have taken away my lord, and I do not know where they have laid him. When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, and did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking? Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away. Jesus said to her, Mary. She turned and said to him in Hebrew, Rabboni, which means teacher. Jesus said to her, stop clinging to me, for I have not yet ascended to the father, but go to my brethren, and say to them, I ascend to my father, and your father, and my God, and your God. Mary Magdalene came announcing to the disciples, I have seen the Lord, and that he had said these things to her. So when it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and when the doors were shut where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, peace be with you. And when he had said this, he showed them both his hands in his side. The disciples then rejoiced when they saw the Lord. So Jesus said to them again, peace be with you, as the Father has sent me, I also send you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, their sins have been forgiven them. If you retain the sins of any, they have been retained. But Thomas, one of the 12 called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples were saying to him, we have seen the Lord. But he said to them, unless I see in his hands the imprint of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe. After eight days his disciples were again inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus came, and the doors, having been shut, stood in their midst and said, peace be with you. Then he said to Thomas, reach here with your finger, and see my hands. And reach here your hand and put it into my side. And do not be unbelieving but believing. Thomas answered and said to him, my Lord and my God. Jesus said to him, because you have seen me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see and yet believed. Therefore, many other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book. But these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name."
Thus reads the Word of God. The grass withers and we are like grass, and the flower fades, but the Word of God endures forever. Amen.  
There is such an extraordinary nature to John 20. After spending time in it this last week, I could close my eyes and I could see it play out. It is arguably the most beautiful depiction of all the depictions of the resurrection, the movement between the different witnesses and then where it ends. The power of it is so much so it feels rather electric, which we should expect it to feel that way. If it is a true story about a man rising from the dead. It's beyond imagination. We have those moments in our lives where something so amazing happens to us, or that we are part of that we witness an unforgettable event and nothing can take it from our memory. There's some electricity still left in that moment when we conjured up in our minds, maybe as a child, some amazing experience of being the hero of the game. Maybe it was the time you met eyes across the room or the first date. Maybe it was graduating from high school or college being the first one in your family to do so. Maybe it was the engagement day or the wedding day. Maybe it was the birth of your first child. Maybe it was when the Steelers beat the Cardinals in Super Bowl 43. February 1st, 2009. Those moments are unforgettable. When we read John 20, it has such an amazing appeal that nothing and no one can take it away from us. Even a communist naysayer like Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin couldn't stop it one day in 1930. At the time, he was one of the most influential men on earth. A Russian revolutionary. A contemporary serving under Lenin and then Stalin, who took part in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. It was in 1930 he went on a trip from Moscow to Kiev to address a massive crowd on the topic of atheism and its merits. Inevitably, it quickly turned into an all out assault on Christianity, and he, a genius in his own right, argued against the faith skillfully. At the end of his talk, he was confident that he had convinced the crowd that they should embrace atheism. So he turned to the audience and boldly opened it up to any questions. Deafening silence filled the auditorium. That is, until an Orthodox priest went up to the platform. He looked at the crowd and then shouted the ancient greeting. Well known in the Russian Orthodox Church, Christ is risen! And at once the crowd stood up and responded, he is risen indeed! What can give a beleaguered people like that such deep rooted conviction in such an unexpected situation? The New Testament has a clear and simple answer. It’s true. Those people, just like disciples and just like you today, believed with all their heart that the tomb was empty and that Jesus had risen from the dead. And people for two millennia have believed Jesus has risen from the dead for the simple fact that he did. My prayer today is that as we walk through this account from John the Apostle, the writer of this gospel, and eye witness to these historical events of seeing the risen Lord, it will have the same encouraging, convicting, invigorating effect that has had for all the ages who are disciples of Jesus. And we will look at the resurrection of Jesus from the eyes of four sets of people today. And I believe if we simply observe what they heard, saw, felt, and responded, we will find ourselves overwhelmed in joy with the most amazing day in history that changed all of humanity.
So first, let's first talk about John and Peter and what they experienced as they race to the tomb that day in verses 1 to 10. The full title of this painting, the disciples Peter and John running to the sepulchre on the morning of the resurrection, was by a little known Swiss artist named Eugene Burnand, 1898 it was his best known work. I love how one Christian art critic put it. The picture crackles with kinetic energy. It is a study in desperate anticipation. Surely is also the posture with which we should approach Easter leaning in, wringing our hands, clutching our chests, desperate for it to be true. Verse one. It was the first day of the week, and Mary Magdalene came early to the tomb while it was still dark, and saw the stone rolled away. John brings us into his energized testimony that morning with a quick survey of the action. It's the first day of the week in Jewish counting of days. They don't name them, but it would be Sunday for us. And by the way, in case you've ever wondered, why is today the day we gather? It's this reason established in early church tradition. The Lord's Day is the first day, and from that time till now, Sunday is the day we gather. Mary comes early to the tomb, and you're wondering if you know the other gospels, where are the other women? John doesn't mention them by name. Mind you, he is telling this account. 40 to 50 years after it happened and he's not getting into the minutia. But we do know the other women were there in accordance with the other accounts because of Mary's response in verse two. Do you see what she says? They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we. The other women were with her. It's just in John's retelling of this event. He wants the focus to be on Mary, because he's going to return to her eyewitness testimony later. She sees the stone rolled away and hotfoots it in verse two to John and Peter to break the bad news. And so then in verses 3 to 5, John humbly recounts he is the other disciple in this story with Peter. He recounts that he outruns Peter in verse four. We don't know why he ran ahead faster, whether it was excitement or it was his age. Some believe he was younger than the older Peter, but for whatever reason, he gets there first and he stoops and looks in. It's the vision they want to give you. He wants to give you that. James 125 uses the same phrase when it says, we are to look intently into the law of Christ, the law of liberty, and by looking into it, you are blessed by it. That's this word. It's a close examination. And he saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. In bursts peter. Right by him. Verse six. I actually picture Pastor Kurtis and John Crick. Kurtis, of course, would outrun John to the tomb. Speed wins. But you know, our former All-American D lineman would blitz right past Kurtis and burst his way into that tomb, excited, taking in everything around him. That's how I picture this. I actually was trying to figure out, could I with the use of AI or something, get Kurtis and John's face on that picture so young people figure it out. We would love to see a recreation of that wonderful painting with our beloved elders. The detail that John keeps repeating that he wants us all not to miss is what changed it for him. It was three times repeated. Seeing the linen wrappings, he writes that he saw them in verse five. But then Peter who gave a closer examination by busting right in and getting up close, sees not just those linen wrappings. He sees the head wrapping rolled up in a place by itself. The detail gets mentioned because John wants us to know this was it for him. Maybe Peter at first or John at first missed that detail, and then Peter's close examination made him see it and believe it. Believe what? That Christ had risen. He saw and believed. That's the most important line in this first account, that the linen wrappings and the head covering did something to trigger in John his latent faith. The faith that, yes, has been dulled in the three days since Jesus died. Dulled to what? Christ's words. His prediction. John, of course, believed in Jesus. We know this. Just looking back to Thursday night because Jesus says it about he and the other disciples when he is washing Peter's feet. And he says to all of them, he who has bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean. And you speaking to the disciples, except not all of you, not the one who would betray me. But he says, all of you are clean. And then he repeats it in John 15. Verse three, you speaking to those 11 who were still there, Judas has left the building. You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. So John is not speaking here of his saving faith, but there was something in his faith that had been dulled since the death of Christ. And what's the reason for it? Well, he tells you in verse nine, speaking as himself and Peter, as yet they did not understand the Scripture that he must rise again from the dead. That was the missing piece. But when he saw it, it all came together for him. Alluding back to John 2:22 when Jesus and the first Passover goes to the temple, and he clears the temple out, and the Jews say to him, what sign do you show to us as your authority for doing these things? And he says, destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. And the Jews said, it took 46 years to build this temple, and you will raise it up in three days. But he was speaking of the temple of his body. And listen to this John 2:22. This is when it clicks for Peter or for John when he remembers this in The Empty Tomb. John 2:22. So when Jesus was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken. This is the moment it all came together for John. It was held together by believing in the word of Christ without even seeing the body of Christ. What does Romans 10 tell us? Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ. It was the scripture John had to recall. The events of the last two days, had yes, put a little bit of a fog in front of his thinking. Just the same was true with Peter. Luke 24:12 says that he went away from this occasion wondering what happened. But here is the wonder and amazement of John's reinvigorated belief he hadn't seen the risen Lord. He is actually unique in all the eyewitness accounts. He's the only disciple that didn't need to see him in order to believe. He just needed the words to come back. And all it took was the empty tomb and linen cloths to trigger that. Friends, true believer, what is it that enlightens your dull heart the most. Is it not the Word of Christ, the living and active Word of God, used by the spirit, his sword, to divide us up to the most intimate part of us, soul and spirit, when we have grown dull in the faith and our affections for Christ, and even believing. Is it all true? It's the Word of God. Psalm 19 says it's pure. It enlightens the eyes. It allows us to see again. That's the first eyewitness account we get. We need God's word to wake us up, even this morning, do we not? And the true believer knows that. The times where we are most glazed over to the glory of God and the work of Christ in our lives. Go back to His word and trust him to do it.  
So we start with our look into the resurrection, with a word on an empty tomb and the faith that can ensue, but from a dulled disciple now to a discouraged disciple, let's see how faith comes alive in Mary and what she experienced as she waited around for answers. Another depiction of this is by Rembrandt called Christ and Saint Mary Magdalene at the tomb from 1638. Surprisingly enough, he sticks close to the passage with some of the detail. Critics of it noting Christ's appearance as purposely vague. And I could see it in all your eyes. You're like, what? Who in the...why is Jesus wearing a sombrero? That clearly would have thrown Mary and all of us off? But it's her twisted posture, symbolic of the painful view she had of the reality and the darkness right before the dawn, Half in the light, half in the dark. When her faith comes alive. And that is the shift of the scene we have in verse 11, the disciples go away on somewhat of an excited high. Even though Peter was wondering, he was amazed, according to Luke account, John believed. So we leave off on something good to go to something dark. Verse 11. Mary, we don't know how long she was standing outside the tomb weeping, and as she wept she, same language of John, same language of Peter, stooped and looked into the tomb. She doesn't notice the clothes. It says she saw two angels sitting, one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus was lying, had been lying. Quite different what people can notice in their times of despair and dullness, isn't it? Had the angels been there when Peter and John ran in? We don't know. But they were there for when Mary goes in, and that's what she sees. They ask a question, woman, why are you weeping? And she says to them, because they've taken away, my lord, and I do not know where they have laid him. Her answer reveals very clearly her hope at that moment was not in a risen Lord. Zero. Was she a woman of faith? Yes. But like Peter and John, she did not understand the piece of the puzzle that was the resurrection. She was in despair. She was despondent. She turns around. She senses someone is in the room, and she sees Jesus standing. But she doesn't know it's him. She got a good look at him. Some sense of sentimentalism would carry on that she couldn't see him through her tears, maybe. I don't think the focus anymore is on her tears. When she sees him and doesn't recognize him. She was in her right mind enough to keep her mind on the same thing, right? She just wanted to know one thing. Where is the body? She sticks to that. That's the first thing she's worried about when she's told the disciples back in verse two. It's what she tells the angels, and it's what she says back to Jesus in verse 15 when he asks, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking? You know, I wonder, in whom are you seeking? Is that Jesus trying to kind of wake her up a little bit? But she sticks to her guns. Sir. She's honorable in that response. If you've carried him away, tell me where you've laid him. She thinks he's the gardener. I think that's why Rembrandt in the picture had him holding a shovel. And the sombrero. It's likely that she did not recognize him because of his glorified state. It seemed to be the same case for the disciples on the Emmaus Road in Luke 24. All that said, like John, something else, even beyond the appearance of the risen Christ, would have to break the spell of despair. Mary broke the spell of despair. He called her name. The beauty of the narrative at this point is that John doesn't overexplain the tone of his voice or the familiar sound. Whatever it was about Jesus saying, Mary, it worked. And you can draw so many soul encouraging implications from that, can't you, believer? Yes. The personal call of Jesus to the brokenhearted is everything. I hope some of you can latch on to that today, because some of you are brokenhearted. You are in despair. You're depressed. You're despondent. There are many things that can help you in that. But there is only one who can heal you of that. It's Christ. It's Christ himself. All the work we do laboring in discipleship and counseling and pointing people to hope there isn't anything better that we can do for you this morning than point you to Jesus Christ Himself. We see the change it makes in Mary. Right away she responds back Rabboni, which is an honorable title of master and teacher and Lord. And then she calls to him, and then she clings to him. I can relate. When I'm gone for a little amount of time, one of the best things about coming home is Shannon coming and giving me a hug. And she just doesn't let go. And then the kids come and jump up on Dad, and they jump up on dad now just to get something from me, but they used to jump up on dad. Just wanted to hold me for a little bit. So we get what's going on here and we know what's going on here because Jesus says, stop clinging to me. And it's not a harsh rebuke because of what he says after. Here's why you can't stay with me, Mary. The moment this is okay, but I haven't yet ascended to the Father. What's he saying there?  I must go back to heaven. I've told you this all along, but go to my brothers and say to them. So here's your mission, Mary. I ascend to my Father and your Father and my God. Your God. What's he saying there? Why this response? There's a lot of speculation, but the most simple is that he's reminding her of what he's been saying all along. I must return to my Father in heaven. I promised I would send you something even greater, the indwelling Holy Spirit, to fill all of you to fulfill my mission. Same God, same team. For the sake of the gospel. To the ends of the earth. Ready? Break! That's what he's doing there. ?. This is what you do from this point on. Just like it was in Acts. We're not standing around looking into heaven. We're activated and empowered to do what? Go tell the world about Christ that he's risen. So she's the first one with that mission. And Mary. So awesome. She does it right away. Verse 18, no break in the action. She comes announcing to the disciples, I've seen the Lord. He's risen and all that he had said to her. Unlike John, she did need to see the risen Lord for her faith to come alive again. But even seeing him, she needed. What? The Word, the reminder. The call. Mary, you know me. Come on. Get out of that funk that you're in and get to work. Get to work. The same courageous drive that had kept her at the cross. That had kept her coming back to the tomb, now sends her from brokenhearted to bold faith. It's the call of Christ. It's the Word again. Seeing him and hearing him, and that doing something in her despondency breaks the spell and off she goes. Christ does that for you, believer.  
Last person to note today the infamous Doubting Thomas, part of a group of doubters to boot. Now, you probably knew this picture was coming. Um, my personal favorite was the first one of Peter and John. But this is probably the most well-known of the three. The goat of the resurrection paintings done by Michelangelo Caravaggio in 1603, called The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. The. The poignancy of the image itself takes us back. But what is noted about this painting is the contrasts, the contrasts. The shadows of doubt that sweep over Thomas. But the closer he is to Christ, he's not drawn back into the light of faith. Well, that basically exegeted this last section so we can move on. Just kidding. The truth is, this whole scene, 19 to 29, isn't just about Doubting Thomas, it's the whole group. He gets singled out from the group only because he wasn't there. That first Sunday, verse 19, when Jesus appears, we don't know why he wasn't there. We know from earlier appearances in the Gospel of John. Back in chapter 11. When Jesus finds out that Lazarus is dead and, it's amazing what Thomas of all the disciples says in response to. I'm glad for your sakes that I was not there so that you may believe. Let's go to him, the dead one. And, Thomas, in some loyal expression of I don't know what. Says to the other disciples, let us also go so that we may die with him. He doesn't quite know what he's even saying there. What he's getting into there. He's just going, hey, if this is what Christ says, I'm with him. That's the. Uniqueness of Thomas. Also, we hear from him in John 14 when Jesus says, don't let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God. Believe in me. I'm going away to prepare a place for you. And when I go, I'll come again and receive you to myself. And you know the way where I am going. And Thomas says to Jesus, Lord, we do not know where you are going. How bold. He just says, you know the way I'm going. No we don't. But this is the heart of Thomas. How will we know the way? Like he wants to stay close to you. Do you get that about Thomas? So maybe that broadens our view of this doubter. That when he isn't there in the upper room that night, the other disciples are. Maybe it's because he was the most devastated of them all. He's gone and I'm gone. And he's some lone wolf howling at the moon by himself. Because he just wanted to be with his Lord still. But my guess would be, judging by his response in 24 to 29, that had he been there that night, he would have responded the same way as them. So hence, I think it's a bunch of doubting disciples. They had the door shut for fear of the Jews. I mean, they had been told earlier in the day by Mary. The disciples had heard, he's risen. And do you see any of those other disciples running out into the streets looking for the risen Christ? No, there was doubt in all of them. So he comes and says, peace to you, but let's move forward to the but Thomas moment in verse 24. An inauspicious start. Like with Mary. He is pessimistic and obtuse to a degree, as one commentator called him. And I can resonate with that. I think I would have had a similar response. If I wasn't there to see it and believe it. Partly because it could be too good to be true. And you didn't want to get your hopes up too high, right? I want to see him for myself. So verse 25, he makes the claim, the famous claim heard round the Christian world. Until I see in his hands the imprint of the nails. And put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe. So Eight days later, Sunday to Sunday. Counting those days, it's the Lord's day. They're inside again. The door is still shut. You know. Bold faith, right? No, they're still scared. But he's there this time and in repetitious style. The disciples are inside. The door is shut. Jesus appears in their midst and he repeats, peace be to you. It's interesting to note the repetitioncost of first classstamp 2025 of the peace be with you. Third time it's mentioned. The peace be to you coming after the "it is finished". Romans 5:1. Having been justified, you have what? What do you have? You have peace with God through the Lord Jesus Christ. Justification by the atoning work of Christ on your behalf. Finishing it on the cross. Your sins paid for in full. First thing, you get out of that. Peace with God. Do you see the connection? So the great last words at the cross it is finished. Lead into the first words to the disciples. Peace to you. Verse 27. And then he goes right to Thomas. Hey, Guy, were you the one that wanted to see me in person? Go ahead. Reach here with your finger and see my hands. And reach here your hand and put it into my side. He's saying it word for word. You know, it never says that. Thomas did it. Sorry, Caravaggio. We don't get that detail in the text. I think that this was enough for Thomas just to know that the Lord knew. The Lord knew his doubt. The Lord knew his doubt, word for word. And he invites him. Bring me your doubts. I'm right here. What is it you need from me? You know I'm still with you. Just like I said I would be. His words again. Producing faith. Faith that had doubts. You know, it reminds me of a passage in the beginning of John. If you turn to John 1, there's a similar dialogue between a doubting disciple and Jesus. But it's at the beginning of the story, not the end. It's when a disciple named Nathaniel, also a pessimistic and obtuse disciple, if you want to call him them that. And Jesus has revealed himself as the Lamb of God sent to take away the sin of the world, he's invited disciples to hang out with him. And then Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, goes, we have found the Messiah and brings him to Jesus. And the next day they go into Galilee and Jesus says, follow me. And Philip finds Nathaniel and says, we found him who Moses in the law and the prophets wrote Jesus of Nazareth, Nazareth. And Nathaniel says, in that cynical, doubting attitude, can any good thing come out of Nazareth? So Jesus looks at him and commends him, hey, there's an Israelite indeed. In who? There's no deceit, no guile. You're a straight ahead guy, Nathaniel. You want the facts? You're not here for the fluff. And so Nathaniel calls him on it. How do you know me? And Jesus answers and says, before Philip called you when you were under the fig tree, I saw you. Oh. How did you see me? So he answers him. And it's the one of the first great confessions. Rabbi, you are the Son of God. You are the king of Israel. See the connection here. See what John is doing masterfully in his story. Doubts at the beginning that all Jesus had to do was meet Nathaniel right in those doubts and bring them to the forefront. What is he doing here at the end? He's meeting Thomas right in those doubts, and he's drawing them out, not shaming him for them. And then he says, and so don't be unbelieving. But believing in Thomas answers, just like Nathaniel's great confession, he has a great confession, my Lord and my God. Amazing. Another disciple goes from a weak faith, a flickering and smothered faith where the fires seem to be dying out. But in a blaze of Christ's revealed glory, he reignites Thomas's heart to burn until you pull all these things together. In all three cases, each one was different. Dulled faith. Despondent faith and doubting faith. All it took was the word of Christ. All it took was him appearing to them, two of them out of the three, and speaking to them. And then he, that is, John captures this amazing line in verse 29, Jesus said to him, because you have seen me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see and yet believed. He uses this moment, this line of Christ, to summarize not just this amazing resurrection account, but his entire gospel to this moment. When he says in verse 29, because you have seen me, you believe. He's not saying that's a bad thing. Why does John want to highlight this? It's because it's the whole point of which he wrote his gospel. It's the Book of signs. The Apostolic Witness was built on the evidence of Jesus' life, death and resurrection. They saw it. They were the ones who witnessed the risen Lord, the apostles. So seeing to believe was a big part, the biggest part of these men taking the gospel message all over the world. Most of them were willing to die for it. So there's nothing wrong for them to have to see to believe. It's what the Apostolic Witness was we saw. What does John say at the beginning of his epistle? What does he start with? That which was from the beginning, which I saw with my own eyes and touched with my hands the Word of life that never got away from him. The reality, the fact that he saw Jesus Christ risen from the dead. But here's the remarkable thing John does in this moment, in verse 29, He takes that last line. Blessed are they who did not see and yet believe. And the camera zooms out on that last line in the upper room, and it starts to turn. And it's no longer on the disciples. It's on you and it's on me. He pulls you in to this discussion. Blessed are they who did not see and yet believe. That's talking about us 2000 years later, sitting in a comfy chair in Hickory. We are those who will hear and believe. Even though we didn't see. And he says you are blessed. What does that mean? Doesn't mean you got a great parking spot this morning. So blessed. Or that if I end early, you will beat the crowds to Golden Corral. Double blessed. The word blessed means. You are favored by God and that you have saving faith. That's the ultimate blessing to be favored by God in his grace, to find you and call you and bring you out of darkness and into the light. That's the blessing that those who would not see and yet believe would have eternal life. This is the brilliant way John ends this gospel. He's thinking of you. Someone in the future with the opportunity to hear about Jesus, the Son of God, who came to take away the sin of the world. So that's why, way back in chapter one, he started telling Jesus' story as the Word that was with God and that was God. And now we get to the end and he ties it together with a disciple who confesses what, my Lord and my God. This is what he was moving up to. This point is to turn it on you, the reader. And in verse 30 he says it. This is what I was trying to do. All the other signs Jesus performed in the presence of the disciples. I couldn't fit them all in here. I gave you a bunch of them. I didn't give you all of them, but that's why I wrote this witness, this account. I wanted you to see and believe he did everything that God would do coming to earth. But the miracles, all of the wonderful things he did, the turning the water into wine and to the healing the sick, and to helping the blind to see and to raising Lazarus from the dead. They were all signs to point to what? To point to him? That he was Lord. That he was God. But he saved the greatest sign for last, didn't he? Right here. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The empty tomb, the folded linens, the transformed disciples. All of it. A sign all remembered and recorded for you to see. Verse 31. Friend, put yourself in it. Read your name here. These have been written so that Adam would believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. Put your name in it. These were written so Dave would believe, and he did. And that Tom would believe, and Tim would believe. Is your name in there because you've believed? That's why this is here. It's not just a history story today. It is fact. But it's to produce what faith that you would believe that Jesus is everything he said he was, the Son of God. And by believing you'd have life in his name. Do you have life in his name today? It's not something I could give you. I can plead. And that's all I'm called to do, is to be a proclaimer of it. But I can't show you Christ. I can't make him appear. He's got to speak to you through his Word right now, where you sit and you believe the word of Christ being preached to you or you don't. And if you don't believe the opposite is true in verse 31, you will not have life in his name. There is only one name by which men or women may be saved. It's Jesus Christ. To believe in the name is to believe everything about him today. You may not know everything about him today. I mean, you saw it in the lives of Peter and John and Mary and Thomas. They had faith, but they just didn't know the whole story. But it was enough to save, you know, enough of Christ to be saved. Today, sitting there where you are, the only thing holding you back is your unbelief. And those who don't believe. He who believes in the Son has eternal life, but he who does not obey the Son will not see life. This gospel call this proclamation that Jesus Christ is Lord is not just an idea. It's an imperative. It's a command. You must believe on the Lord Jesus Christ to be saved. And if you do not obey the call of the gospel on you this morning, you will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on you. That's a very sobering reality. Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, sent to take away the sin of the world? Christ right now offers himself to you through the gospel for you to receive him by faith. How do you do that? Confess two things. That you're a sinner. And you call on him a savior. So wonderfully put by Thomas, my Lord and my God. Do you know him as your Lord and your God? He said, my sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. It's not about me calling you to faith today. It's about Christ's call on you to faith. Look to the Lord and be saved. Now for all y'all who know him as Lord today. It is true the Gospel of John has, of all the Gospels, the most evangelistic aim. But there is something for you, the believer today, not just for your faith to be reinvigorated. I want to remind you of your job by a section I skipped over verses 21 to 23. They looked like the most difficult verses in this chapter because they are. But what do they mean? We shouldn't overcomplicate it. He comes in, he says, peace to you as the Father has sent me, I also sent you. So anything you're going to try to understand after that, you got to understand through this. This is the first fruits of the great commission of the great Activation of Acts where he's saying, look, the father sent me on a mission I send you. What was Jesusmission? John 4:34. My food is due to the will of him who sent me to accomplish his work. Did he do it? He accomplished it. He died on the cross. It was finished. He rose again for our justification. It's time he goes back. So after that, then here's where everybody's. What is going on in verse 22 to 23, when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit. He's doing something symbolic in this moment. The Holy Spirit, Word itself. The idea was wind, breath. So he breathes on him and he says, Receive the Holy Spirit. It's a first fruit of what the fullness was going to be at Pentecost. And clearly they were not filled to the full because they didn't really get after it until Pentecost, did they? The boldness, the activity, the preaching. It didn't happen here. It happened there. And then verse 23, he says, not only am I going to empower you, but here's your message forgiveness of sin, verse 23, that's what that's about. You are proclaimers of the gospel. And at the heart of the gospel is a simple message the Son of God who came into the world to save sinners. You can have your sins forgiven. That's verse 23. He's not saying you personally will forgive people's sins. You will, on behalf of Christ, proclaim the gospel. And people could say, my sin. Yes, your sins could be forgiven. How could you possibly say that you don't have the ability to forgive sins? No, I don't have the ability to forgive sins. But I can tell you who does. I'm a proclaimer. So are you. So he basically says to those disciples, there, you got one job. Preach the gospel. Tell people they can be forgiven. You know what, friends? That's the mission of all of us, though. It just doesn't rest on those first disciples. It's our job, and it's more than a mission. What is it? It's a privilege, isn't it? It's an honor. It's a joy that we get to tell others the greatest news there is that sinners can be saved. You have the power of the resurrection life of Christ in you. You have the presence of the Holy Spirit in you with all of his graces and gifts. You have the perfect and inspired Word of God to instruct you. You have the partnership of the Body of Christ to go with you. If you think of what we have today with what the disciples had then, you know there's only one thing we do not have. The excuse not to do it.  
Let's pray. Father, we thank you that we have been saved and set apart and sent even if we stay here. We have the greatest news in the world. And we pray this morning that by the work of your Spirit and the Word, that the resurrection of Christ reinvigorates in our own lives, in our own hearts, a passion to tell, to not stand around. To not cling, but to go and to preach and to teach and to start a Bible study on our streets or in our school, or start within our own home with our kids, that we would be invigorated by the truth of the resurrection that Christ you live. And so we live as well, and we live for you. Help us to do that today. We ask in your name, Christ. Amen.

The Glory of God’s Supremacy

Pastor Adam Ashoff

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The Glory of God’s Supremacy

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Turn in your Bibles to First Samuel chapter 5, and we will go through, actually, all the way to chapter 7:2 today. And you're probably not betting on that, seeing as how it took me two weeks to preach through chapter 4. So now I'm going to preach through two chapters in one week. Adds up. The reason I'm doing that is because the text that we'll see today from chapter five into six, and then just the first two verses of chapter seven is just really one amazing story about God's glory. It's one continuous tale of when it looks like God has lost, he actually reverses it completely. And that's where we left off last week, when the Ark of God had been taken captive at the end of chapter four. And it ends with the sad line, the glory of God departed, not the glory of God, the glory from Israel's departed because the Ark of God was taken. And that's where we ended, where we said, you know, God will risk his own reputation to drive the point home to his people, that his glory is not found in a box. It's not. It's not found in something that man wants to construct in his own mind that helps him to hold together some...in The case of Israel, some passed on superstitious view of where God's presence is to be found, and maybe clinging to some ideas from the past, because in the present they have no idea what the presence of God is actually about. It's about what we just sang about, which is an overwhelming sense of his holiness and our sinfulness. And so when God's people lose sight of that, he will not only risk his reputation, as we saw in chapter four, take on a loss in order to win. He'll do something different this week. And that's why we're going to see it all on display in one story from five, six into seven...is that God will display the supremacy of his holiness over our sinfulness in order to magnify his glory. That in three different cases, in three scenes, if you want to call it that is, we're going to look at today where God is putting his glory on display far and above what man is doing to show the insurmountable gap between a holy God and fallen man. And in the early cases, it will be between God and a pagan idol Dagon. And then it will move to God and the diviners, the priests of the Philistines who seem to have the answer, or so they think...by piecing together some superstitious view of God. As man tends to do in his own power and make up their own ideas. And then finally it'll land home back in Israel. And it's no better there because there's false faith even in Israel itself. But in all three of these cases, the single line, the theme that will be driving through all of these texts is one and the same. That when God wants his glory to be known, he'll stop at nothing to show it. And that comes at the cost of loss for the Philistines, for the Israelites to open their eyes, to see that he is supreme over all in his glory. That he will tolerate no rival. He will fly solo in these chapters. And so, if you're one of those people that still might have a bumper sticker that says, God is my co-pilot, I think you may be inclined today to peel that thing off and throw it in the trash. God is no man's co-pilot, and he needs no co-pilot. What God is going to show in his sovereignty in these next chapters is he can do it all himself. That's what makes him God and us...not. That he is independent of any of us in his workings in the world. He chooses in love, in grace to use us. And so we will see that today. So I'm just going to read the first few verses of First Samuel chapter five to get the ark moving again. And then we'll walk our way through these chapters.
"Now the Philistines took the ark of God and brought it from Ebenezer to Ashdod. Then the Philistines took the ark of God and brought it to the house of Dagon and set it by Dagon. When the Ashdodites arose early the next morning, behold, Dagon had fallen on his face to the ground before the ark of the Lord." Father, magnify your word according to your name, that all the weight of the glory of your name, all that it carries, and all that we can comprehend, would lay heavy on us this morning through the preaching of your Word. So lay it heavy on us in order to lift us out of our own burdens, to free us from our idolatries of the heart. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.
Chapter five, verses 1 to 12, will be the first scene in this extended lesson, and it's that God will show his glory over the false idols of man. The Philistines take center stage in chapter five. They were a polytheistic people going back over a thousand years before we meet them here, sometime in maybe 1050 BC. There's other ancient Near East texts, Akkadian and Ugaritic texts that talk about Dagon going all the way back to, uh, 23 BC. So over a thousand years earlier, you can find this God here mentioned as the supreme deity over the land, namely vegetation and crops, things that people would depend on for their daily sustenance. So rather than asking God to supply their daily bread, they went to Dagon. And, he actually is who the Philistines are worshiping. If you just turn back to Judges. Chapter 16...the Story of Samson many of us are familiar with and certainly familiar with the end. Here we see in chapter 16, verse 23, the lords of the Philistines assembled to offer a great sacrifice to Dagon, their god. This is right before Samson is going to come out and literally crash a party to a false god. You would think maybe these idol worshippers would learn their lesson, that the man that they assumed by conquering him, Samson, they had conquered Israel, comes out, knocks the pillars over, kills thousands of Philistines. You would think that maybe within a hundred years of that, they would have moved on from Dagon. But, you know, we just cling to our idols so closely, don't we, that when we're convinced we've got what we need, we've got whatever little gods in our boxes. Pagans will stick with it to the bloody end. So this is the Philistines, and they return from conquering Israel. Remember, 30,000 soldiers of Israel fell on the battlefield in Ebenezer, and now they moved the Ark 30 miles to Ashdod. Ashdod is one of five major Philistine cities along the sea. The Philistines were sea people. That's what their name meant. They had the good posh land and living out towards the Mediterranean. And one of their five major cities is this place called Ashdod. And, um, they bring the Ark here and they bring it into, of all the Philistine temples, this one contained their god Dagon. And so they bring it here, because to defeat a rival nation is to show that your god is what?...more powerful or supreme over their God. So to celebrate that victory, they bring the Ark in in verse two and set it by Dagon. They don't understand that God threw the fight. Right? Psalm 78:61 talks about Shiloh and what happened when the glory of God departed. And it says in Psalm 78:61, he gave up his strength to captivity and his glory into the hand of the adversary. God threw the fight, but he wasn't going to roll over and play dead anymore. So the bell rings, round one, verse three. The Ashdodites arose early the next morning. They're ready to eat some breakfast. You know, because Dagon is the god of the land. He's got something good for them. And they walk in and there he is, fallen on his face to the ground, prostrate before the ark of the Lord. It's a knockout punch. So they drag him back to his corner. They put some water in his face and they send him out for round two. After, note, they set him in his place again. Because this is what you have to do when you worship a false god. You got to set him in his place again. It's kind of ironic. We use that language. Somebody needed to set that guy in his place here. They have to set their mighty god Dagon in his place. Bell rings. Round two. Same result. They come out early the nextmorning. Dagon had fallen on his face to the ground before the Ark of the Lord. Same exact language. So again, another knockout punch. But this time the gloves didn't just come off. His hands did as well as his head. Dagon's head and palms of his hands were cut off on the threshold, and the only thing still standing was the trunk. That was Yahweh making a very clear statement to these pagans. I let you take me captive, and now your God is captive to me. It was common in this time. If you conquered another nation and particularly conquered their king. You would take that king's life and you would dismember him. The Philistines are actually going to do it to Saul at the end of this book...spoiler alert. They cut off his head. They want to show not just the superiority of their army, but if anyone else would ever choose to mess with us again, this will happen to you. This is what we did to your leader. So God makes a very clear statement of his supremacy over their deity, that even though you thought I lost when you brought me to Ashdod, I won. And henceforth, verses six through 12, we won't go word by word, but you can follow along as I put it together. It's a game of pagan hot potato that nobody actually wants the Ark anymore. Though this was a sign of the Philistines dominance by defeating Israel and taking the Ark of God. Now they're trying to ship it out wherever they could send it. Verse six, the hand of the Lord was heavy. Remember that language of heavy on the Ashdodites, and so heavy he ravaged them and smote them with tumors. Ashdod, the city and all its territories. So they see it and they say, hey, we don't want this ark anymore. His hand is severe on us. Let's, uh, send it to our friends over in Gath. Now, remember, these are all, uh, a collective community of cities underneath Philistine country. They should be friends, not enemies. But they're trying to gift this Ark now to their neighbors in Gath. And the same thing happens there. And there is almost a poetic, flow to this, because God's hand is heavy and the people are smitten. You'll see that pattern in verse six, nine and 11. The ark shows up. God's hand is heavy. The people are smitten, they are laid low. Even down in in verse 11, there is a deadly confusion, a death panic. So you can imagine at the end of that section after it's been in the third town, Ekron, they're about to send it to the remaining cities that the arc hasn't made an appearance at yet. What do you think those cities were doing? They were building barricades at the entrances, saying no vacancy for Yahweh. They didn't want anything to do with them. They were saying, send the Ark away. Finally, Ekron says, let it return to its own place. Initially, they just wanted to send it to a place. They just wanted to get rid of it. Now they realize it needs to go back to where it belongs, so that it will no longer kill us and our people. So what's the lesson in this first section in God's glory on display over false idols? Well, we've said this book of Samuel, which means God is my name. The most important character is Yahweh. It's not Samuel who the book's named after, and it's not Hannah, and it's not going to be Saul, and it's not going to be David. Yahweh is the main character, and he gets top billing, if you will, in this scene. Because as I said before, he has no rivals. He needs no help. So he independently outside of any of Israel's help, is just showing who you are up against. When you take lightly his glory. He puts down his heavy hand. And sothe first lesson is, beware of thinking God is helpless without you. You know, to kind of read the scriptures in a way that you feel like, you know, I mean, we're, you know, he needs propped up by me sometimes. He needs my help. He needs defended. In moments like these, when you read your Bible, you read quite the opposite. Uh, you need propped up by him. You need held by his strong and mighty hand. You need defended by him. Otherwise, when we get it reversed and we read ourselves as the main character, it ends up being us that we worship, not God. We reverse Psalm 115, don't we? Not to God, not to God, but to my name be the glory, because we want the victory. The fact that our God is victorious, we just kind of appreciate we're on the right side. So now let me move on from victory to victory. We get fooled into the idea that we can handle the glory of God. Without first recognizing he alone is glorious. He chooses to use us. We are grateful recipients. We learn about ourselves in this section. How easily we protect our idols. How we want to keep them even when they get smashed. Go back to verse two and three. You know, even when Dagon had fallen on his face, they want to prop him back up. And God in his glory to show him holy and us sinful, will allow our idols in our lives and our hearts, even as followers of him, to be knocked over, just knocked over, just to show how light they sit. Something we think is our identity, maybe. And he'll allow it to get knocked over. And what do we do with it? Do we learn our lesson and say, you know what, God, that was about me? Or do we try to prop it back up like they did? And when they get dismembered, if you will, I mean, there's a progression here. Um, they try to deny the reality of what's going on in the place in which Dagon fell. Verse five, look back there. It said they wouldn't even tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod to this day. The palms of his hands were cut off on the threshold. His head was there. And rather than them say, you know what, maybe we should abandon ship on this idol. They say, well, wherever his head and hands landed, that's sacred. Let's walk over it. You know, we can look back in our lives and see when God destroys our idols, we somehow, in our hearts, can still hold it as sacred ground, even when they're exposed as silly. What does that look like in our lives? It could be any number of things. I mean, hearing the testimony this morning of Chase and in sports, it reminds me of my testimony. You know, I had made an idol of football, thought I was defined by it, thought it was everything in high school. I mean, my life was going to be determined by a scholarship somewhere. So my glory could be known. And I was a believer, but little by little more of Adam and less of God moved that idol up. And so I get injured my senior year. And there goes that. No glory. This is the first time I remember really wrestling with, oh, God, if you're sovereign and good, why did you let this happen to me? Because he's sovereign and good. But you know, you cling to idols. So I don't let it go. And I take it into college, and I do the same thing in more of a cleaned up way, but still defining myself. And then even when that career is over, I could let it be dead on a threshold and try to live, live it out through my kids. Right? My glory. And there was really none to be had. Could be smashed there. But I could say, you know what? I'll coach and I'll make my sons into the football player I never was. Because now I have the wisdom to know how to do it and live through them and prop up an idol in their heart. You see how we do this? You know, just name the thing in your life. Maybe it's success in your career. Maybe it's been wealth and suddenly your idol has been knocked over with the tariffs...businessmen. Have you trembled because of the tariffs? Are you petrified when you look at your portfolio and you could be a follower of Jesus. But sometimes money and being set up for the future can become an idol, and it's not really exposed until we start to lose some of it. We can make an idol of our families, we can live for our spousesapproval, our kids approval, and really, when we're living for their approval, we just want their admiration. We want them to exhalt us, so, who actually is the idol...is it the kid or is it me? You go on down the list and the thing I can't do is open your heart up to see into it today. I could give you some ideas of where your idols might be, but really, you just have to look at sin in your life. And often when you sin, you can trace your sin back to something you're idolizing, something you want. And it could seem like a good thing. It could be life in the church. It could be service in the church. You love the affirmation. Somewhere along the line, as a Christian, you've found joy in serving the Lord. But now you define yourself by that. And now you got to out-serve everybody, right? Or somebody new comes along in HBC and they're moving into your territory and you're going to cling to that idol because why? That was your position. That's where everybody thought you were doing such a great job. We can become idol seeking in our own church as collective this week. Is our church going to out Easter all the other churches in in Hickory, you know, are we going to get the biggest crowd? Are we going to have the most people and do the best stuff? An idol of self, even in the church, among the people of God. When who's this week about? Who is your service to be given for? It's for Christ. So all those things can be ways in which we learn something about ourselves from the text today. But I think the main thing we see is how much we want to still hold on to them, even when God is clearly displaying his glory, saying that idol is nothing, I'm everything. And they say, no, no, no, we're going to keep it. Look where it ends in verse 12 in this section, very sad. The men of Ekron who did not die, were smitten with tumors and the cry of the city, the whole city goes up to heaven. It doesn't say it went to Yahweh, does it? It wasn't a cry of repentance, was it? They didn't get rid of Dagon, did they? They do what a lot of Syncretists people do. Polytheistic people. People that pick and choose which gods they want to serve. They might cry to heaven. They have a pseudo spirituality that might say, listen, I pray. I know there's a higher power. I know the big guys up there doing something. Friend, if that's the extent of the way you describe how you cry out to heaven, it's not moving the needle. I mean it may fly in the south in the Bible Belt because you know the right stuff to say to kind of, hey, listen, man, I pray I'm good. I cry to heaven. But if you don't see the connection between repentance and crying out to God to forgive you versus just a general cry of...what's God doing, I don't know? You might be as lost as these people in Ekron. So God's glory over our false idols. It's the first one.
Next we move into chapter six and the new territory. Now we're in the country of the Philistines, where the lords of the five areas come together. And the start of chapter six, to flex their power, they're going to come up with a plan. They're not turning to Yahweh and turning away from Dagon. They just want to get a plan to get God off their back. So they call for the priests. It says in verse two. I mean, things must get really bad when the powers that be call for the pastors of the land and say, hey, we can't figure this one out. We got ourselves into a jam. You know, when the president rings my phone, I'll know he's really, you know, out of luck. I mean, like bottom, you know? Wow. How did you find me? And that's essentially what these lords of the Philistines are doing. They call for the priests because they think maybe there's something they're missing here. What shall we do with the Ark of the Lord? Tell us how we shall send it to its place. They still just think the glory and the magic are in a box. So these diviners say, if you send away the Ark of God of Israel, don't send it away empty...penance, right? That's what we got to do, that that flexes our power, that shows our devotion. We got to send it with something. How about a guilt offering? They say then you'll be healed and it'll be known to you why his hand is not removed from you. So they kind of merge a little bit of their knowledge, maybe of the Old Testament religion of the Israelites, a guilt offering. But then they merge it with something, probably from their own pagan background, where you make...look at verse four. It makes some golden tumors and some golden mice according to the number of your cities, your lords. So they just patched together in their own plans and powers, this mashup of ideas. Okay, if Yahweh is the one who sent this. Because suddenly you have what looks like the bubonic plague going around, which is the connection between maybe rats and tumors. Why else would you pick such awful things to make golden idols of? And we know the bubonic plague was spread in Europe by a lethal bacteria from fleas that bit and infested rats. And those symptoms are swollen lymph nodes. So a lot of Bible scholars say it probably was a bubonic plague like thing. So their idea is make some images in the likeness of those to show to God that you understand your affliction comes from him, and you recognize he sent it. And, if you give it back to him, he'll be pleased...penance. Which is just spiritualized magic tricks, you know, just. I'm going to do something, and, God will leave me alone. I want to be left alone. I don't want to deal with this God anymore. I just want him to get out of my life. So what can I give him to leave me alone? And then verse five says. And perhaps he'll ease his hand from you, your gods, and your lands. Notice what the priests say in verse six, just to show that they weren't completely unaware of who this God was. They say, why then do you harden your hearts as the Egyptians and Pharaoh hardened their hearts. This is hundreds of years after the Exodus. And these pagan priests, they understand what happened back with Israel, how they got to where they were. They were delivered from Pharaoh. And Pharaoh had hardened his heart. How does Philistia know what was going on back in Exodus 15? The song of Moses, after they come across the Red Sea, has this line. "You stretched out your hand the earth swallowed them. In your loving kindness You have led your people whom you have redeemed, and your strength you have guided them to your holy habitation. The peoples have heard, they tremble. Anguish has gripped the inhabitants of Philistia." That was back in the Song of Moses hundreds of years before. Somehow word got around, predicted then, that even the Philistines would remember this to this day, that the God of Israel delivered his people from the powers that be. Hundreds of years later, God's Word endured. So they come up with a foolproof plan, verses 7 to 9 back in chapter six. What's the plan? All right, guys, here's what you're going to do. You got these tumors and these ugly rat golden things. You're going to take them and, you're going to take some milk cows that have never had a yoke on them, and you're going to hitch the cows to the cart and take their baby calves away, and then take the Ark of the Lord, put it on the cart, put the articles of gold, those ugly things, the guilt offering side by side. You see the whole theme of side by side. Let's mix a little Philistine pagan religion with some Yahweh side by side. God's not going to accept that. They don't come the whole way. Their plan is in their own power and their own wisdom. We've got this idea of what's going to get God off our back. Now, they devised this, verse nine, to put God to the test. So they say, watch if it goes by the way of its own territory. Own territory, meaning back to Israel...Beth Shemesh. Then he has done us this great evil. But if not, then we will know...if it doesn't go that way, then we will know that it was not his hand that struck us. It happened to us by chance. Notice in pragmatist spirituality you still create the test, don't you? They still get to create the test. They create the boundaries of how they're going to know how this sovereign God who brought this affliction on their land, is going to make his next move. It's a pragmatism. I'll try a bunch of stuff, and whichever works must be the right way. They never thought to ask Israel and their priests what God's Word might say to do, right? If this is Israel's God and we're screwing up enough that he's wiping out 3/5 of our population and nobody wants the arc anymore. Maybe we should go to them and see if they have a word from God. But no, they have the idea. It's either going to be chance if the cows don't go or, it is God, he has done this great evil. Notice how the sinner wants to put the blame on God. Notice nowhere in verse nine is this test designed to reveal maybe we're the problem. Maybe it's our idols. Maybe it's our false worship. Maybe it's our false god. Dagon fell over. Dagon was dismembered. Our people are dying. Maybe the problem rests with us. But when you are in a false system of religion, that's always the last thing you bring up...your problems. It's everybody around you. It's the circumstances. So you could come up with your own test. One writer says "subjective signs of our own design, crafted out of the folly of our own mind, are no way to discern God's will. Instead, they invite us to divinize our own hunches and provide an opportunity for Satan to deceive us." Whew! You ever applied that to your own life? You ever divinze your own hunch by trying to read the tea leaves of the circumstances around you, and you plaster on a proof text from the Bible. Think about that. That's what they did. They're divinizing their own hunch. They're coming up with a solution that whatever the outcome is, they're not at fault. Either it's all chance or it's God's evil hand. But it has nothing to do with their what?...their own sin. The lost person only sees God in debt to them for the evil they perceive he does to them. They don't consider the evil they do to him in their lost rebellion every moment of the day. So God has to show his supreme glory over the false powers of men. Well, these cows, um, who should not have went the direction they went. The men did so they took these milk cows. They hitched them to the cart. They shut up their calves at home. Why does all that matter? Because, these mama milk cows, they would want to go back to their baby calves to feed them. And they also have never had a yoke put on them. So there's an amount of, if they had been yoked already, then just putting a yoke on a cow that's already been yoked and knows how to run through the farmlands is going to probably just go in a straight direction. They've been trained that way. Sowhat is happening here is there's no human explanation for why these cows would go the way they would go against all common sense. Not that I know much about cows. I read books about this stuff. So they go straight ahead. They went straight ahead. It says in verse 12 to Beth Shemesh. They went along the highway seven miles. Now they did go complaining, lowing as they went. They wanted to go back to their baby calves. They knew that. But the sovereign hand of God is keeping them straight ahead. They're not turning aside to the right or to the left. Maybe that's a good word for us...on what long obedience in the same direction looks like. We can learn from a cow. God uses animals often in the Bible to rebuke us. He used a donkey to rebuke a foolish prophet. He used a fish to rebuke a fleeing prophet. In this account, he's using cows to show the sinfulness of man and his holiness. But the problem with the Philistines as we leave off with them in this section is they never forsook their own powers to turn to God. Once he went away, the lords of the Philistines. Verse 12. It ends there. They followed them to the border of Beth Shemesh. And then verses 17 to 18, it reminds they went down, they gave what they had, and then they walked away. There was no warfare or fanfare for the Philistines. They just go back to their own lostness. That's not repentance, friends. Getting rid of God in your life...there is nothing to do with repentance. It's just running from him. It's ignoring him even when he is making it very clear who is in charge here. You know, if they had any sense of God's holiness in his sovereignty, they would have in that test they set up, seeing those cows go all the way against their own natural law, if you will, of being a cow mama and said, wait a second. That has to be this holy God that was just bringing his heavy hand upon us. Maybe we should think twice of getting rid of him. Maybe we need more of him because he's just shown himself glorious. But the lost idol seeker doesn't do that, do they? They stick to their guns and they go back to Dagon.
Last section. God shows his supreme glory over the false faith of the Israelites. Lest you think I was just picking on pagans today, he has one more way to show his supreme glory over the false faith of man. Last section of God's glory on display is in verses 13 all the way into chapter seven, verse two. The ark returns to Israel. Verse 13, the people of Beth Shemesh were reaping their wheat harvest in the valley. And they look up, and there is the Ark, and they're glad to see it. The Ark comes into the field. There it is. They split the wood. There's a stone there to make a sacrifice. They split the wood. They offer the cows as a burnt offering. If you are writing a script, this is a happy ever after ending, isn't it? The Ark is back. It even ends up in, of all places, Beth Shemesh, which was Levite territory. We know this from Joshua 21 when God divided out the territories once Israel had conquered all the Canaanite lands. Joshua 21, the Levites, they were given various places to live, and one of the places it mentions by name is Beth Shemesh. So it was given to them. Sothere's clearly some Levites living here. We learn about them in verse 15. Then there's also just some regular people like you and I, verse 19, the men of Beth Shemesh. So it's a mashup, but it looks like a happy ending if we stop writing in verse 15. They take it down. They offer a sacrifice. I mean, the only person that probably would have a complaint here are the cows, because not only did they have to get a yoke put on them and lo, the whole way they get chopped up at the end and offered as a burnt offering. That's a bad deal for the cows, I guess. Verse 19, the blue skies...suddenly a cloud comes. Yahweh struck down some of the men of Beth Shemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the Lord. Notice that it doesn't say He struck down those Levite priests. The Levite priests apparently did what they were taught to do. In a moment of consecration dedication, they made a sacrifice that day to the Lord. As far as we could tell, that was the right move. Verse 19 here was the wrong move. The greater population of Beth Shemesh. They did what Eli and Hophni and Phinehas and the elders back in chapter four have been doing this whole time. They take God lightly. They don't listen to his word. They don't have some sense of the holiness of God in this moment to stand back far away...echoes of Mount Sinai, when only Moses is allowed to go up and he says, everybody else better stay clear of that mountain. Lest you die when you come near. But the men of Beth Shemesh, instead of maybe seeing the Ark as some magic talisman, now they see it as some cool relic. It's been gone seven months. I wonder you know what? Like nobody's around. Let's look in. Take God lightly. Suffer his heavy hand of glory. Same lesson, isn't it? We've seen it all along. He's trying to get through. He struck down, of all the people, 50,070 men. Now, if you have the ESV, it says 70 men. There's a discrepancy over ancient manuscripts. Is it 50,070 or is it 70? It would have been a scribal error in transmission. Why we have two different ideas. And my sense would be, from what we know of populations of towns around then, did Beth-Shemesh even have 50,000 people living in it? It's a pretty tiny town in the pasturelands of Israel. But look, debating over 50,070 versus 70 would miss the point, wouldn't it? The point being, God puts his glory on display. He shows the sinfulness of these men who should have known by having those Levites living in their own town the rules about approaching God's holy things if you are not set apart as a Levite. Back in Numbers, chapter three, verse six, bring the tribe of Levi near and set them before Aaron the priest, that they may serve him. They shall perform the duties for him and for the whole congregation before the tent of the meeting, to do the service of the tabernacle, to keep all the furnishings of the tent of Meeting. What were the furnishings of the tent of meeting?...the Ark. You shall give the Levites to Aaron and his sons. They’re the ones that do this. And now listen to Numbers 3:10. You shall appoint Aaron and his sons, that they may keep their priesthood. But the lay person who comes near shall be put to death. Now benefit of the doubt to this men of Beth- Shemesh...did they know numbers 3:10? Do you know numbers 3:10. We at least have copies of the Bible. They probably didn't. Those Levites should have known. I mean, they offered that sacrifice. They chopped up the wood, they burned up the cows, and they should have turned around and warned everybody like Eli should have warned his own sons. Guys, do not come near. This Ark belongs to God. Stay back. Well, it seems that God finally got his message across. Look at the response. Not of the Levites, but of the population of Beth-Shemesh. They say, who is able to stand before the Lord this holy God? For the first time in three chapters, an Israelite finally asks a relevant and a reverent question. If this is is what God's holiness is about dealing with our sinfulness. Who then can stand? And notice, they don't say before the ark. They've at least moved on past the...it's something magic about this box. No, it's something glorious about our God, something different, something holy. And who can stand before him?...this holy God... Entirely appropriate...the perfect question, the question that they should have been asking back to chapter four. And then they ask another bad question. Two steps forward, three steps back...sometimes in our lives. Look at the next question. I don't know if it was in the next breath. Somebody in the crowd asks the right question how can we stand before a holy God? And then somebody else says, and to whom shall he go up from us? As in, how do we get rid of him? Now, they sound just like what?...all the pagan people around them. They sound like the Philistines who, when they encounter the supremacy of God's glory, and his holiness is matched up against their sinfulness. Their idea is, let's get rid of God. How is it any different with these Israelites and their false faith? They run up against something fearful in God, in his holiness. They survive it, and rather than fall on their faces in worship, they say, let's find a way to get rid of them. We don't want Him hanging around here. You know, people did that with Christ. Matthew eight, Mark five and Luke eight all tell the same story of when Jesus cast the demons out of a man, sent them over into some pigs off of a cliff. And it says in all those accounts, everybody in the city comes to Christ. Everybody wants to see who did it. And then guess what they tell him. Get out of town. We don't want you around here. They're seeing the works of God on display, and they would rather than fall down and worship him, they say, would you leave us alone? It's almost like they were in that moment saying, hey, we'll take our chances with the demon possessed around here. Can you leave us to be?...just like the Philistines. Just like the men of Beth Shemesh. So how's that hit home for us today? Some people will want to get close enough to God. They may even come in through the doors of a church. They may do it on a regular basis. Because, you know, that's what Christians do. You know, life goes wrong. You show up in church and there's a little bit of spirituality, maybe just enough to get God on your side. But then whenever God actually wants to push and lean into your life a little bit through the Word of God preached through the people of God holding you accountable. What do some people do? They run. They find a new church, maybe one that doesn't take the Word of God so seriously and sin so seriously. Look, you don't want to take the Word of God serious. You don't want to take your sin serious. Then probably following in that line. You don't want to take God serious. You want him to be light, not heavy. But that means he's glorious, doesn't it? And when his glory rests upon us, that pushes our sin out to be seen for what it is. And here's the great news. Here was the answer to the question that they didn't come to. Who is able to stand before the Lord, this holy God? The answer is no one. Who may ascend the hill of the Lord? Nobody. Oh, he who has clean hands and a pure heart. Anybody here have that? So who can stand before a holy God. Just one. And he rode into Jerusalem. Zechariah 9:9 says he rode into Jerusalem as the long awaited righteous king. He is just and salvation comes with him, and he is humble. That's who could stand before a holy God. If you want to know how to be right with God today and not run from him and hope he leaves you alone. If you're lost in your sins today, you can't stand before a holy God. And showing up here today changes none of that. And you're trying to be really good this week and read your Bible all week and get really into Holy Week changes none of that. Recognize what Israel missed when Jesus, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, rode into town on a donkey. He was the king. Because he was righteous. He was just. That means he was perfect. He kept the law in all of its perfection. But what good would that have done if he didn't die to save? So he came to bring salvation with him. And yet, in all of that glory of the Son of God, living the perfect life and dying on the cross in your place, he was humble. So he can say to you that he could speak to you this morning. Come to me, you who are weary and heavy laden. And I'll give you rest. That's the answer to the question that they missed. None of them were holy enough to stand before him. It's by grace alone. Through faith alone you come before God alone. In the name of the Son who stood alone and went to the cross alone, and died alone and raised from the dead alone. Christ is your only hope today. Trust in him. Let's pray.
Father, we thank you for your Word this morning. We thank you that there is no other way for us to be right with you, except through your righteous Son and the righteous Son who, healing came in his wings. He was perfect. Who could heal us to the innermost. Who could heal our broken soul, depraved and darkened sinner by nature and yes, by choice. But when we see our sinfulness rightly in light of your holiness, and we cry out, how can we then stand before you? We have the answer in front of us today. We stand alone in the righteousness of your Son by faith. We point to him, not to us. Our righteousness is in heaven and we praise you for it. A holy God who is loving and good enough to send his perfect Son. We thank you for Christ. Amen.

 

Glory in a Box Pt. 2

Pastor Adam Ashoff

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Glory in a Box Pt.2

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This week we're in 1 Samuel 4, and we're going to take another attempt at finishing this chapter. I did come in last week with the intentions of getting through the whole chapter and made it halfway and learned a lesson there that there was more than I expected, more than meets the eye. Or as one of our toddlers used to say, more than eats the eye, which is gross. Um, but it is a fitting way to get back into subject matter of this chapter. That phrase there's more than meets the eye is a common phrase suggesting something is more complex than what it initially appears. And I would say it's very accurate when talking about the glory of God that there is more than meets the eye. In fact, of all the subject matters in the Bible, let alone anything you could come up with, there might not be a more complex matter than the glory of God. Paul at the end of Romans 1 through 11, in highlighting our great salvation ends, they're saying, oh, the depth of the riches. Both of his wisdom and knowledge of God are. How unsearchable are his judgments and unfathomable his ways! For from him and through him, and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. To see the glory of God, we can look outside in creation. Psalm 19:1 says that the heavens declare the glory of God. And that's true right now. In particular, most of us are probably happy to be outside and letting the heavens declare his glory in all the green and all the colors that we see around us. It would take 100,000 lifetimes to explore every nook and cranny of our wonderful planet, to see God's glory in the largest and smallest ways. So we can attest to what the psalmist says, that the glory of God is everywhere for us to see, but to see the glory of God in himself. To talk about actually seeing his glory takes it to a whole nother level. The closest we get to that in the Bible is people wanting to see the glory of God. Perhaps first that pops in your mind is Moses, who, as it says about him, unique to him, he spoke to God face to face like a friend. And yet when he says, I want to see your glory, God's response is, you can't handle it. Exodus 33:22. It will come about while my glory is passing by, that I'll put you in the cleft of a rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. That's the closest anybody got. I can hide you in a rock. And I can turn you away from me. And I'll turn away from you. And that'll be enough that when Paul records what happened there in 2 Corinthians three seven, Moses comes back down. What does he say? The sons of Israel could not look intently at the face of Moses because of the glory of his face. I don't think he's commenting on on how handsome Moses was. It was that by being in the presence of the glory of God, He came down, lit up, and people couldn't even look at him. They had to turn away. That was the effect on Moses of being hidden from the glory of God. And so back to my point. When we start talking about the glory of God in Scripture, there's much more than meets our eyes, because our eyes can't handle it for certain. But with eyes of faith, we can see it in this passage. We started to see it last week. Israel thought they knew it. They thought they had God's glory in a box. And they found out the hard way that when you have a misunderstanding of the glory of God, when you think you know what it's about, when you have lived your life like Israel had for generations, toying with God, if you will, going their own way, doing what they wanted to do, and then all of a sudden become apologetic, like we see in the book of Judges, that cycle of sin where, okay, now that we've been given over to our enemies and we've been taken captive and under their rule again, we'll clean up our act. God. But did they really take his glory seriously enough that at the point we left off last week, verse 11, they had been defeated, utterly wiped out, completely annihilated. Israel's defeated. Every man runs for his life. The slaughter was so great that it was 30,000 foot soldiers, the best of their men had fallen. And then at the end of verse 11, the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were dead because Israel put their hope in a box. They put their faith in the Ark. They thought there was something about the Ark that was glorious, and that was the best they could do, because they had long before that, in their disobedience and their disregard for God's glory, they had long before that lost sight of his glory. They thought God existed to serve them. They had forgotten that they exist to serve him.
And we'll see in our text today that when we misplace the glory of God, we will be certain to misunderstand any activity on his behalf in our lives. Because when you think it all revolves around you and then you look around and see what. And ask, what is God doing in my life? If you think you are the center of the universe and God is just one of those other planets revolving around you, how do you think you're going to interpret anything around you? You're going to interpret through what kind of lens? A self-centered lens. It was the Copernican revolution when Copernicus said, look, wait a second, I think we've got it all wrong. I don't think the sun and all the planets revolve around us, guys. So any calculation we're going to try to make about how our universe works, we're off. No, the sun is the center and we are all in an orbit around it. Changed everything. And so it is for us. The glory of God can have an effect on your life as a Christian. I'm not just speaking to the unbeliever right now. The glory of God for the Christian opens up a whole new realm of this is just how great of a God it is I serve. It's not something that, when we talked about last week, rests on us lightly. The word itself means heavy, but we could certainly lose our way, just like Eli did. Just like Israel did, thinking we are serving the living God. And end up figuring out we've been serving ourselves. And we'll see that in two ways today. Misplacing and Misunderstanding the Glory of God, part two. Finishing off chapter four this week. Follow along as I read. Chapter 4. First couple verses to set the context again. Remember, we're leaving off the Ark of God's taken the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, are dead. Verse 12.  
"Now a man of Benjamin ran from the battle line and came to Shiloh the same day, with his clothes torn and dust on his head. And when he came, behold, Eli was sitting on his seat by the road, eagerly watching, because his heart was trembling for the Ark of God. So the man came to tell it in the city, and all the city cried out. When Eli heard the noise of the outcry, he said, what does the noise of this commotion mean?" Open our eyes, Father, that we may see the wonderful things in your Word. Most importantly, the glorious things about you. And in the meantime, teach us about ourselves. We ask. Amen.
So picking up in verse 12. A man of Benjamin. And as the storyline has unfolded in the first four chapters of Samuel messenger's, No Name, messengers or insignificant messengers by appearance only seem to be popping up in Eli's life with devastating news for him, don't they? A few chapters ago, in chapter 2, a nondescript man of God comes to Eli to rebuke him, to tell him the error of his ways both as a priest and a parent. And then in chapter 3, in a seemingly insignificant character in Eli's eyes, this young boy, Samuel, the Lord, comes and speaks to him in the night. He doesn't come and speak to Samuel, and he wakes up the next morning and he knows Yahweh has a message for him. And so here we have a third time. A man of Benjamin. Is this man of Benjamin significant? All we know is the Benjamites, they are a troubled tribe at the close of the Book of Judges, where we leave off and pick up here the last three chapters in judges 19 to 21 center around the despicable behavior of the people of Benjamin, the tribe. So bad that the other 11 tribes come to wipe them out if they don't repent. Is there something behind then this detail we get that this is a man of Benjamin coming from the battle line? It might be. I mean, this man of Benjamin would have been part of the tribe of people that, just back in the book of judges, would have been fighting for their own lives against their own people, the Israelites, for their sinful behavior. Kind of ironic, isn't it? this man escapes, and he comes to Shiloh the same day with his clothes torn and dust on his head. So the scene is set, the battle is over, and we don't know how long that battle took. Maybe it was, it ended pretty quickly. 30,000 soldiers dead. But in that same day, he runs the 20 miles from Aphek to Shiloh. And, it says he gets there that day, so he is out of breath running 20 miles. I know for you marathoners, you're like, big deal. Do it all the time. Three hours and 42 minutes or whatever. You write it in. You know what? I'm out of breath just reading that. Soyeah, 20 miles in a day is a big deal to me. But the detail that his clothes are torn and dust on his head is not referring likely to. He was in the fight. He was repentant and contrite here. That's the dust and ashes of Job. When you have seen the hand of God act against you and you know you need to change. You tear your clothes and you put dirt on your head. And that's what he's done. This man is in such a hurry to tell Shiloh the bad news. He runs right by Eli, who can't see him because he's going blind. Verse 13 says, when he came, behold, the director wants you to stop and see as this guy is flying by, Eli is sitting on his seat by the road, eagerly watching though he's blind. Why was he so eager to find out what's happening? Because his heart was trembling for the Ark of God. Now that could be a summary statement. He's really worried and concerned that the Ark got taken into battle. What's going to become of it? But who went with the ark? His sons did. Hophni and Phinehas. They would have signed off when the elders of Israel in verses 3 and 4. Um. They come and say. You know what? Oh, we got defeated today by Yahweh. Um, clearly he's upset with us that we lost his furniture. We didn't take the Ark with us. Ah, now he'll be pleased because we got him in a box. We can predict his next move. If we just bring him with us. He will give us victory like the days of old. So the elders have that bad idea. Hophni and Phinehas go. I'm down. Let's do it. And they all end up dead. The man comes to tell him in the city, and the city cries out. The last great commotion we heard was what? In verse five, when the Ark is going in. The people are celebrating an early victory. Now that the Ark has gone out, the people are doing what? Weeping and wailing. My. How the tables turn pretty quickly in those triumphant cheers. God's people can really rev it up when we think we're on top of the world, having no idea God isn't with us. His glory isn't gathered where we are. We can still make a lot of noise and be very empty, spiritually speaking. Just like Israel was here and now it's turned around. There's a great commotion, there's a great cry, but it's the cries of families who have lost fathers and sons, 30,000 of them. You don't think that would have been devastating? Every single one of those mothers and daughters saying they're not coming back. Every single one of them dead. Eli hears the commotion. Verse 14. And he said, what does the noise of this commotion mean? Does that ring a bell? That question. It was already asked a little bit earlier in the text. The Philistines heard the noise of the shout when the Ark came in. What does the noise of this great shout in the camp of the Hebrews mean? That's what Israel should have asked when they lost the first skirmish and 4000 died rather than, oh, we forgot the Ark. Let's send it in. It was the pagan Philistines who knew something was happening when that Ark came in and they say, what does the shout mean? Because they understood the Ark of the Lord had come into the camp. Now that the Ark of the Lord is gone, Eli asks the same question what does it all mean? Why all the noise? Well, the man had already breezed right by Eli's blind eyes. He had heard the pitter patter of his feet flying by, and Eli's just sitting there, a pitiful sight. Verse 15, 98 years old. Eyes were set so that he could not see. And the only thing moving faster than the man of Benjamin's feet is the beat of Eli's troubled heart. He knows something is wrong. Verse 16, the man comes to Eli. I am the one who came from the battle. Indeed, I've escaped from the battle. We do this when we are vexed, out of breath, worn down. We got a message to deliver. We repeat ourselves. He identifies himself. He doesn't actually give any information of what happened. He's just panting and out of breath. And that's all he could think to tell Eli is to say, I was a witness to this, but I escaped. And you can rely on me for this information. And then the scene slows down because it's been a fast scene, all of it happening very quickly. And then old Eli slows it down. How did it go, my son? Do you see the camera freeze on his dead, colorless, lifeless gaze? Staring off into the distance but asking the question, how did it go, my son? Well, now that the man of Benjamin has caught his breath. He delivers the report. Israel has fled. There's been a great slaughter. Your two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, are dead. And the Ark of God has been taken. Just like that. Eli can now see the bloody battlefield, can't he? He can picture there's nothing left. The men of Israel defeated, his two sons laying there, and the Ark is gone. The gavel of God's justice for Eli's injustices finally falls. This word of prophecy, of this devastating moment was told to Eli twice back in chapter two, verse 34, when the man of God came and told him, this will be the sign to you which will come concerning your two sons, Hophni and Phinehas. On the same day both of them will die. Prophecy number one, true, prophecy number two. When God had a message for Samuel in the middle of the night, that Eli wanted to know what it was the next morning. First Samuel 3:11 and 12 the Lord said to Samuel, behold, I am about to do a thing in Israel, at which both ears of everyone who hears it will tingle. That's just happened in Shiloh, hasn't it? Word got out. It's over. In that day I will carry out against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house from beginning to end. For I told him that I'm about to judge his house forever for the iniquity which he knew. You know, all those years Eli knew what was going on. He knew the Word of God. He knew the warnings not just for his own life, not just for the own sin he was allowing to happen under his roof and on his watch. He had been warned. He also knew that when you abandon Yahweh like that, when you go your own way, Israel, the Lord shall cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will go out one way against them. You will flee seven ways before them, and you'll be an example of terror to all the kingdoms of the earth, not a terror from those kingdoms, a terror from the God you say you serve. The bottom's going to fall out on you. And now it just did. Not even the high priest is allowed to play games with God. And presume upon his grace. Maybe he'll give me one more chance. Time was up. Verse 18. When he mentioned the Ark of God, Eli fell off the seat backward beside the gate. It wasn't the slaughter, the great slaughter among the people that took that trembling heart in and just paralyzed him. It wasn't the death of his two sons that did it. It was that the Ark of God was taken. That's why he loses it. Falls backwards. His neck was broken, and he died because of the news of the Ark. What do you do with this guy? What sense do you make of that? If you were the coroner to show up on the scene in Shiloh, what would you have recorded for the cause of death? Heart attack?Obesity? Broken neck? Broken heart? I mean, we could see some of those things with our eyes in the text, but with eyes of faith. What are we really supposed to see here? The cause of death was misplaced glory. And that's the summary lesson on Eli's life. There's detail that illustrates the misplaced glory in a really unforgettable way. He falls over, he dies. For he was old and heavy. Why would we get the detail of he being heavy? We already know he was old. We were told he's 98. Why is the last word on Eli's life? His weight? That word in Hebrew, heavy as applied to Eli is the word khaved? The Hebrew language. The majority of words in it. If you were to look in a Hebrew dictionary, the majority of words have three consonants. It's a triliteral root system, and by putting vowel pointings above and below those consonants, you add vowels, and that changes the meaning of a word. And so this word here, if you were to have been hearing this read or reading it for yourself, learning a lesson and you knew Hebrew back in the day, you would have heard he was. He died, for he was old and heavy, khaved in E. But this whole passage has been about some other departure, hasn't it? Not man's weight, but God's. And the word for God's glory is the Hebrew word kavod. The only difference is one little vowel pointing on that word. Khaved is man's physical weight. Eli's weight. Kavod is God's weight. Both words come from the same root. What does the narrator want you to see and compare? In this corner weighing 300 pounds coming out of Shiloh with a record of zero and two. Failure raises sons to fear the Lord. Failure to be a priest. To lead people in holiness. Eli. And in this corner. Weighing infinitely glorious and holy. The champion Yahweh. That's an unfair fight. But when you misplace the glory of God for your own, that's the fight that you're picking with God. And that's the word on Eli's life. Misplaced glory that hung around his waist for us to see and learn from. If you look back at First Samuel chapter 2:29, it's maybe a detail that we missed in our first pass through it. As the man of God came to pronounce judgment on Eli and his household. This man of God came to Eli years earlier and told him, did I not indeed reveal myself to the house of your father, the Aaronic line, when they were in Egypt in bondage to Pharaoh's house? And did I not choose them from all the tribes of Israel to be my priests, to go to my altar, to burn incense, to carry an ephod before me? Did I not give to the house of your father all the fire offerings of the sons of Israel? Incense? Did I not set you apart? Have you not been part of that priesthood? Did you forget what you were called to? Eli? Why do you kick at my sacrifice and at my offering, which I have commanded in my dwelling, where I dwell, in my presence in Shiloh, in the tabernacle, in the Holy of Holies, at the Ark. Why have you kicked at it and disregarded it, and honored your sons above me by making yourselves fat with the choicest of every offering of my people, Israel. Now, do you see how he's incriminated? And he wears it around his waist. He honored self over God. The ultimate offense. Verse 29. But the means to that selfish behavior was at the sacrificial offering. So when the narrator mentions the heaviness of Eli at his death, he's tipping his hand and pointing us back. Eli was guilty, too. It wasn't just passive approval of his sons' evil. It was his active participation. He dishonored God. He kept God's glory for himself, just like his sons were doing, when they would thrust the fork into the cauldron and steal meat that wasn't meant for them and got fat off of it. The misplaced glory of Eli's desires over God's. Is seen in the sins of his sons and the fat on his belly. And the narrator. Wanted you to see it. Because sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, right? A lesson. God fulfilling his Word. He wasn't messing around all these years. Warning, Eli. And yet, though the glory of God's reputation in the eyes of man was tarnished and the loss of the ark, it was really a tarnished priest that had misplaced the glory to begin with. It was long gone before it was gone, wasn't it? You misplaced the glory of God in your life like Eli did? You may see some consequence come on later on in life and you stand around and say, Where is God in this? How could this happen? Were you asking that a week or a month or a year earlier, when you were doing what Eli was doing all these years, taking his glory and putting it in a place that only God deserved? Were you asking that question then? No. We usually ask it in the moment, don't we? Where's God in this? But where was God and all of that believer? Seeking your own glory above his. Honoring yourself or others above him, time after time after time? Where was his glory then? Is the question you have to ask. Because in the moment that everybody's saying the glory of God has been taken and it's gone, it was already gone. Die the death of a thousand choices to disobey in Eli's life. All along the way. All the way up to his 98th year. A passive father, a pitiable priest, a pained worshipper. Why couldn't he get his act together? Because he misplaced the glory of God. He kept it for himself. He kept it for his sons. He knew the right things to do and didn't do them to the fullness of what the law required of him. So what's the first step back? To reset our vision, to see the glory rightly placed? There's a lot of talk of the glory of God in the Bible. But we just want to say I need to. I need something just to hit the reset button in my heart. Psalm 115 not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name be the glory. That's your starting step back. Not to me, not to me, but to your name be the glory. That's why you created me. That's why you chose me. That's why you redeemed me. That's why you set me apart. Is that your name would get the glory and not me. And somewhere along the line I lost sight of that. So let me recenter my life back around you by saying not to me, not to me. To your name. Give glory. Why? Next verse. Because of your loving kindness. Because of your truth. Isn't that what resets our life? And we see God as glorious? Once again, we go back to the gospel. Where else do we go to see the glory of God? Where else? Where are you going to go today to see the glory of God more than in the gospel of Jesus Christ and in the Old Testament, according to Psalm 115:1, it's summed up in these words, your loving kindness and truth, His loving kindness. That while we were sinners, God demonstrated his love for us and that Christ died for us. That's his loving kindness. He made the first move. You didn't. That's the truth that resets our minds and hearts back to the glory of God. To say, not to me, not to me, but to your name be the glory. It's interesting where the psalmist goes next in this. Why should the nations say, where now is their God? See, they play the same game, don't they? Oh, you're losing. I guess your God lost. Things go bad for you, Christian? Where's your God now? He let that happen to you some god. That's what the pagans say. The heathen. And your only response is verse three. But our God is in the heavens. He does whatever he pleases. When things go bad, believer. When you don't understand them. When you don't have an explanation for how you've ended up in the place you're in. Maybe even today. You rest yourself on the sovereignty of God. You don't excuse it away. You rest on it. You stand on it and you say, My God is in the heavens. I might have lost sight of that. I might have forgotten that. But that's where my God is. Mocker. Scoffer. He's in the heavens, and he does what he pleases. And I can live with that. Can't live with anything less than that. Later on in Psalm 115, verse nine, it says, O house of Aaron, who belonged to the house of Aaron? Eli, did O, house of Aaron trust in the Lord. If somebody would have just come up and shaken Eli and said, would you just trust in the Lord and stop trusting in yourself and stop worrying that if you kick your sons out of the temple because they're long overdue for that. Would you just trust the Lord? It'll be okay. No, he kept them in because he trusted in his own wisdom. He thought they would get fixed. He could fix some it. Could we all do it? O house of Aaron, trust in the Lord. He is your help and your shield. You who fear the Lord, trust in the Lord. He is your help and your shield. The Lord is mindful of us. He will bless us. But you got to put your trust in him. All this time, Eli might have to some degree still feared the Lord. To some degree, but he certainly didn't trust him when every time he was warned and told, he didn't change and he kept right on going because he misplaced the glory of God. That's the first lesson we learn.  The second one is the weight of misunderstood glory. If you misplace it, you're surely going to understand it. If you've moved yourself to the center like in Eli, and honored yourself and honored other people above God, how are you going to ever understand how the glory of God is at work in your life? How possibly could you do that? And that's what we see happening in the next section. It's misunderstood glory, and it's not in a old priest who should have known better. It's in a young lady who probably her whole time connected to Eli's household, never maybe was taught the right thing, but certainly caught the wrong thing. You know what I mean? She heard the right things being said by Eli. Maybe even Hophni and Phinehas were really great at they knew what the Bible said, but they didn't do it. And so she learned hypocrisy. Verse 19. Eli's daughter in law. Phineas wife. It's the only detail we get about her. We know she was married to an unfaithful man back in first Samuel, chapter 2, verse 22. Eli was very old, and he heard all that his sons were doing to all Israel, and how they lay with the women who were serving at the doorway of the tent of meeting. Everybody knew it. She knew it. She knew the phony her husband was. She knew the phony her father in law was. That's the detail we get when we're told it's Eli's daughter in law. She was pregnant and about to give birth, but when she heard the news that the Ark of God was taken first in the list, and her father in law and her husband had died, she went into labor. She kneeled down and gave birth. And verse 20 just smacks us right in the face with another sad scene of death that's been around the corner in every place in chapter four, the time of her death. Just like that. Eli's dead. Her husband's dead. She dies. But at the time of her death. Meaning in the labor, the women who were standing by her are trying to encourage her. They're seeing the vexation. They're seeing the distress. And they say what any Hebrew midwife might have said in that moment. Hey, don't be afraid. You have given birth to a son. This is good news. This is the news Hannah had prayed for her whole life that she would have a son. The good news for many Israelite women. It's a boy. I've given my husband a son for our name to carry on. And of all people, she would she they would think, wait, wait, you're this son. He can carry on the line. No, he won't, because God said he won't. He'll be an orphan now. He'll be, as Hannah talked about back in her prayer, those who were full hire themselves out for bread. And those who were hungry cease to hunger. The great reversal the Lord kills and makes alive. First prophesied there, and then prophesied later by the man of God to Eli about his household. Verse 36. Chapter two. Everyone who is left in your house is this kid going to be left in his house? He will. Will he have a future? He won't. We'll come and bow down for a piece of silver or a loaf of bread. He's going to have nothing. In fact, Shiloh is going to be wiped out. History tells us that after this, it's done. Probably some other group. It could have been the Philistines. Maybe someone else comes in and it's gone. We learn this in Psalm 78, verse 60. God abandoned the dwelling place at Shiloh, the tent which he had pitched among men. He gave up his strength to captivity and his glory into the hand of the adversary. It was over. But when you misunderstand the glory of God because you've misplaced it, you think it's been taken, right? Like she said, she misunderstood it. She thought the Philistines took it. They weren't even up against a fight. Why? Because God gave up his strength to captivity. It's a play on our theology, isn't it? How could God lose? He's infinitely stronger. He can't lose unless he chooses to lose. And that's when you misunderstand the glory of God. Like she did. That's what's the tragedy of her life. She thought she had lost everything and seen with human eyes. She did. Home, husband, heritage, if you want to call it that of the sacrificial system at Shiloh. The Ark is gone. What? Nobody's going to come here. It's over. It's over. And so that mentality overwhelms her with grief. To the point. The only thing that comes out of her mouth is Ichabod. The glory is gone. That's what the word means. She repeats it. The glory is gone. And the women around her are trying to say, no. It'll be okay. Hang in there. Stick with it. You've got a son. And as she's dying, all she's repeating is the glory is gone. The glory is gone. That's tragic, because she didn't have to believe that. You know, Samuel was around all this time. Chapter four tells us that at the beginning, the Word of Samuel came to all Israel. She's part of all Israel. The Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh. She lives in Shiloh. Was she listening? You know, when you misunderstand the glory of God, the Word of God could be all around you, but you can't hear it. And when you've misplaced the glory of God, you can't see it because you're consumed with self and you're only going to hear what you want to hear. Was she right? Is the question a lot of writers and preachers ask at this point? Was she right when she says the glory has departed from Israel, for the Ark of God was taken. I don't like asking that question to the audience, because I'll probably get half yeses and half no's and everybody's like, oh, he asked me a trick question, slink in the seat. Yes and no. If he would have said yes or no. My opinion, you're right. She was right and that there was something that was taken. She's right when she says the Ark of God is taken. She's wrong when she says the glory has departed. That's something no man can take. God delivers them over to captivity. God ordained it. God allowed it. Why did he allow it? Because we said last week that he will suffer the risk of his own humiliation of his name. To teach us a lesson on where his glory is truly found, he'll let it all be burned to the ground, won't he? If that's what's going to take for us to look up and listen up and pay attention, he'll let it all fall apart. And that's what she's thinking. It's all gone. It's all over. But it wasn't. More there than her eyes could see. And it was so hard on her. It was so painful. It puts her in a state that she dies believing the wrong thing. Misunderstanding where the glory of God is to be found. So as we draw to a close today, we should ask ourselves the question. It's a good question to reflect on as we would move to the Lord's table. It's just this. You just take those two words. Misplaced and misunderstood. Where have I misplaced my glory for God's? And how, in light of that, might I be misunderstanding where there is something that I would call a loss that might actually be a gain, that God's glory actually is not departed from my life? For the Christian, he says, he'll never leave you nor forsake you, Christian. So any thought that the glory of God has departed from your life is a lie? Now you could be living in disobedience. You could be under the chastening of God. We've seen that in the last few months. But to do what she did and jump to this faulty idea that his glory is gone was because she never put it in the right place in the first. She maybe had it in her husband. She maybe had it in Eli. She had it certainly in the Ark. We do the same, don't we? We think God's glory is in a place. It's in a building. It's down front. If I invite you here, or we have to sing a song that says, we ask you to fill this place, and we forget we already have the Holy Spirit in us. You don't have to invite the Holy Spirit into a worship area. You are the worshiper. You have the Spirit. You bring the glory of God in here, brothers and sisters. So to try to foment or foam up in in some kind of state of. We need to ask him. He's already here. You can enjoy his presence wherever you go because he's with you. He's with you. You have the Spirit with you. His glory is not in a performance, a sacrament. We're going to take communion today. His. His glory is not in the sacrament. By taking the bread and the cup will not do something magical in your life to change you. It's in the remembrance. The glory is found in the gospel of Jesus Christ. That's what the cup. That's what the bread is meant to do for you. Remember the glory of the cross. If you're not in Christ today. You may understand the facts of the gospel. Absolutely. You could repeat back to me, probably Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He came and lived a perfect life. He completely obeyed the Father loved him with heart, soul, mind, and strength. Lived the life I couldn't live so he could die. The death that I deserve to die. He died in my place. He rose again. Three days later. He ascended to the right hand of the father. You can rattle off a creed. You can tell me what the Romans Road is. You can mention it all. But if it's just information that's not glorious, it hasn't saved you. Can I be that honest? Because that's what the Bible tells me. 2 Corinthians. If our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In whose case the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. You can hear the gospel of Christ. You can understand it. You could write it down. You could preach it to other people. But if it's not glorious to you, it hasn't changed you. So you're blind. The word glory changes everything, doesn't it? When something is glorious to us, we are blown away by it. We lose our mind over it. Our heart explodes because of it. That's what the gospel is. It changes you. You love the Lord. You live for him. He brings you joy. And if none of that is true in your life, you've not believed Savingly. That's what the kingdom of heaven is like. A man who finds a treasure hidden in a field, and in his joy he sells all that he has to buy that field because it's glorious field. It's forgiven sin. It's life eternal. I was at a car thing last night. That's how much I know about car things. It was a guy in our church who invites people to bring fast and furious cars, and he puts them on this thing where he can hit the gas and they don't fly away. They're chained, and it's called a dyno, and it's. And I'm sitting there watching. People are hanging, talking. And then he puts a car on this thing, and it was like moths to the light. When they hear the sound of horsepower, they all come shink and they come shink to stand with their phones out in record a car on a thing with wheels spinning fast. It's not moving. It's not up on two. It's not racing anything. They thought it was cool. No offense. None taken. I was just amazed at they saw glory in that, they did. Smiling and high fiving. And when my friend put his supercharged something on it, it went, he told me 2000 horsepower. I don't even know how to say that. Right. It went super fast. Um, so fast. The people behind it, their hair blew back, dirt was blowing in their face, exhaust fumes, and they're fired up. And he asked me to preach the gospel. And I said, some of you here, you think there is glory in that? And that's great. I think there's glory in basketball. Driving home, I knew there was a game coming down to the last minute. I put it on Am radio, kids, have you heard of it? I found an Am station where I was going. Florida, Auburn. Because I think there's glory in sports and it's okay. So those things, some of them that God is, it's his world. He's given us all of it. So yeah, the mechanic that could figure out how to rev up an engine to blow your face off in the exhaust. There's glory. And I told the people there, I said, you know, I sit and watch you take glory in this thing and it blows you away. But here I am with the gospel of the glory of Jesus Christ. Right? And so I could do this. I could tell you the good news of the glory of Jesus Christ in the gospel. And you could be like me watching cars, just going, what's that big deal? And you could tell me it's 2000 horsepower. It's I can't name anything else. That's the only thing I know. And you could give me all the facts and try to convince me. It's glorious. And I'm like, see you next year. I'll preach again. I'm not going to read a magazine. I'm not going to go buy a dyno. My point is, it's got to do something in you. It changes you from the inside because it's a glorious message. That's what the gospel does. If it hasn't done that, you know the gospel, but you don't know the glory. See, when you're like, how does my life get changed around today? Is he glorious to you? It's the only way. God said, light shall shine out of darkness is the one who is shown in our hearts. He did it for me. I didn't do it to myself. He has shown in our hearts to give the light the truth of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. That's where it is, and that's only where it is. So for the unbeliever in here today. The glory is in Christ. It's not in you. The glory is in the gospel that tells you the sinner. You could be forgiven of your sins if you trust in him right now. And if you're in Christ, the glory is in Christ. Nothing changes, does it? You come back to this gospel and you say, the reason I could have had the week I had and sinned the way I sinned and messed up, the way I messed up and come in here and I'm not just evaporated is because of the gospel. Because he keeps you. If he loved you enough to die for you, why would he get rid of you? Why would he be done with you if he loved you enough to die for you, believer. You didn't earn your way in. You can't sin your way out. But you can come to grips today with maybe you've been taking him lightly. So ask him to restore the weight of his glory. Whether you've misplaced it or misunderstood it today. Let's take this time in communion and ask the Lord to readjust that sight in us.
Father, we thank you for your Word today. We thank you for its power and clarity. How easily we, your creation, your creatures, your redeemed, your children want to put our own glory on the pedestal and lose sight of yours. And thank you that the gospel of Jesus Christ puts it right back in the focus. Because everything we have is in you and apart from you, Christ, we can do nothing. Thank you, Spirit, that you are in our hearts and we are not to be pitied. And we do not lose hope because you pour out the love of God in our hearts like a flood. So overwhelm us with your glory now, as we would turn our attention to remember Christ and Him crucified. Amen.

 

Glory in a Box

Pastor Adam Ashoff

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Glory in a Box

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Good Morning Saints of HBC. Please turn in your Bibles to 1 Samuel chapter 4. And while you're doing that, you can think about the title of today's sermon, "Glory in a Box". And I chose that in relation to the text today,as the box referring to the Ark. And how sometimes we talk about our faith in ways or talk about with others remark around the church. I don't think I hear it around here this often. Or maybe at all. Uh, when somebody might say, don't put God in a box and, you know, you question, what are they actually saying? What do they mean by that? Maybe it's just simply you're trying to encourage someone to have faith. You know that nothing is impossible with God. So don't put them in a box of your own imagination of what he can or can't do. And so we take that one, I think, just on face value, maybe beyond that. Uh, maybe if somebody is speaking more along the lines of a preconceived notion, someone might have, uh, challenging somebody's understanding of God's character or the way he acts, his actions. And somebody maybe with a more, less Biblical and a more imaginative theology just says, well, you can't put God in a box. You know, you can't limit him that way by saying he can or can't do this when maybe you're just trying to say, here's what the Word of God says. So either way, that phrase don't put God in a box is, um, it's around. And sometimes we have to just think about what we might be saying to someone else, or what somebody might be trying to say to us when you hear that. I don't think they're referring to the box we're going to talk about today in first Samuel four. Uh, the Ark of the Covenant, um, is all over this chapter. 12 times it's repeated. It's, if you want to call it the main subject matter, the Ark of the Covenant. And anytime I hear that...thanks to television and wasting much of my childhood in front of it, I can't help but think of Raiders of the Lost Ark and, um, even the way in which maybe your early views of the Ark of the Covenant were shaped, if not scarred, by that movie. Uh, only because of the way that Hollywood takes something and just turns it into, uh, well, whatever they did. Um, I thought, you know, maybe in order to really get into the Ark of the Covenant today, I would, you know, show some clips from the movie. Just kidding. Or I could have dressed like Indiana Jones and, uh, swung in here and, um, asked my wife maybe to dress up as the brunette in the movie. She would rather me get rolled over by that giant stone than do something so stupid. So I threw that idea out. But since we won't be getting into the movies today...we will exegete and exposit the living, active word of God. I hope that's okay for you. I know it might not be quite as entertaining, but we will look to see what God's Word has to teach us today on really a spellbinding chapter, when you get into it and it gets into you and what it teaches us about the most fascinating subject matter in the entire Bible...the glory of God...not any character. And in fact, the Ark narrative of the next four chapters...four, five, and six shows us that very fact. God needs no man with a plan in the next four chapters in this Ark narrative. He is just going to captivate us, the listener, with showing what he can do apart from any work of man for his own glory and Israel's good, and by extension our good as well. And so I'm going to get this started by just reading the first three verses of 1 Samuel four to set the context of the shift from chapter 3:19-21.  It ended on a high note with the Word of God that was rare and him speaking to his people following suit. It was visions were infrequent and the Word of God was rare at this time in Israel's history. And yet the dawn has broken over the dark night for Israel, and a prophet of God has been raised up...Samuel. And that ends chapter three on a high note, because the Lord is appearing again at Shiloh, revealing himself to this young man, Samuel. How is he doing it? By the Word of the Lord. We finally arrived there and then now we'll start in chapter 4 and Samuel is just off the scene. The camera shifts. And he's nowhere to be found. And Israel is going to have to find their way in the dark yet again. Even though God has shown in this story I found my man. He's revealed the plan. I'm going to have to lead Israel back into the light, out of the darkness of their own sinfulness. And yet. The story will start with Israel not really interested in that. They want their own plans. They want to follow their own ideas. And we'll find the God who is so glorious and sovereign over all things that he allows it.
Follow the first three verses, we'll jump into today's text. "Thusthe word of Samuel came to all Israel. Now Israel went out to meet the Philistines in battle, encamped beside Ebenezer. While the Philistines camped in Aphek, the Philistines drew up in battle array to meet Israel. When the battle spread, Israel was defeated before the Philistines, who killed about 4000 men on the battlefield. When the people came into the camp, the elders of Israel said, why has the Lord defeated us today before the Philistines?" Father, your word is truth. So sanctify us. By your truth we ask. Amen.
Beyond the fictional accounts of the Ark of the Covenant that we've been discussing earlier, uh, in recent days, oddly enough, of all weeks, the week I jump into a study on the Ark of the Covenant, uh, pops up on my feed that classified files from the CIA have been declassified. I can't make this up. This very week. Hits the headlines. Declassified CIA files reveal psychic quest for the Ark of the Covenant. And so I took the bait, um, 38 pages later and give you a summary of what I found. Uh, because some of you aren't interested, maybe in reading into this late into the night. Uh, the short of it was that in the 70s and 80s your tax dollars, not mine. I wasn't born, uh, at least I wasn't a taxpaying citizen yet. Um, went to, uh, the CIA testing whether psychics could locate things around the world like the Ark. Now, reading this report, one, justified DOGE in my mind. Two, gave me hope that if this doesn't ever work out for me, I will submit my resume to the CIA. A department of one called. Um. Can I tell you when an idea is really dumb? Nonetheless, the findings of the file alluded to descriptions of something resembling an Ark. Um, pictures were drawn from what these psychics were saying they saw, even with a Raiders of the Lost Ark-esque warning, that anyone attempting unauthorized access to the Ark would be destroyed by the protectors of the container by a force unknown to us. I report, you decide. I bring this all up just to ask the question is this what comes to mind when we think about the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord? I think today we're going to see that God has something far more glorious, far more weightywhen we talk about his glory. Um, so many things can rest light on us in life. The most tragic of all would be for the glory of God to rest lightly on you, because the word itself means heavy. It's a perfect word picture, isn't it? The sum of the attributes of God. You name them: love. Justice. Mercy. Compassion. Omnipotence. Omnipresence. Go down the line when you put all of those attributes together. That's heavy. And the word for that in the Bible is...that's God's glory. And sometimes God's people, religious people, get so far away from God, and he rests so lightly on them. That he...and this is what we'll see today. He risks his own reputation in order to teach his people a lesson so that they will finally see where his glory is truly found. That's the God with whom we deal. And even thinking about a line like that, God would risk his own reputation. Would lay on the line in the eyes of man...humiliation. Loss. Defeat. So that he could teach his people a lesson where his glory is actually at. And the places we lose sight of his glory, and we place in a box of our own imagination, shows us he'll stop at nothing to wake us up out of the illusion of our own pseudo religiosity. When we think we have this God...in our grasp. Able to co-opt him for our own purposes. No. He will show himself glorious, even in risking his reputation, so that we wake up.
So let's see this God glorifying efforts that he makes using no man of his choosing...Samuel. He's off the scene. We will talk about the glory of God concealed by the work of man in verses 1 to 11. When Israel, and by extension, we take matters into our own hands apart from following God's Word, we will fail. That comes right out of the gates because the end of chapter three and the beginning of chapter four, God has delivered a man that they could now go to hear a Word from him, and they just seem to pass glibly by. Because Samuel goes off the scene right after the word of Samuel has come to all Israel. And that word of Samuel was the Word of the Lord. Verse 21. In verse 19, the Lord was with him. And then this account in chapter four comes, and there's no mention of going to Samuel and saying, what should we do? You have the Word of God for us, clearly. What should we do, Samuel? And we don't hear from him for three chapters. So God will put his reputation and allow for his own humiliation and even the desecration of the ark being taken to show Israel just how far they've fallen. Verse one. The word comes to Samuel. He's off the scene. Now, Israel goes out and to meet the Philistines in battle and camps, besides Ebenezer, while the Philistines camped in Aphek. And, um, it's kind of an interesting wordplay... these two cities. It's one means Ebenezer...Stone of help. So anytime we sing here, I raise my Ebenezer. Now, you know what that means. In case you didn't know what it means. Come thou fount. Um. It's a stone of help. It's a it's a rock of reminder. And there's a city named after that. And that's where Israel is camped. Ironically enough, they think they're going to be helped, just not in the way they would design. But the irony is they're going up against the Philistines in Aphek. And that word meant fortress or stronghold. So this battle that Israel is about to go into puts them between what?...a rock and a hard place. The distance between these two places is about three miles. It doesn't describe, at least in this text, the reason that Israel and the Philistines are at war. We just know they have been pestering Israel in that Canaan area, for a decent amount of time since they got there. Aphek in particular has been home to the Philistines and Arameans, Israel's long standing enemies. Uh, if you turn back in your Bible to Judges 13:1, and we've gone back there quite a bit because the overlap between the time of judges and the time of Samuel, uh, is such that when Samson passes off the scene in Judges 16, he has judged it repeats Israel 20 years. That's only halfway through the time of the Philistines, of them being a nuisance to Israel for 40 years. Look at Judges 13:1. It says, now the sons of Israel again did evil in the sight of the Lord. And that's the spiral of sin in the book of Judges. Israel does evil in the sight of the Lord, so the Lord gives them into the hands of their enemies. Uh, this is just the way Yahweh is going to play. They cry out to him for a deliverer, and he'll bring a judge, and they'll feign repentance, and they'll clean their act up for a little while, and then they fall right back into the same sin of trusting in man and following their own ways, and doing what is right in their own eyes. That's the summary statement at the end of the Book of Judges. So here we have Judges 13:1, the sons of Israel are doing evil in the sight of the Lord. So the Lord gave them into the hands of the Philistines for 40 years. And yet right there we have a man whose name is Manoah, and his wife was barren and had no children. So the angel of the Lord appears to her and says, I will give you a son. You shall call him a Nazarite to God, as in he set apart and listen to this in Judges 13:5, and he'll begin to deliver Israel from the hands of the Philistines. I'll raise him up temporarily. And we learn from the rest of Judges 13 to 16. It's repeated in verses 15:20 and 16:31 that Samson judged Israel 20 years in the day of the Philistines. Yet we know from 13:1 this was going to go on for 40 years. So sometime in the aftermath, fast forward back to where we're at in 4:1. Israel is fighting the Philistines sometime in a generation after Samson is dead. They have no one to lead. They have Eli as the high priest in Shiloh and his wicked sons. And we have seen so far in Samuel where that's getting them...like people, like priests. How are the people ever going to rise above their leadership if their priests are corrupt? If their examples. If those who are to be making atonement for their sin of all things are making a mockery of it, we learned in chapter two, didn't we? Taking the offerings that were meant to be used and given to Yahweh, and feeding their own faces with it. And it displeased the Lord. So now Israel goes out to battle. Verse two...and they get smoked. When the battle spread, Israel was defeated before the Philistines. They killed about 4000 of Israel's men on the battlefield. Uh, this is a bad start to a sad chapter because the theme of death lingers in the air. You think this loss is bad? Just stick around for a few more minutes and then not just collective loss of lives, uh, loss of individual lives. That is sad in this chapter. So what happens after this defeat on the battlefield? The people...what people? The people that were there come into the camp. They go back, you know, three miles distance. Uh, they go out to war. Israel gets destroyed, 4000 men die, and some of the people come back to the camp in Ebenezer...the stone of help. Where do they look for help? Well they go to the elders of Israel. Who are these men? We don't know. They're some form of leadership left over. They're not judges, they're not priests, they're not prophets. They're just. Well, they're the elders. They're supposed to be the spiritually wise men who should be giving wisdom. They should have the good ideas, shouldn't they? So what's going to happen here? Um, the people come back and they tell the elders what happened, and they say, why has the Lord defeated us today before the Philistines? I've pondered this week whether or not that's a good theology like to give them credit where it's due. Um, because on one hand, they would have known from their own history of going into battles that the battle is the Lord's. The deliverance of the people of Israel from the time in Egypt all throughout this time. The battle is the Lord's. He's the one that will grant victory. That's what Deuteronomy essentially said. You trust in yourselves, you'll go down. If you do not obey the Lord your God, Deuteronomy 28:15, and observe to do all his commandments and his statutes, which I charge you today. These curses will come and overtake you. Cursed you'll be in the city and cursed you'll be in the country. Verse 25. Deuteronomy 28. The Lord shall cause you to be defeated before your enemies. Is that pretty clear? So good theology...did they know Deuteronomy 28:25? Or were they kids of Awana memorizing that verse? That would be an interesting verse to make your kid memorize.  But they say, why has the Lord defeated us today before the Philistines? They ask a good question. I don't know how long the pause was between the question and then this answer. Let us take to ourselves. They didn't say, you know, let's go to God. Let's repent. Maybe. Instead of saying we've sinned clearly, let's seek the face of God. They say we've lost. Let's force the hand of God. You see the difference between the two? There's a world of difference between seeking God in a time of crisis like this, a world of difference between seeking God to serve him and submit to him, whatever that may cost you, versus trying to catch God in some twisted Scripture conundrum. To try and control him. To try to take his Word and rather than take him at his word, take his Word and manipulate him with it. Where he becomes your servant. Rabbit's foot theology. Genie's lamp theology. Grandpa in the sky theology. God exists to serve me not in this moment. Where in this calamity, in this darkness, in this loss to the Philistines. Um, guys. Let's repent. They don't do that. They say, oh, you know. Hey, you remember that part in the Bible where if we just, um, take the Ark. Of course, the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord. That IT, not God, it the Ark may come among us and deliver us from the power of our enemies. That's it guys. We just gotta use the Ark. That's the ticket. We just need to bring the Ark with us. How could we have forgotten? Maybe because they hadn't been to Shiloh in a while and actually worshiped...rote religion. I mean, again, they would have had right theology to remember that that is, the Ark of the covenant was where God would meet with his priest. Turn to Exodus 25. Moses has given instructions in the book of Exodus. Terms for how the people can come near to the Lord, dwell in his presence and the heart of this. It wasn't going to be just all the trappings around it the tent, the tabernacle and everything that God was going to say for them to make in the Holy of Holies, the central part of this place for worship where the high priest could only go. They were going to build a box. I'm not being a cheeky calling this glory in a box. The word ark in the Bible meant box 4 ft by 2.5ft. Um, something like that. And then verses 11 to 19, all kind of beauty around it. Because God deserves the best. It's to be precious and set apart. And so instructions for how to build this ark are in Exodus 25:10-22. But it's to be the symbol of God's presence. We read that in verse 22 where God says, there I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim. He never says I'm inside it...put me in a box. He just says, there, I will meet with you. The priest that's been set apart. This place that's been set apart. This weighty moment, not light moment of being in the presence of your creator. He says, there I will meet with you between the two cherubim which are upon the ark of the testimony. I will speak to you about all that I will give you in commandment for the sons of Israel. What's it about even being in the presence of God in this Holy of Holies at the Ark? It's about revelation from God. It's about his word to his people. What's changed hundreds of years later now in this situation? Are they wanting a word from the Lord? Did they ask God, what should we do here? What do you want us to do? What path should we take? No, they just say we just need the Ark. We just need the rabbit's foot. Because God says he'll be with us if we do it. He'll be with us. It's a means to an end. It's ministry pragmatism. They would have known the end of Exodus 40 after Moses did all of this. They're leaving something very important out about Exodus 40. It's a repeating line that you'll see time and time again in the last chapter of the Book of Exodus, when all of the building project has completed and the ark is to where it should be. It says this. Moses did just as the Lord had commanded. To a 'T'. He did everything God had commanded. The rules for the priests. The rules for the tabernacle. He spread the tent above the tabernacle and put the covering of the tent up on it, just as the Lord had commanded Moses. Verse 21 of Exodus 40. He brought the Ark into the tabernacle, and set up a veil for the screen, and screened off the ark of the testimony. Just as the Lord had commanded Moses, he lighted the lamps before the Lord. Just as the Lord had commanded Moses, he burned fragrant incense on it, just as the Lord had commanded Moses. So you, sensing a theme, this is the way God deals with his people to allow them into his presence. You will do it just as the way I command it or it won't be done. What won't be done? God's presence, revelation. Letting you know I'm with you. But when you do it the way God commands it. Moses, Exodus 40:33, he erected the court all around the tabernacle and the altar, and hung up the veil for the gateway of the court. Thus Moses finished the work. And now when you've done it exactly the way God says to do it, then the cloud covered the tent of meeting and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. But what did these fools rush into? They just wanted the furniture. There was something special in that ark. And so they say, let us take to ourselves. What a line of man centered theology. That's just as true today as it was then. Let's take for ourselves. Let's get our leaders together. We got the plan. Attendance is down in church. Empty seats all around. You know what? I'm going to go to the elders this week and say, hey, guys, I got the plan. I got some new methods. I know exactly what we could do to fix this. Without checking to see...are we keeping any of the commands that God has laid out for us? Are we opening his Word? Are we opening the Bible? Or are we just looking into a box? Which is it? So the people sent to Shiloh, and from there they carried the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord of hosts, who sits above the cherubim. That's just such a good line of irony when you take it into your own hands. They carry the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord of hosts, who sits above the cherubim. You think you carry any of the glory of God? You think you can handle that? Think again. And look who's along for the ride. Can you picture this scene? They recruit a Hophni and Phinehas. I'm sure Hophni and Phinehas had no better theology than these elders and these losers of the battle. None of them were checking their own obedience or disobedience. They were just rushing ahead. They just trusted in in this idea of an ark being protective for them. It was not about a relationship with God, seen in a heart of faith that led to serving and obeying him. It had become a rote religion of ritual, putting God in the box of if I just do these things, if I say the right words, if we take the Ark with us, God will show up, just like in the good old days. Because we know how God works. We remember we've seen it. They might have even remembered numbers 10:33 to 36, when it's mentioned that the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord went out in front of Moses. The cloud of the Lord was over them by day, and Moses led them in song and said. Numbers 10:35, Rise up, O Lord, and let your enemies be scattered, and let those who hate you flee before you. We even got songs to put to it. But you know what they missed is the heart of Moses there. Moses doesn't say, rise up, Oh ark. Da da da da. Da da da dun dun da dun da dun. Pop goes Yahweh.  You think you can manipulate him.  Because you think you know the way he works? So you put your trust in a ritual and wrote religion, and then you recruit the last people that should have been recruited for this holy endeavor of taking the Ark would have been Hophni and Phinehas. They're the wicked sons of Eli sitting around Shiloh. And the people come and say, um, you know, it's in the middle of one of their, um, annual barbecue and brothel fundraisers and, uh, they're stumbling around in their own stupidity, but they're told, you know what?... The Ark needs signed out. Where can I get it? Where's the sign out sheet? And Hophni and Phinehas say, no, we'll go along for the ride. So that's where it ends with the people of Israel...the religious ones. The ones who know. Um. Compare that to this next section 5 to 9. And, uh, the actions and attitudes of those pagan Philistines with those pious Israelites. Verse five, as the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord came into the camp, all Israel shouted with a great shout, so that the Lord resounded. Mhm. You know, it reminds me that religious people can make a whole lot of noise with very little true worship. It's not hard to whip a religious crowd into a frenzy. Find a formula to fill a room. I watch the trends. Fire all my disciple making staff. Hire really, really, really...like, Christian or not, talented musicians. The best I could find. Fill the stage with them. Blow this place out. It's what the people want. It fills a room. And then there's me. I think I become a little more casual and cool. I'd start watching popular comedians. I'd dress like Nate Bargatze. And I'd pay him to write me some good jokes...megachurch. I bet in six months megachurch, you would all disappear. Because that's not what you want. But the room would be full and we'd make a lot of noise. Do it man's way. Because all you have to do is see where the crowd is and then work backwards from it. Right? Don't question whether or not it's for man's glory or God's glory and the reasons behind it. Just shortcut to pragmatism, just like Israel did. Hey, I remember how we used to win these wars. We just took the Ark out in front of us, and we said something like, arise, O Lord. Boom! Victory is ours. I'll never forget when I heard R.C. Sproul say this about worship. "The most successful worship service ever recorded in the Bible is found in the Old Testament. It broke all attendance records, and the singing was so full of gusto that it was heard miles away on a mountain. One of the men who heard the celebration thought war had broken out, but when he took time to investigate, he discovered it was not a war. Instead, it was a worship service, one with a golden calf. Nothing attracts greater crowds than practices of idolatry." Because we love to exalt ourselves. It's been that way since Babel. Let's build a building that would stretch all the way to the heavens. What do we need God for? So here you have a wartime worship service with spiritually dull Israel singing on their way to their own slaughter. Back to the scene of those nasty Philistines. When they heard the noise of the shout, they said, what does the noise of this great shout in the camp of the Hebrews mean? Contrast their response with Israel's. The religious Israelites asked, what should we do? That was their line. Why has the Lord defeated us today? What should we do? The irreligious Philistines ask, what does it all mean? Which one was actually taking time? Sober minded, trying to figure out where is God in this? Not what should man do in this? Notice their response of pronouncing curse on themselves. Verse 7, they were afraid there was reverence. There is no reverence in Israel's response. It's gone because there's no glory. And when there's no weightiness and glory, there will be no reverence. Friends just come up with a new idea. All right. Charge the hill. Let's go. Of course, with religious trappings. Let's grab the Ark. The Philistines say, woe to us that's pronouncing a curse on themselves. Question I ask is who should have been pronouncing a curse on themselves? Israel should have. They should have recognized we have gone astray. This one's on us. The reason we just lost 4000 men isn't because God isn't powerful enough. It's because of our own sinfulness, our own rebellion. And repeated in verse 8 with the Philistines, woe to us! Who shall deliver us from the hand of these mighty gods? Again they're doing what Israel didn't do. They recount the glories of God's victories. Aren't these the gods who smote the Egyptians with all kind of plagues? They knew about Israel's history. What does God remind Israel back in Deuteronomy? Don't forget my deliverance of you. Remember when I saved you and brought you out of Egypt? Who's doing the remembering here?...the Philistines. Who's just doing the let's rise up and bring this lucky charm along the religious. So now the Philistines, though they might be respectful, I wouldn't even call them reverent, but respectful of this God that can win wars. They knew enough to fear him, but not enough to serve him. They're lost, so they do, verse 9 says, they drum up some courage and, um, say, listen, if we don't fight and win, we'll become slaves to these people. So, Verse 10, the Philistines fought and Israel was defeated, and every man fled to his tent. And the slaughter was very great, for there fell of Israel 30,000 foot soldiers, absolute annihilation. If we thought losing 4000 men in battle was bad back in verse 3, without the ark, you bring the Ark and you lose 30,000. Ark or no Ark, no presence of God, no power...delivered into the hands of their enemies. Just like Deuteronomy 28:25 said, the Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will go out one way against them, but you will flee seven ways before them. And you, Israel, will be an example of terror to all the kingdoms of the earth. I will risk my own reputation and humiliation and losing this war. So when they see you lose, that would terrify the kingdoms of the earth, that this mighty God who delivered them once didn't do it this time. Why? Because you disobeyed. Because you never repented. You didn't turn back. You didn't recognize how far you've strayed.
Last but not least, the Ark of God was taken, and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, died. So it's not just a collective view of the destruction of these people. It's the promise God kept going back to chapter three and chapter two, delivered by the man of God to Eli, and then Samuel to Eli, that your sons will die on the same day, and your line, Eli, will come to an end. What do we find in the midst of this wreckage in the aftermath? What I said from the start, from a human viewpoint, God will allow this defeat to take place in order to teach Israel a lesson and all of us. Don't ever put me in a box of your own man madereligious making. My glory cannot fit in such a silly place. Isaiah 66:1, thus says the Lord, Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Where then is a house you could build for me? And where is a place that I may rest? Now God, in acting this way towards his children, may give us the sense that he is now no longer for them, when he made a promise to be with them. Deuteronomy 7:6, you are a holy people to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession. Out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. What's that teaching them? You exist for me. I don't exist for you. When we turn to pragmatism, man centered ministry, trusting in our own ways, we've flipped it around on our glorious God and said, you exist to serve me. He says, no Israel or you, child of God, bought by the blood of the Son, adopted into the family of God. You exist to serve me. Don't ever lose sight of that or you'll lose sight of my glory, my weight. I'll rest light on you. For you're a holy people to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession. Out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. The Lord did not set his love on you nor choose you, because you were more in number than any of them. You were the fewest of all the peoples. But because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your forefathers, he brought you out of Egypt. He redeemed you from the house of slavery. Know therefore that the Lord your God, he is God, the faithful one, who keeps his covenant and loving kindness to a thousand generations to those who love him. It's about the heart, friends, and keep his commandments. It's then about our service to him, not his service to us. Love is included in that. And the tone doesn't change in the New Testament. When we talk about the great love of God for us, that he sent His Son to die for us, that doesn't then exclude in the next breath out of our mouth that we're to obey him. 1 John 5, whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and whoever loves the Father loves the child born of him. Okay, it's about faith. It's about first and foremost, recognizing God demonstrated his love for us in this, that while we're sinners, Christ died for us. That's how we get in. That's the good news of the gospel. Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God. It's by faith, friends. It's not by works. But by this we know that we love the children of God. When we love God. Sound like Deuteronomy 7 right there?...and keep his commandments. How do we know where's the fruit? We love him, and out of love we obey him. And listen to this. This is the love of God that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. So as we draw this time to a close, think about that. You say you're a Christian and that you want to do all that you do to the glory of God, the weight of God, the heaviness of God. On one hand, you would then realize his glory is so great, his commands. They weigh on me and that's a good thing. They weigh on my conscience. They remind me what I am, who I am, whose I am, what I'm to live for. That's a good weight because it's not one that crushes you. When you realize somebody else was crushed for you. Who was it? It was his Son who was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. By his stripes we were healed. You could only say that the glory and weight of a holy God who says, live this way. Choose righteousness, that you're not crushed by those commands. When you first have seen that his Son was crushed for you. That's the gospel. That's why Jesus could then say, come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Isn't that somewhat of a paradox? That the weightiness and glory of God that calls us to obey every single command that he comes up with. Then says, But I've placed your command keeping and your law breaking on my Son, and I broke him for your behalf.
So if you're not in Christ today, Christ was broken and buried and rose again on your behalf. And you either believe that with everything in you or you don't. And then the freedom we find in Jesus Christ, the glory of God and the gospel is then we can say, because he's done that for me, I love him and I keep his commandments and as weighty as this book seems to be. If you feel it's weighty, you don't understand it's glory. It's not burdensome. It's freeing, because then you're living exactly the way God has designed you to live for his glory, not your own. So if you don't know Jesus Christ today, call on him.
If you know him today, remind yourself. It may not be easy to obey always. Fights against our flesh, the indwelling sin in us. But oh, is it worth it because he alone is worthy.
Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your Word this morning. We thank you for its goodness and kindness to us, your children. We thank you for the way it frees us to be exactly the children of God you have called us to be, who don't grouse and complain under your commands, but because you took the weight that we couldn't take. You bore the cross. You nailed our sins to it. That we are free now to obey, and that we, in following Jesus, are transformed from glory to glory in his likeness. And that's the rest of our days. So help us today, encourage us and strengthen us by the work of your Word and Spirit. Amen.

 

The Grace of God’s Word

Pastor Adam Ashoff

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The Grace of God’s Word

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Good morning, Saints of HBC. Please turn in your Bibles to 1 Samuel chapter 3, and we'll pick back up in the story of Samuel, who, as we have met him so far, has been just a boy, maybe three, four years old, when he was brought to the temple in chapter 2. And now we pick things up in chapter 3. And he is in his adolescence, still serving God faithfully in Shiloh, under the dimming and slightly dutiful eye of Eli the priest. But as we get back into the Book of Samuel again, I want to remind us all that though the book is named after him, it's not about him. This is true of Samuel, as it is the entire Bible, true of our lives. This book and the entirety of the Bible is about God and how he has revealed himself to us...God's Revelation. His sovereign choice to reveal himself to his creation is the start of our redemption. Without his Word being revealed to us, where does that leave us? If he doesn't come to us, if he doesn't make himself known to us...leaves us lost, leaves us in the dark, it leaves us in the silence. And that is what appears to be the situation in Israel at this time...1050 BC. It is a dark time and it is a quiet time, but in God's timing, the perfect time for the gifts of grace of His Word to arrive, because that is God's revelation to his creation. It is, as the title of today's sermon says, it's the grace of His Word. That God's word arriving, God's word being revealed, God's word being made known is in and of itself grace. It doesn't matter what message is being conveyed, a message of comfort, a message of affliction, a message of encouragement or an admonition. Any time God is revealing His Word to His creation, that's an act of his grace. Not anything we deserve, but that which he, out of love and care for his creation, wants to make himself known. And so it fits into the title of our series, though it's entitled Samuel. We saw from the beginning that his name meant, though it sounded like what Hannah named him. I've asked of the Lord. What it actually meant was God is my name. He wants his name to be made known. We saw last week in studying the Lord's Prayer...it's the first thing. We pray Hallowed be your name. It's his name that's to be exalted. And to pair with that message last week on prayer, we get to talk about the Word of God today...how fitting. As we jump back into Samuel, we're going to be in chapter 3 today. We will cover the entire chapter, but to get us into it, I would just read the first four verses, and then we will walk through the text together and you will see the revelation of God, the Word of the Lord being made known to Samuel in a way that hadn't been made known before. And the blessing wasn't just for him. It was going to be for all God's people. Follow along as I read.
"Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord before Eli. And the word from the Lord was rare in those days. Visions were infrequent. It happened in that time as Eli was lying down in his place. Now his eyesight had begun to grow dim, and he could not see well. And the lamp of God had not yet gone out. And Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the Ark of God was that the Lord called Samuel. And Samuel said, here I am."
Father, your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ when speaking to the followers around him in his day, in a loving but warning way, told them, as your Spirit tells us now be careful how you hear. He who has ears to hear, listen up. May we listen to the word today through the power of your Spirit, we pray. Amen.
Speaking of voices, thanks to the internet...we live in a sea of man's opinions. A veritable wasteland, if you will, of bad ideas that you can find all the time. And in a seemingly infinite amount, you can't get to the depths of the sea of what the World Wide Web has to offer us when it comes to man's opinions. One particular place that you can find bad ideas very quickly...man's opinions that is...is a website called Reddit. It's a social news forum style website where users called Redditors submit content, which then when they offer their answer to you, a question that plagues you. People can vote up or down. And so sometimes when I had one advice from the masses, not the Massey's, Massey's will give you good advice. Kurtis Maria, even their kids...masses will not give you good advice up or down. But the other day I wanted to query Reddit and find an answer to the question, how can I hear God's voice? Probably know where this is headed. So, in no particular order of awful, I offer you the following replies from Redditors. First, from chainsawX72, which should be intriguing just by the name alone. Somebody just slunk down in their chair a little bit. There goes my burner account. Um. Chainsaw X 72 says to the question, how can I hear God's voice? Well, Jesus never suggested we do that. We are called to love, not to have magic powers. Okay. Thanks, Chainsaw. Um. A spiritual voice from Be the Light 24-7 says your body is a house. If you have a bunch of chatter in your house, it'll be hard to hear the Holy Spirit's voice. Try to do a three day water fast for God. Find a book online explaining how to do this. I believe this, be the light person means, find a book online of how to do a water fast. But I think that's rather self-explanatory. Then ends...guarantee by the third day you will hear the Holy Spirit's voice guarantee. So you try it and don't hear it. Be the light 24-7. Find them. Don't find them. Lastly, a guy who gave his real name to to protect his identity. I won't reveal it. Um, he's not in our church for all I know. He writes when you are about to fall asleep in bed, pray God, speak to me. Repeat it three times and go to sleep. Which perhaps he got this idea from this chapter. Three times, you know, when you're sleepy, don't wait for the Lord to call your name. Just say God, speak to me three times and then go to sleep and see what happens. Um. My favorite. Both theologically and good natured, is the response if you want to hear God speak, read your Bible out loud. So I offer that to you today.
Today's text doesn't intend to tell you how to hear God's voice, but it does indirectly teach a fundamental truth about hearing from God, which is this...that the grace of God comes to his people through the revelation of His Word. It's an act of his grace to make himself known. It's always an act of his grace. It is not something that you can initiate and put God on the dock to speak to you. At the same time He has given you His Word.  So, you can come to the Word of God and believe that it's not just the voice of prophets throughout the ages, it's the voice of his Son in Hebrews chapter one, which says, God, after he spoke long ago to the fathers and the prophets in many portions and in many ways in these last days, has spoken to us in his Son. So you have God speaking to you when you open His Word. You have not just the voice of prophets and preachers throughout the ages that has been in Scripturated...God has spoken to us through His Son. And that is the starting point in any discussion when we talk about the value, the the precious value of the Word of God in our lives. But in this section today of Scripture, we get to kind of follow the path to see just how gracious is God when he brings his Word into our lives. And we see it in three ways.  
First, we see grace comes by God's perfectly patient Word in in the first section of this story, verses 1 to 9. When God's perfectly patient word comes to Samuel right there in verse one of chapter three, we find Samuel ministering to the Lord, just as he's always been doing. We think now he's in his adolescence, maybe age 12. He's been with Samuel for the last 7 or 8 years. Whenever Hannah and Elkanah brought him, dropped him off and was committed to be Eli's understudy as the high priest. Not sure if they knew the future of Samuel when they gave him to Eli, if they thought, oh, he's also going to become a priest. He was committed to the Lord, and that's all Hannah and Elkanah godly parents, they were, cared about. Was this kid though you gave him to us, we give him back to you. He is yours, God, to use as you will. And in the track record on Samuel's life as we meet him again in chapter 3, verse 1 is continual growth and godliness. Verse 11 of chapter two, the boy's ministering to the Lord before Eli the priest. Verse 18 of chapter two, the boy's ministering before the Lord. And verse 26 of chapter two...now the boy Samuel was growing in stature and in favor, both with the Lord and with men. And by this time in chapter 2, Eli is very old. He's getting on in years. And we learned that about Eli in verse 2 of chapter 3. So time has passed, but we're still in those days, those times. We see that in verse 1. These are the same days we've been in for the last two chapters. These are days where the Word of God was rare and visions were infrequent. And this is the moral collapse of Israel as a society. It starts back in the book of Judges. Moses and Joshua are off the scene, and there is no man of God who would be there on a faithful and frequent basis, to be relied upon to hear from God and mediate that word to the people. Judges came and went and all had their own shortcomings. And now, by the end of the book of judges, where 1 Samuel overlaps with the start of it, everyone is doing what is right in their own eyes. There is a spiral for this nation into apostasy. And so a summary statement in verse 1, the word from the Lord was rare and visions are infrequent, speak to that idea. Uh, God would speak to his prophets directly to give people God's voice and not just his voice, but from that voice a vision for what to do, where to go, the direction they should take. That's not hard to put those two ideas together. When it says visions, it could refer to as we hear often in the Old Testament, someone has a dream. But if God isn't speaking to that person to tell them what that dream means, then they're left with just a dream. It's just that. Where it's connected here is between the word of the Lord and those visions. Being that when God wanted Israel to do something, he would speak to a prophet like Moses, and the people would hear whatever that was and follow that word. And so there is where God's voice and vision or direction for the people are connected. And Israel has neither right now to a great degree. Which brings you to the basic truth that if there is no word from God, there is no vision for God's people. It's fundamental to understanding the kingdom of God. When you look across churches, um, don't get fooled by what we have said all along in Samuel. What you can see with your eyes. You'll be fooled if you just assume church is growing and big, it must be a place where the Word of God is there. A lot of religious functions, a lot of programs going on, and you could maybe attend some of those churches and you show up and there's a lot of activity and so much is going on, whether it's a contemporary or a traditional church, you can see a lot of religious activity. There was a lot of religious activity happening this entire time in Israel by ungodly men like Eli's sons. So they were performing the functions, but there was no flame to the fire. It was going out. And you can show up in a church today, and you could see a lot of religious function going on and activity. And you sit there after a while and you go, I think I could put my finger on what's wrong here. The Word of God isn't here. Everything else seems to be here but the Word of God. We might live in a time, particularly in our country, where, because of our man centered approach and view towards pragmatism, we know how to get people in a room. We know how to meet their felt needs. We know we can figure it out. We can do surveys, we can watch what the people want, and we could give it to them. And you can show up week after week. And it can keep you interested for a while. But if God has been doing a work in your heart, you're saying, what's missing here? The Word of God is missing, and such it was the time in which Samuel was ministering to the Lord. Rare and infrequent does say that it wasn't entirely silent, but, um, it was like a time, I guess, Amos 8:11 speaks of behold, days are coming, declares the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land, not a famine for bread or a thirst for water, but rather for hearing the words of the Lord. It's a famine like time, spiritually speaking, in Israel here. And does the majority of the responsibility lie on God or lie on Israel? It works both ways, doesn't it? If people want to do what's right in their own eyes, the leadership is corrupt. Eli doesn't have the courage to try to turn it around. And so when we see in the Bible often is the case, when you refuse to listen, your spiritual ears will begin to dull. When you refuse to eat what God would offer, eventually the famine comes. Here it's a judgment of perceived silence from God. And we understand what that could feel like on a human level, when someone stops talking to us. I don't think anybody...when somebody ghosts you, young people. Old people, that means they're just done talking with you. You thought you were their friend. Gone. When somebody does that to you. What's that? Your thought is there must be. I did something wrong. They must be mad at me. Not because they had to say anything. They just stopped talking to you. Even if they responded to you with some type of malice, at least you know they care enough to talk, even if it's just to pick up the phone to yell at you. Okay, I got something going. There's communication here. But when it's silence, when you're blocked. When it's you're phased out. It's as, um, the writer Elie Wiesel wrote in his book 'Night', his account of growing up during the Holocaust. He remembered as a young boy watching his mom and dad and siblings killed at Auschwitz. And he titles the book Night because it was the dead silence of the night when people were being led away to be killed, slaughtered, that he lost his faith because God wasn't there. And he said, out of that, the opposite of love isn't hate. The opposite of love is indifference.  And that's sometimes what the silence can convey. But we know that God isn't indifferent, and we know that when it seems like nothing is happening in the dark of the night here in the first four verses, God is doing something. He is working. He's been preparing Samuel and he's been giving Eli warnings and Eli has not responded. So now it happened at that time of darkness and Eli's sleeping and his eyesight's dim. He can't see well. You wonder, is that the narrator trying to tell you there's something more than just a physical problem with this priest? That's a spiritual issue that we're about to see why he seems so dead to the workings of God. And yet this young Samuel is alive to them. Samuel is away from the presence of God, sleeping the night away. And yet, verse three, the lamp of God, which was to perpetually be burning, has not gone out. See, it's dark there, but the light's not gone out. And you find little Samuel, adolescent Samuel. He's not so little anymore. He's lying down in the temple of the Lord where the Ark of God was. The writer wants you to know Samuel where he should be. This is him being faithful to his task, though Eli had not been faithful to his.  This is the decline of Eli, physically and spiritually. And this is the rise of Samuel. He's lying down in the temple of the Lord where the Ark was. And that was as prescribed that the lamp should always be burning. One where the ark is, is where God's servants should be, Exodus 25:22. Because he says, there I will meet you. Where? Where the Ark of the Covenant is. I will meet with you from above, the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim which are upon the ark of the testimony. I will speak to you about all that I will give to you in commandment for the sons of Israel. Eli is derelict in his duty, going back to Exodus 25:22. But Samuel is not. Samuel is there, waiting and ready even just to keep the lamp burning. Exodus 27:20, you shall charge the sons of Israel, that they bring you clear oil of beaten olives for the light to make a lamp burn continually...why?...in the tent of meeting outside the Veil, which is before the ark of the testimony, Aaron and his sons. That's the priestly line...goes all the way to Eli and his unfaithful sons. They shall keep it in order from evening to morning before the Lord. It shall be a perpetual statute throughout their generations for the sons of Israel. Why do I take you back into Exodus? To show you that what Eli had let happen on his watch, it wouldn't bother him to let the light go out physically, because it already has gone out spiritually. We've seen that in chapter two with his sons, that a man of God has to come in and tell him, did I not reveal myself to you, Eli? Did I not choose your line from all the tribes to be my priest, to go to my altar, to burn incense, to do all of this? Why have you rejected my sacrifice and offering which I have commanded? All this is happening here. The lying down. The eyes dim, the lamp almost out...at the dark end of chapter two. And the judgment on Eli and his sons. Their demise is set. It's a bleak picture, except in that flickering light of the Ark's lampstand, there is Samuel. 12 years old, been at the task eight years ministering to God before Eli. And when you just think about that in our lives, what's the relevance? Where does God need to find his servants today? Faithful at your task. That's where He doesn't need hype machine's calling attention upon themselves. You just need somebody in the middle of the night where they should be at their post, ready to serve God wherever and however and with whatever means he wants them to serve them. Do you understand that? There's a story to be told here. It's what looks like a bleak and barren moment in the life of Israel and even in this priestly temple. And yet there is Samuel. Why? Why is it so simple? Because God doesn't need us to light anything up. He sees through the darkness to those who are truly obedient from the heart. He can find you where you're at. He could find whether you're faithful or not. And so he comes to call Samuel, verses 4 through 9. Three times the Lord called Samuel, and Samuel faithful and ready to serve. Eli just says, here I am. And the first time he pops up, verse 5 sprints over to Eli. Sleepy, Eli. Sprinting, Samuel. Can you picture it? Here I am, you called me. What did you need? This is what he does. This is who he is. He is grown in wisdom and stature...favor with God and men. Of course he's going to respond this way. And Elijah says, I didn't call. Go back to bed. He's snoozing. And the Lord calls yet again. 'Samuel' and Samuel arose and went to Eli and said, here I am, for you called me. And Eli is not getting it. He's not getting it. What other explanation would there be for Eli? This, of all people, should be the man who should understand when God is coming to call. He doesn't get it. He's spiritually dull. He's not out, but he's dull. He says, go back and lie down again. Verse 7 explains, this is no fault of Samuel's. No, Samuel didn't know the Lord. It had the word hadn't yet been revealed. That's a phrase that's meant to explain why Samuel's response wasn't immediately to think it was Yahweh. It had never come to him this way before...the Word of the Lord. Did he know the Word? I would think he would. Having worked in the temple for the last eight years or so, he knew what he was supposed to be doing. But Eli, the mentor, the high priest, has not apparently taught him to be ready to be listening to saying, Lord, speak to me whenever and however. So, Samuel...the worst I guess you could say, he's just unacquainted with the words and ways of Yahweh at this point, I don't think you could say he's totally ignorant of Yahweh based on how already he's been described, but it's just this particular way in which God wanted to speak to him, reveal himself to him. He wasn't ready for it yet. This is on Eli, just as it's always been on Eli for his own sons, and now this adopted son who's been faithful and submissive and humble, and Eli hasn't prepared him. It says he doesn't know the Lord. But that's a far cry from the sons of Eli, who were worthless men and did not know the Lord. And in 1 Samuel 2:12, do you see the contrast? Those words aren't there by accident for us to just pass over. It's showing...here are men who do not know the Lord, and it is on them. They're worthless men. They sin before the Lord. They despise the offering of God. And Eli should have not just rebuked them, but removed them. Why? Because the Bible says so. Not because I say so. Numbers 15:30...It was in the law of God for the priests to make atonement for the person. Numbers 15:28, the priest shall make atonement before the Lord for the person who goes astray when he sins unintentionally." But we learned in 1 Samuel two that they despised the offering of the Lord. They were intentionally sinning against the Lord. It was high handed. It was deliberate. So listen to Numbers 15:29, you shall have one law for him who does anything unintentionally for him who is native among the sons, meaning they should know better. But they sinned unintentionally, and even for the alien who sojourns among them. But listen to Numbers 15:30, but the person who does anything defiantly, whether he is a native or an alien, as in whether he's from Israel or he's a Gentile, that one, if they're doing it, defiantly is blaspheming Yahweh, and that person shall be cut off from among his people. That's the action Eli should have taken all along, high handed, deliberate, defiant sin against the Lord. You're gone. You don't get an exception for being a pastor's kid...Priest's kid...why? Verse 31, it goes back to the Word, because he has despised the Word of the Lord and has broken his commandment. That person shall be completely cut off and his guilt will be on him. So there's the contrast as we see in this section, it was it was inexperience and ignorance for Samuel, it wasn't so for Eli's sons. And so God is persistent in his patient call. Verse 8, so the Lord called Samuel again a third time, and he arose and went to Eli and said, here I am, for you called me. Then Eli discerned, see, that's that's the tricky thing about Eli. The third time was the charm, wasn't it? We want to just roll them out, write them off and say what an awful guy he is. But three times in, he finally discerns and goes, you know what? Maybe this is God trying to get Ahold of this boy. So what does he say? He tells him next time, if he calls you that, you shall say, speak, Lord...personal name of God, Yahweh...your servant is listening. So Samuel went and lay down in his place. What does this section teach us? It's the perfect patience of God. This section isn't really about Samuel and Eli. This is how God's Word comes to us in grace....perfectly patient. You don't see God raising his voice, rebuking Samuel or Eli. It's a modest word in the middle of the night. He doesn't try to get Samuel or Eli's attention in some blaring and blazing glory, though God had every right to go silent on his people in the time where His word is being trampled on and trifled with by his own priests, God's perfect timing patiently calls on a young man of his choosing to take up the diminishing torch of Eli and light it on fire again. And that is a good way to think about how God's Word comes to us. It comes with patience, because God's never in a hurry. He's never running behind. And when the time comes for his perfect Word to land on your prepared heart, it'll be there. It'll be there, friend. Wherever you sit this morning. Know the patience of God and His word to you. You can see it in a hundred ways, can't you? Sitting under teaching, reading your Bible, listening to a sermon. You put yourself under, underneath the teaching of God's Word and it will come in God's perfect and patient time. There is, though, a warning with that. From 2 Peter 3 that though God has a patient word delivered in just the right time, it does not give us the right to presume upon the patience of God as if he's never going to take action. 2 Peter three:3-4. Know this first of all, that in the last days mockers will come with their mocking, following after their lusts, and saying, where is the promise of his coming, the return of the Lord? Ever since the fathers fell asleep, we've been told that this Messiah will return, but everything just keeps going on as it has been from the beginning. Those are the words of a mocking person who's gone dull. They hear that this return of Jesus is coming, but rather than that move them to be ready and have their lamps lit and stay awake and be on the alert, they run in the opposite direction. Hey, if this God is so patient, who knows if he'll ever show up? That's presuming upon his patience. And the warning is this...the only thing holding back the judgment of God is His Word, his perfectly patient word. Verse 7 in 2 Peter 3. By his Word the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. Do you see the only thing holding back God's judgment...final judgment is his perfect, patient Word. That word that the mockers mock. Maybe some of you. You just think I got time. I mean, look, how long people have been saying Jesus is returning. It's getting so bad. Look at the wars. Look at all of that. Yes, there's going to be wars and rumors of wars, but it warns you. Don't presume upon his patience. Verse 9, the Lord is not slow about his promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish, but for all to come to repentance. Beware of testing his patience. Thinking you know better than him, and you'll come to Christ on your own time. No, you won't, because all time is his time. And as you sit under the Word of God and Christ Jesus being offered to you in his righteousness and his life, his perfect keeping of the law, not yours, comes to offer you in his sacrificial death, his substitution for you on the cross. And you sit there and go, I know I've heard it all before, Adam, but have you then repented and trusted in him? Don't presume upon his patience, because his patience is actually an act of kindness for you to repent, not for you to wait. So call on the Lord Jesus Christ now and be saved. Don't wait another moment longer. If you see yourself lulled to sleep thinking life just goes on, I can wait. No you can't. Today is the day of salvation because tomorrow could be the day of judgment. That's the perfect patience of the Word of God that comes to us. In just the right timing. Just like Samuel needed it. But just as much as we could see the patience of God in this, this portion of Scripture from verses 1 to 9, right around the corner comes the forcefully firm Word of God. I mean, back to back in the story, there is this pace. And it's not a sleepy pace. It's a patient pace to God, calling upon Samuel and even trying to wake Eli up from his slumber. But just as we sang this morning, The Lion and the lamb, you have those diverse excellencies of Jesus Christ. Lion and lamb, as Jonathan Edwards called them, paired together in in the Lord Jesus Christ. You have them meeting here in verse 10 where you had a a lamb like, patient word coming to Samuel and Eli. And then in verse 10, the lion roars. He shows up forcefully firm in what he is going to reveal to Samuel, to be told to Eli right next to each other. Unexpected. Almost. Verse 10. Then the Lord came and stood and called. He's not just speaking. What's he doing? He's appearing. I'm shocked at Samuel's response. Speak, for your servant is listening. He has the composure...12 year old to not fall dead like John did in Revelation 1:17, when the Lord that he had walked with three years seen after the cross, comes to him in his glorified state, and he says, I fell like a dead man at his feet. And here is a theophany of the Lord coming and standing and calling to Samuel, the 12 year old. And he can repeat the words that Eli had told him. What a kid!
But it's about the Word of God coming in grace, even though this gracious word is a forcefully firm Word, because immediately after he says, speak, your servant is listening. Then God says to Samuel, listen, behold, I'm about to do a thing in Israel, to put everybody's ears a tingling, as in, the hair is going to stand up on your head, because the person that everybody in Israel was looking to as the high priest, the priestly line that was supposed to be the guide and the guard against falling into apostasy will be removed once and for all. In that day I will carry out against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house from beginning to end. And what was that that he spoke? Well, you'd have to go back a few weeks and listen to the sermon if you weren't here. But it's in verses 27 to 36 of chapter 2. It was the judgment on Eli. What judgment? What's he going to carry out? What did Eli do wrong? Well, on one level, nothing. Eli is being judged for doing nothing. When he was supposed to do something, he did nothing. And therein is his judgment. When he was supposed to speak up and kick out his ungodly sons from the priesthood in Shiloh, he didn't do it. And you would say, yeah, but he verse 25, he spoke to them about it, but he didn't carry it out. Like the parent that just keeps warning the kid, you do it one more time. You do it one more time. On the 15th time, you do it one more time. All you've taught your kids is delayed obedience. All you've taught your kid is. I can just keep pushing my parent like this. Maybe I could push God like this when he comes to me forcefully firm in his word and says, do this and live. And I say, you know what? We train our kids that way. We don't believe in first time obedience training our kids because we want to raise robots. We want to raise sensitive hearts to respond to the Word of God immediately against their own will and desire, because that's where the blessing is found, parents. In the same way, the blessing would have been found. How Eli hadn't responded all these years, knowing what the Word of God said and not doing it, not speaking up when he should have in his sons’ lives. Eli was not judged for his son's sins of commission. Those sins were on his sons. Eli was being judged for his sins of omission, not honoring God above his boys. And here's the irony. To deliver the final word of judgment, God uses a 12 year old that's been right under Eli's nose the whole time. How humbling...that God, in his judgment, doesn't even speak directly with Eli. He brings Samuel, this 12 year old, to tell him the high priest. It's over once and for all because you honored your sons above me. You took the easy route. It's kind of an irony that Samuel, a courageous young man, has to deal with Eli in a way that Eli couldn't deal with his own sons. And that goes back to Hannah's prayer, doesn't it? That boasts no more the proud and the arrogant. Because the bows of the mighty are shattered. But the feeble will gird on strength. Who would be more feeble in a moment like this than a 12 year old boy talking to a man he respected and worked for the last eight years? What a twist. And we have said Samuel was full of these great reversals. You think it's going to go this way and God takes it that way. Now here's another interesting thing. After Samuel gets this forcefully firm word that he now has to deliver to Eli, he goes back to sleep. Verse 15, he lays until morning, and then he opens the doors of the house of the Lord. He doesn't go and talk to Eli right away. Why? I don't think it was out of disobedience. We'd have no reason to believe Samuel would want to be disobedient, but he was probably afraid. Samuel was afraid to tell the vision to Eli. There was a humble fear in him. Maybe those same humble fears that Eli never overcame in his own ministry. When God gives you a word to say, you say it. You say it straight.  You don't add to it and you don't take away from it. And so Eli comes to Samuel. Clearly, he knew something was up. He seeks Samuel out in the morning and says, Samuel, my son...I mean that again. Eli being the unpredictable priest. He calls him my son. It's a gracious, affectionate word. And Samuel says, here I am. And he said, I want you to tell me the word that God spoke to you. Please don't hide it from me. And like, man. Eli, what a guy. I mean, he's really like, come on, it's okay. And then he says, and may God do so to you and more also, if you hide it...that's a curse. That's a prophetic curse. If you don't tell me every last word of truth right now, may God curse you. I mean, finally we see some boldness in this guy that should have been there all along. But the irony is, he's saying it to...Samuel. See, this is where Eli's waking up. He knows God means business. He was dull, but he wasn't out. I think it's a word of warning to us as Christians, as his children, we can be dull, but not out. And God could be trying to come to us in that perfectly patient word, and we just kind of lull ourselves to sleep until he has to show up with a forcefully firm word. And, it gets our attention, doesn't it? Yet that's still a word of his grace. He wants you to listen. It's what I prayed earlier and mentioned in Mark 4. If you have ears to hear, let him hear. Take care what you listen to. By your standard of measure, it will be measured to you and more will be measured to you besides, if you're listening and wanting more from the Word of God, he will be faithful to give it. But when you start pulling back, beware. Whoever does not have even what he has shall be taken away from him. Eli was going to have the entire promise of the priesthood taken away from him. Not only that, his sons, were going to die because he got soft to the Word of God. Not in the right way. It just didn't penetrate anymore. It fell and didn't sprout. But yet in this moment, he tells Samuel, I want you to tell me everything. So Samuel, reticent as he is, tells him everything and hid nothing from him. I mean, what a first assignment as a prophet. This is what the prophet's task is. He's 12 years old, and the first time God speaks to him with direct revelation to speak to someone else, it's a word of judgment. He doesn't give Samuel any time to warm up on this thing, you know. Let me give you a few easy reps with some positive things to say. No. He calls him right into the line of fire and to speak to Eli. And what was God doing? He was preparing Samuel. He was testing him. In the first test that Samuel had to pass was the earliest test with somebody that he probably loved and respected. Could he minister the grace of God's Word with the courage and conviction that is inherent in it? Because God's Word is never weak. It's patient. It's not pathetic, it's compassionate. But it's not compromising. We do that to the Word of God when we take away from it or add to it. And so the test of the prophet here and the test of the preacher today, we feel it. We understand it...what Samuel's going through. But he says every single thing, and he hid nothing. And look at Eli's response. It is the Lord. Let him do what seems good to him. Eli received it. Samuel passed the test. The convergence of these two lives that God has planned all along for one's diminishing role and one's ascension are happening at this very moment in verse 18. Eli knows it's over for him. Samuel sees it's just beginning. Question we need to ask ourselves, as we know God calls us to speak the truth to other people. Teaching a small group. Discipling others in the Word. Parents leading Bible times in your own home. You could feel this tension between softening it or making it too hard, can't you? If you don't feel that tension, you're not doing it. I'm serious. If you've never felt that tension, am I being too soft and easy? Am I tempted to go too hard? I don't think you're doing it, because it's always there. All encouragement and in no exhortation can produce rebellious results because sin needs confronted in people's lives. So if you just want to bring that comforting message all the time. I mean, as a preacher, it would leave you sitting here going, I know he loves me, but I wonder if he really fears God. If your preacher is just all comfort. But if he's all affliction, if he's all exhortation, if he's all admonition, if it's all heavy, all the time, it might leave you wondering, does he really love the people? Does he care for the sheep? All admonishment, no words of assurance of the gospel will have an exasperating effect on your disciple. Count it. Where do you find yourself? Where do you lean? Because none of us are perfect. Only the Lord was perfect in how he would deliver the Word. I mean, it even shows in the life of Samuel detention how he was afraid to say it exactly as it was. But he did it. He passed the test. God's forcefully firm word was not just about what Eli was to hear, but it was for Samuel to say. And so God is always doing more than one thing as it might appear in our lives. The person that you need to speak forcefully and with firmness to. It's not just for their good, it's for your good. God's growing you to be able to do that, but he wants you to have the humility of a Samuel who would be hesitant...reticent. Why? Because it's a weighty thing to have a word to say that would be that bare bones. Matter of fact, when you see this person running headlong into sin. The reality of the task of the Word of God from preacher down to the pew. But it's still a gracious word, even though it's a hard one to give. So God's Word is gracious. God's word is firm. And then lastly, we see it's its lasting quality. When you do take God at His word and see it's not about you, the messenger, it's about the message. Look at the blessing that comes to close this chapter out. How things change, where it goes from the Word of God is rare and visions are infrequent to now all Israel, verse 20, from Dan to Beersheba knows Samuel is the new voice in town. He passed the first test with the Word of the Lord coming to him. None of his words were falling to the ground like a dried up leaf with no nourishment, because he was a man of God who feared God and what God was going to tell him to say, he would say it. And look at the blessing and benefit that would now come to the people of Israel...what they needed. They needed the Word of the Lord now is being revealed to Samuel. Verse 21. The Lord appears again at Shiloh. He has been missing, so to speak. And now he's there. Samuel's there. The Word of the Lord is there. Over time, God confirmed a new era of his work, of his word through Samuel. The dark clouds that had hung over this story so far in the first three chapters of people doing what's right in their own eyes, there is no man with no word from God. The light is breaking through all because of God's Word and not just a one time word. Samuel grew and the Lord was with him. There was a relationship. There was a communion. There was an abiding. And because of that, the Lord let none of his words fail. Do you notice that? It wasn't Samuel's words that had the inherent power. It was that God was giving him those words. And because God gave him those words and was with him, he wasn't going to let any of the words of Samuel fall to the ground without producing the desired result.
So it teaches us to trust him, trust the repeatedly resolute Word of God to endure in people's lives. It's the promise that Jesus gave to his disciples in John 15:16. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you, that you would go and bear fruit, and that your fruit would remain or abide or endure, so that whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he may give it to you. What an amazing promise. And it all comes to us simply by the grace of trusting more in God's Word than your own opinion...than what you think you should say, how you might compromise it, how you might make it harder. Push it aside. Say, God, I just I want to say what you want me to say. I want to hear what you want me to hear and tune all the rest of the stuff out and trust him. Trust him like Samuel did. He'll be there for you. The repeatedly resolute word from God regulated Samuel's ministry and revived a nation. Do you see the impact in his life? It changed his life. It changed the course of the nation of Israel. Why wouldn't we trust it the same? Why would we think that anything else could be a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path besides the Word of God? Everything else is going to be flickering out. Everything else is going to be dimming. But what never fails to shine is when we take the Word of God and hold it in front of us. He won't let the oil of the lamp go out, but you got to keep it in front. You can't put it to the side or behind you today. Are you doing that with the Word of God? Is it leading your way? Is it lighting your path because it has the inherent glory to do that. It tells us that in Psalm 19, yes, there's a glory we see in creation, but the glory that changes a life that works from the inside on the human heart comes from what? The law of the Lord that's perfect, restoring the soul. Do you believe that with everything in you today? It'll restore the soul. It'll change the heart. But you got to trust it and not trust yourself. I mean, think in your own life. Put these three ideas together. God's word coming patiently, forcefully, and having an enduring effect in your life. Do you even see brother and sister in Christ, how God has been faithful to do that in your life till now? I mean, before you even believe, there was the person patiently teaching you the Word of God time after time, even though you rejected it. That was God being faithful. And then there was the time when it came in its force, and it opened your eyes to see your sin and see the glory of Jesus Christ. And you believed. And then what has he kept you with?...the Word of God. You've endured. Because the Word of God continues to give you life, it continues to feed you. It's living and active. It's the firm foundation on which your life continues to hold. I couldn't help but think of the pairing of these qualities next to each other in this chapter of a patient word and a powerful word, and as we sang earlier, the meekness of the lamb and the majesty of the lion and how those go side by side, don't they? That in the middle of the night, in a very meek and modest way, God can start to speak to Samuel, and then burst on the scene in a magnificent moment, fully revealing himself towards the dawn. That's the Word of God in our lives, brothers and sisters. It's the dawn, it's the sun, it's rising, and it rises higher and higher into the noonday sky in a blazing light of glory. That what you when you see it in all it's worth, it changes everything. You see everything correctly that way. 2 Corinthians 4:6, for the God who said, let light shine out of the darkness is the one who is shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. Do you believe that's how you live your life when it comes down to it? What other light could you live by?...than every day you wake up and you say again, Lord, like the sun rises each day. Christ rise in my life, that I would see the glory of God in your face and your person and in your work. And it's the light by which you live your life. What a what a wonderful blessing to have Christ, to have His Word, and for the glory of God to be illumined in your life, to live by. We have everything we need for life and godliness right here in front of us. Let's thank him for that.
Father, we praise you this morning for your gracious word that comes patiently, forcefully...it lasts, it endures, it abides. And we have to take you at your word, because sometimes we don't see its effect. As Jesus, you taught in a parable, sometimes it's scattered. And we like a farmer, we go to sleep and it's going to grow overnight. It might seem dormant, it might seem gone. And then there's the sprout. There's something there. And you in your perfect timing let us see it when we need it. To build our faith, to exercise our faith in prayer, to exercise our faith, in meditating on your Word that we persist. We come back. We trust, we abide. Help us to do that. Grow us by your grace. We pray today, Father, through seeing the glory that you have in your Son and your son gave us in giving us the Spirit. And in giving us the Word, we have what we need. Help us to steward it rightly. Amen.

The Persistent Prayer of a Passionate Disciple

Pastor Adam Ashoff

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The Persistent Prayer of a Passionate Disciple

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Good morning Saints of HBC. Please turn in your Bibles to Luke chapter 11. We will resume our time in 1 Samuel, Lord willing, and the creek don't rise, next week. We'll be in Samuel 3. But we're going to go and talk about prayer this morning and the persistent prayers of a passionate disciple. And this was on my heart as the season we're in of spring break. And then Easter's coming, and it could feel like things are just moving along rather quickly. And as Easter approaches to have our hearts praying with greater desire on the things that matter to God, the priorities that God has in our own lives, for our own hearts, as well as preaching the good news of the gospel to other people. And I don't think there's a better passage in Scripture to reorient our prayer lives for this one week occasion than Luke 11:1-13. There's power in this passage that compels us, as followers of Jesus Christ, to be praying passionately, passionately because it comes from what God wants, not necessarily what always comes to our mind to want. And then also the call to pray persistently that that passion in prayer would be followed up, rightly so, by a consistent pattern of prayer that allows us to, in our own hearts, be excited for the things of the Lord and want others to know those as well. So follow along. As I read our text and I would just say this morning, as as you're listening and you have, you know, 36 days from now, Easter is off in the distance. But whatever the Lord be putting on your heart this morning as we think about prayer, the people he's laying on your heart, the names you want to take before him, and the reasons you have to pray for them that you would be jotting those down along as you go, and know that that would be something that God could be laying on your heart from his text this morning, from His Word compelling you to do that. Because the fields are ripe for the harvest all around us, and we pray that the Word here today would open our eyes to see it and to pray for it even more. So, follow with me. Luke chapter 11:1-13.
"It happened that while Jesus was praying in a certain place after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray, just as John also taught his disciples. And Jesus said to them, when you pray, say, father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, as we ourselves also forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation. Then Jesus said to them, suppose one of you has a friend, and goes to him at midnight and says to him, friend, lend me three loaves. For a friend of mine has come to me from a journey, and I have nothing to set before him. And from inside he answers and says, do not bother me. The door has already been shut and my children and I are in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything. I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence, he will get up and give him as much as he needs. So I say to you, ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and it will be open to you. For everyone who asks receives. And he who seeks finds. And to him who knocks, it will be opened. Now suppose one of you fathers is asked by his son for a fish. He will not give him a snake instead of a fish, will he? Or if he asked for an egg, he will not give him a scorpion, will he? If you, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him." The grass withers and the flower fades. But the Word of our God endures forever. Amen.
Last week a post on Twitter came across my feed, which was a repost from TikTok in which a popular young priest in the Roman Catholic Church was explaining why he and other Catholics pray to Mary. And this is what he said, word for word. "Look at it this way. I'm a priest, so people often ask me to help with different things. They email, they text, but sometimes I get busy and I fall behind on requests. So you know what people do if I'm not responding? They call my mom and she calls me and says, so-and-so is trying to reach you. Can you get back to them? And you bet I get back to them right away. Sometimes the fastest way to the son is through the mother, and there's something beautiful about that. God chose to become a baby. He became part of a family. He had a mother. That's the basis of Christianity. So why would we think it would be different for Jesus and Mary? Sometimes the fastest way to the son is through the mother. Praying to Mary makes all the sense in the world." The fastest way to the son is not through the mother, because the only way to the Father is through the Son. You get that? We didn't have to sit around and pick that thing apart. You understand what you've been taught, which is there is one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ the Son. Though the sentimental nature of that priest's words might make someone feel good, it's heresy. The error is that he suggests Jesus is too busy to handle our many requests. And if that is the case, then Jesus is not the Son of God because Jesus is not equal to God. The God who can hear all of our requests all the time because he neither slumbers nor sleeps, nor is his ear ever dull, nor is his hand ever too short. So if this priest is correct, he isn't the son spoken of in Hebrews chapter 1, verse 3. Jesus is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of God's nature, and upholds all things by the word of his power. Except when he's too busy and overwhelmed. Friendly pastoral reminder...young people. This may particularly land on you because it's coming at you. Beware of getting your theology from 45 seconds on TikTok. It might be well crafted. Go, hickory. It might look right, sound right. Good lighting. Catchy saying. Like, sometimes the fastest way to the son is through the mother. It just rings in your ear and you say, well, that's true with my mom. Well, you're not dealing with your mom. You're dealing with Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who came to say, I and the Father are one. And no one comes to the Father except through me. So rather than get your theology from 45 seconds on TikTok, we need 45 minutes of the Bible to learn how to pray Biblically in a way that honors and glorifies God, so that we can be sure that what we pray and how we pray and why we pray line up according to the Word of God and not according to man's opinions.
So let's see five vital truths for us to understand and apply so that we can pray the way Jesus prayed all the time. But particularly in this time as we look to Easter, as we look to celebrating the high point on the Christian calendar, the death of Jesus Christ, the sacrifice of his life on the cross for our sins and the power of his resurrection.  
First truth number one. The pattern for prayer is to pay attention to how Jesus prayed. Before we get into the content of what to pray, we don't want to skip past the who of prayer...God's Son. Because if anyone knows what God's heavenly priorities are to inform our prayers, it's the son. Just go back two chapters, Luke 9:35 at the Transfiguration, which we see in verse 28 of Luke 9. Eight days after Jesus's sayings...him saying that the Son of Man will lose his life, and you need to deny yourself and take up your cross and follow him. Some eight days later, after these sayings, Jesus took Peter and James and John and went up on a mountain to pray. Note in the Gospel of Luke you see specific times of Jesus' life in prayer, corresponding to the important moments that were happening. The pattern of his prayers, not just the precepts that he tells us, but how he modeled prayer to us, corresponds to these heightened times of importance in his life and ministry. Luke 9:35, a voice comes out of the clouds saying, this is my son, my chosen one. Listen to him. So why should we want to listen to what Jesus has to tell us about how to pray? Because God the Father says, listen to my Son. He's my chosen one.  If there is anybody that knows my heart and my hand and how I go about doing things...it's my Son. Not much further away, Luke 9:48, as those were arguing of who was going to be the greatest, he takes a child, puts him by his side, and says, whoever receives this child in my name receives me. Whoever receives me receives him who sent me. Luke 10:16, the one who listens to you, listens to me. The one who rejects you rejects me. And he who rejects me rejects the one who sent me. Is Jesus making himself very clear? The Father has chosen me. The Father has sent me. If you reject me, you reject him. Luke 10:22, all things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son. And to anyone whom the Son wills to reveal him. Leading up to our text today. Why we don't want to skip past verse one. And the pattern for our prayer lives is because Jesus, the Son of God, has made very clear in this gospel who he is and what he's here to do. And if anyone knows what God's heavenly priorities are to inform our prayers, it's him. So Luke 11:1 says, it happened that while Jesus was praying, he's modeling it by pattern. After he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray. Now they want to know by precept. Friends, that's discipleship 101...pattern and precept, model and teaching. This is how Jesus did it. This is how we grow to be more like him. And this is how we help other people to grow, to be more like him. As we imitate Christ, others can imitate us and we go no further than his example. For homework this week on your own, just up to chapter 11 in Luke, because of the emphasis Luke gives on Jesus prayer life by pattern and precept. You can go through and you can find seven times up until this chapter, he teaches by pattern and precept, and then five times after it, more than any other gospel. Luke who gave a detailed account, Chapter one says of the life and ministry of Jesus, wants to put his prayer life front and center for you, the reader, to see. It's that important. So I want to stop on this first idea and remind us as we pray, as we think about our prayer lives, how vital it was for our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Chosen One, to pray. This is no small thing. John Calvin said in his "Institutes". Prayer is the chief exercise of our faith. What does that mean? Well, I think you know what the word exercise means. Some of you I can see it. That's a compliment. You know what it means to exercise. You're committed to go to the gym to work out. You pay to go to that gym. You pay somebody in that gym to work you out so that you could be stronger and you're not satisfied to just do a minimum workout. You want a maximum workout. That's what prayer is to the Christian. It's the chief exercise of your faith. Why would it be the chief exercise of your faith? Because in that moment where your knees are bowed and your eyes are closed, you're not seeing anything by sight, are you? You're seeing life by faith. And whatever comes into your mind informed by the Word of God is what you're praying and believing upon and taking back to God. It's exercising your faith out. Jesus grew in wisdom and stature. It says in favor with God and man. We talked about that a couple weeks ago in 1 Samuel chapter 2. In the same way Samuel was growing in wisdom and stature and favor with God and man. So Jesus did as well. And prayer was at the heart of his faith. So study for yourself this week. Take time. Go back and read the Gospel of Luke and note the times Jesus was praying, what he was praying about, what was going on around him. So you're inspired. The same to say, Lord, when I'm facing some big decision, when I'm in some certain season, when I have these great ambitions for you, may they start with me on my knees, as it did with my Savior at his baptism, at his Transfiguration before he went to the cross, before he chose his disciples. All of those Luke records for us to see. But as we see in verse one, it wasn't enough for the disciples to see it. They let him finish praying, which it's interesting to see that though Jesus would teach in Matthew 6:7 the privacy of prayer life, that he did model prayer in a way where they could be around him. I think because the Lord was perfect in heart, in humility. When he was praying within earshot of his disciples...it talks about later in Luke. That it was so they could hear him, so they could see him enough so that they could walk up and say, when he had finished, Lord, would you teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples? They wanted to learn from him.
So now, moving to truth number two about the prayers of a passionate disciple. We have to have the right priorities. God's kingdom priorities. We move from the who of prayer, following the example of Jesus to the what of our prayers, verses 2 to 4. So Jesus said to them, when you pray, say. This is to be taken at a literal level, as in these words matter...the priorities he has. But it's more than just the words. Otherwise, this would be a very short prayer. And we, thinking that the power is in just saying certain words, might violate the principle Jesus taught on prayer in Matthew 6:7. When you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition, as in, there's more to it than these words. Though, he's saying when you pray, these are the priorities you are to speak. Follow this pattern, but don't get locked into...you have to say these exact words, otherwise it can become rote, correct? It could just be, hey, if I just say these exact words Bada bing, bada boom, I would be finished with my prayers each day in about seven seconds. The power is in what these words represent...the ideas behind them. So what's the first idea that comes to our mind when we pray according to Jesus, the Son of God? Father, hallowed be your name. He reminds them to address God as their father, which wasn't the norm for disciples to learn from their rabbis. But as J.I. Packer says, "father is the Christian name for God". When you come to the Father, you come through the Son. You pray in the Son's name. It highlights the exclusivity of Jesus claim to be the Son of God. So we're not with everybody else in the world saying, you know, it doesn't matter what God you pray to as long as you pray. It's all the same God. No, it's not because we have a Christian name for God our father, and we only call him father because we come through the son. Hallowed be his name. The first priority is the exaltation of the name of God, to revere him, to sanctify his name, to set it apart, that he would put his name above everything in the world. But that starts with us being reminded to put his name above everything in our hearts. That it's not just a prayer for out there. It's a prayer for in here God, holy be your name. Sanctified be your name, revered be your name. Blessed be your name in my life and in my heart. That's where prayer starts. Our first priority in prayer is always to lift high the name of God, as we saw in the life of Hannah, 1 Samuel 1:11. a few weeks ago, when the first words out of her mouth were, O Lord of hosts, praying to God of the highest heaven. Our prayers are to exalt his name. That's the first priority. Second, our prayers are to expand his kingdom. Your kingdom come. We know over in Matthew chapter 6, this also gets expanded into your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. But the idea behind it is the same. Jesus moves from saying, look upward to exalt the name of God, and then ask him to expand his kingdom. Which is a great way to start our prayers, because it immediately puts a stop to us wanting to pray for our kingdoms, our little kingdoms, our little fiefdoms, our little toddler lego lands down here. And you say, what am I doing, focusing so much looking down when Jesus is saying look up, exalt his name, expand his kingdom. Our prayers are to be to that end. So simply put right out of the gates. If we are going to pray with the priorities of God, we put his name and his fame above our own. And we need to be reminded of that often. It's about him, and it's about him in our hearts. That's where it starts, and then it moves outward from there. So the first two priorities in prayer are the exaltation of the name of God and the expansion of his kingdom. And as his kingdom expands in people's hearts, as people come to Christ, his name is exalted, isn't it? You're proof of it in here. The name of God gets exalted every Sunday for an hour and a half in each service, because you've been brought into the kingdom of God by the power of the gospel, and you come here to worship his name, not your own. We don't have a seeker sensitive service, as if we're doing this thing to impress you, to attract you to say that somehow Christianity has become all about you. It's about him. So if you're seeking something this morning and you wind up here today, I hope you realized quickly this isn't about you, and it's not about me. It's not about any of us in here. This is about God. The one with whom we must deal and who has dealt with his children kindly and mercifully in his Son, Jesus Christ. So his name's exalted. His kingdom is expanded. What do we need? Verses 3 and 4, we see three things. They're all about one thing. They're all about equipping us. They're all about helping us. It starts with we look up and we get our focus right on him. And then we can say these three things. First, in verse three, give us each day our daily bread. That's pretty simple...our physical needs. He will get to pray for your spiritual needs in verse four. But you know, at some times the urgent things are not always the most important, that there is a need to say, Lord...daily bread. The things that I need around me. Would you help me with those? I'm not here to say the quantity of it that I need. I just know I need something. Today, as I wake up...provide. You have everything, I have nothing. So praying for that physical need is fine. It's first on the list when it gets to equipping us. But we have to remember that, as Bonhoeffer wrote, neither anxiety or work can secure this daily bread. It is a gift from a loving father. We need to remember this is the same lesson that God was teaching his children ever since he rescued them in the Exodus. If you go back to Exodus chapter 16, God delivers these people in a way that has never been seen before on all the world. He has taken a people who were under subjugation in slavery and bondage, and he has completely shown the world, Egypt in particular, that though you may be the most powerful down here, it does nothing for you if you don't know me. And so Exodus 15, they are delivered. They celebrate with the wonderful song of Moses singing to the Lord, for he is highly exalted. The horse and rider he's hurled into the sea. It's this wonderful song of praise that ends with, the Lord shall reign forever and ever. And you would think at that they would be set, that they would not worry ever again. They have seen the plagues on Egypt, but themselves be spared, the Passover, the parting of the Red Sea. You would think if there was any people who would understand...God is for us and not against us, and we don't need to worry or fear. And then you read chapter 16. Right after this hit song of praise they set out, and all the congregation of the Sons of Israel come to the wilderness of sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, and on the 15th day of the second month after their departure from the land of Egypt, the whole, as in every single one of them, a lot of people, the whole congregation of the sons of Israel, grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The sons of Israel said to them, would that we had died by the Lord's hand in the land of Egypt. Here was there good life. When we sat by the pots of meat, when we ate bread to the full. That was it. We'd rather be dead in Egypt with full stomachs than be out here in the wilderness starving...free to follow God, the one true God. That quick it could change for people. Shows the fickle heart of man, doesn't it? So God responds with daily bread. Verse 4, then the Lord said to Moses, behold. Listen up, I will rain bread from heaven for you. And the people shall go out and gather a day's portion every day. So it's not by accident. The echo of this in our passage today, that Jesus is going all the way back to the first children who had to depend on a father in heaven for their daily bread. The same language here physical needs matter because they represent our daily dependence. Moves from the physical to the spiritual. And that's in two different requests. The first is the number one priority on our list of spiritual need in verse 4 is and always will be, forgiveness of sin. Forgive us our sins. It's the number one priority. Why is that? Because Jesus came to give his life as a ransom for sinners. That's it. That's foremost that when we move into praying for spiritual needs, our eyes look in at our own hearts and examine our own hearts and remind ourselves that the great chasm between a holy God and sinful man had to be what?...provided for by the Son, and I am part of that. When we lose sight of our need for forgiveness of sin, everything else gets out of focus. How? If you don't pray that forgive us our sins. Help me be reminded of my sin. How does our focus get lost? Well then, first we lose sight of our relationship with God. We forget he's the Holy God and we're the sinful people that we haven't arrived. We still need Jesus every day. And when you lose sight of that, second, you lose sight of your relationship with other people. When your own need, when your own sinfulness is lost on you, but you remember everyone else's sins. You won't extend God's grace to others. And when you stop extending that grace to others, all hell breaks loose in relationships. And I mean that. I'm not saying that for shock value. Hell is a place where the unforgiven dwell forever, right? Hell is full of unforgiving people. So if you want a taste of hell on earth, dwell in a place where forgiveness has been abandoned. You know what I'm saying? Relationally, when you want to live in a place, when you want to dwell in a place and stay in a relationship and not grant forgiveness, then you've put the sign from Dante's Inferno over your own home. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Because when you abandon forgiveness, your hope goes up in smoke. And you can ask any person in our church who's trying to help struggling marriages, when you get past all the bad fruits to the root, the root issue is not forgiving the other person. And you see the connection right in front of your face here, don't you? You've made their sin. You've magnified their sin. It's the foremost thing that you can't see anything else but that. And Jesus warns in Matthew 7, yeah, I mean, it's because your vision is off. You've got a log in your own eye and you're looking for the speck in someone else's. We can ask forgiveness from God, but not extend it to others. We're betraying the claim that we know the power of the gospel because we want to claim it for ourselves, but not for them. So Jesus corrects that by saying, when you move to the spiritual realm to pray, first and foremost, deal with your own sin, and with the same introspection, you look into the sin in your own heart and you dig deep to find it. And you say, all these things are coming out, all these other roots I'm seeing, and you bring them to God, and you see that in Christ they're forgiven. It's removed. No guilt, no shame. And you feel that freedom and sense of relief. God, it's paid in full. Pivot immediately then to say, you know what? And that same freedom and forgiveness I've just experienced. I can forgive that person that I've been holding in debt to me. And if you can't do the second part, then you haven't done the first part adequately. You need to dig deeper into your own heart in prayer. That's the first priority. Spiritually. The second priority is 4b...Lead us not into temptation. If our number one priority is sin forgiven and forgiving others. Next on the list is that we would move out at the end of our prayer into the battle, not falling into temptation, and that God would be by our side, not leading us into sin, but leading us through it and out of it. And he will help us stand firm in the Lord. He will do it. He promises to never leave us nor forsake us. He'll be with us in the valley of the shadow of death. So these simple priorities. I mean, think you could pray on these all day. The exaltation of the name of God. The expansion of his kingdom. The equipping of you, his saint, his child with your physical needs. Your need of forgiveness, your need to extend forgiveness, and of course, to be able to move forward in the battle. Those are the priorities of the King that Jesus shares with us.
And now that you know the what of prayer? Let's talk about the how. How should we pray if that's what we know should be the top priorities in our prayer life? Now we've got the fuel for the flame....the logs to throw in the fire have been given to you in verses 2 to 4. And now Jesus says, you want to keep that thing, you want to keep persisting in it? You want to keep the flames going? Listen to this story and I'll tell you how persistent you should be. He tells a story, a very simple one, verse 5. Jesus says to them, and this isn't in Matthew. This is particular that Luke records this. Jesus says to them, suppose one of you has a friend, and immediately he pulls you in. Normally his parables, you're kind of on the outside listening in. He says, there's a farmer who has a field, or he says, there's a shrewd businessman. He's going about his business, or there's some workers going out to work here. He says, no, no, you you're in the story. I'm going to call you needy. That's your name, so you don't forget it. In this whole story, your needy. Where you sit right there. You think you have what you need. You don't have what you need. That's you in the story. Let's meet the other characters. Suppose one of you, needy, has a friend and goes to him at midnight and says to him, friend, lend me three loaves. We'll call that friend sleepy because you woke him up out of sleep. So you, needy, go to your friend's house, sleepy, at midnight and say to them, I got a problem. A friend of mine...we'll call that friend, hungry, has come to me from a journey, and I have. And here's the key...nothing to set before him. That's your problem. The problem is that he didn't show up at an inconvenient time. In fact, in the time of Jesus, somebody showing up late at your house wouldn't have been unexpected because people would have wanted to travel in the cool of the evening. The problem isn't the inconvenience of the arrival, it's the inadequacy of your pantry. You don't have what you need. So you go to this friend who you know has what you need and you say, can you help me out? I just need three loaves of bread. Three pieces of bread...Kitchen's closed. Right? I don't got nothing. You've got something. Can you help a brother out? Answer from inside. Meaning, you're standing at the window. Imagine a small home in Palestine in the time of Jesus. One bedroom...everybody's sleeping on a mat in the middle of the room. They've excavated homes like these. This is how they're set up. You didn't have your own separate bedrooms, so you and the kids are all piled on top of each other, and you hear a few pebbles hitting off the side of your house next to a window, because if he throws them in the window, he hits you, and you look up and you go, what? And you actually say, hey, don't. Or he says, sorry, sleepy. You're needy. Don't bother me. Why? The door is shut. I'd have to be crawling over all my kids to unbolt it. And my children and I are in a bed and I cannot get up and give you anything. He doesn't say I don't have anything to give. He's just unwilling to do it. And he's your friend. But you needy friend, persist because of your absolute inadequacy and your friend's adequate supply. You knew there was no way you could provide in this situation. You have nothing but what Jesus doesn't want to escape our attention is in verse 8, after you are the one with nothing and your friend sleepy has something. Verse 8, I tell you...because you think the story is over. The disciples would have said, yeah, this is how the world works. We got to create boundaries. That's what my psychologist says. I need boundaries. So, sorry, come over for coffee in the morning. Peace be with you. You think that's the way the story goes? But that's not how Jesus is telling the story. He says, I tell you, even though the friend sleepy will not get up and give you, needy, anything because you're his friend, which is the humor of Jesus. This is a fantastic story. When we talk about the sense of humor of Jesus, it's not like it's the obvious stuff he didn't walk around with like, hi, I'm Jesus...clown, funny. No, he's telling a poignant story that makes you chuckle on the inside one because you have persistent friends, some annoyingly persistent, obstinate even. And listen, this is the moral of the story. Even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend. It ain't about the relationship, because of your needy persistence, your friend sleepy will get up and give you as much as you need. And there's the payoff pitch. It's persistence that gets you there. But it's not as if Jesus is teaching this story to teach us that persistence is an end in and of itself. That's not the moral of the story. That persistence is an end in and of itself. I mean, we do know that in life, any great endeavor we set out to do, you got to stick with it. You got to keep trying. You got to keep going. But see, you keep going because there's an end in mind. And there was an end in mind in the story and the end in mind in the story, is that needy knew he had to meet the need of his friend. It wasn't even about him, and he wasn't even going to get that need met by the relationship. He was going to get it by not giving up. The end game wasn't him insisting on his own way. It's not about insistence. It's not about me. It's about persistence on someone else's behalf. And we just learned on whose behalf, we pray. We pray on God's behalf for his name and for his fame. So when we persist, we are persisting. And here is the lesson of persistence. Persistence in our prayers comes from the presumption of our faith in God, not the insistence on our own will and way. Do you see the difference between the two? Persistence and insistence are not the same thing. Insistence is I want it my way, God. And he opens those clutched hands up to say, no, I have more for you. I have my name and my fame, and I have what you need. But I gotta pry those fingers open as you insist. You want what you want, and you open your hands up and say, okay, it's not what I want. I want what you want. And that is you persisting in prayer on the presumption of your faith in him. He has the supply and you have the need, and you'll just keep praying. How long? Well, 9 and 10 helps us see how long to pray. The principle of the prayer is that we just keep praying. The persistence of the prayer is we have inadequacy, God has the supply. The point of the story is then you just keep praying because Jesus pivots here and 9 and 10 and says, so I say to you, now that you know what persistence looks like, it ain't even because you're this guy's friend. It's because you didn't stop asking that that friend will get up and give you as much as you need. So, I say to you disciples, you're still in the story. Here's the command ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and it will be opened to you. Why ask, seek, and knock. What's special about that? Well, it's all encompassing, I guess, in every way you could think of making a request to somebody who has what you need. But there seems to be a a progression in intensity. You know that when you want something from somebody else, you first just ask. And if they don't give what you want initially, you keep asking. You seek. You follow them around, you dog them, you know you're just not going to give up. And then even if they slam the door in your face, opportunity knocks. Importunity, which we're talking about here, knocks the door down. That's what Importunity does. It just keeps going and going and going and going and won't quit. And so we see this progression in persistence that can lead to God's provision of grace. And now we're back to what Calvin said about prayer being the chief exercise of faith. Why the progression of persistence? Why the principle that just keep asking and seeking and knocking and whoever asks, receive and seeks, finds and knocks, it will be open because God is building faith in you, Christian. He's working you out in his gym. And he's not doing this to play a game, to say, I want to see how bad you want it. What he's actually doing is trying to get you to see what is it you actually want, and does it align with his priorities and kingdom principles? That's why persistence is not a virtue for its own sake in this story. It's for a higher cause. So he wants you to keep asking and seeking and knocking, working it out with him. He wants you to abide in him, be close to him and figure it out. But you're not really just saying I'm just going to keep saying it over and over and the same...thing that's not praying. That's not communion. That's just saying I'm just going to be obstinate and repeat myself. That's not the point. Much of what it means to be a Christian is in prayer, just to be with the Lord, to have that discipline, to come and talk to him, to plead with him, to ask him. As John 15:7 says, to abide. If you abide in me, Verse 7 John 15, and my words, that's the key...abide in you. Ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. So that process of going to God in prayer, he's refining you every time you go back over and over again, asking, then seeking, then knocking. Because hopefully in that time he's refining you. He's conforming you to the image of his Son. He's helping you build endurance.  You're persevering, and it says in Romans, when perseverance is built, character is formed. This is what God's doing when he's saying, keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking. C.H. Spurgeon said, 'the best prayers I've ever heard in prayer meetings have been the fullest of arguments'. What does he mean by that? Not okay. Clarify. He's not talking about like that good old fashioned church meeting where everybody argues with each other. No, he's saying a prayer meeting...where the people have been the fullest of arguments. What arguments? Pleading God's promises back to him. The three words that I fear most in my house. Dad, you said. Now I am getting hit now in five directions by it...kids age 12 to 5. They figure out that maybe I said this, but the little ones pick up. And while this one's saying dad, you said ice cream, this one says dad and you said ponies with ice cream. I did?...That sounds crazy. Okay. Ponies with ice cream it is. Let's go. Now I can fear, "dad, you said", because I'm fallible. I might have said it. It might be somewhere in the annals of things. Adam says when he's half paying attention. But when you say to your father in heaven, dad, you said...he knows exactly what he said. It has to be here when you plead that promise back to him in importunity in shameless persistence, in audacity that going to him again and again what he's refining in you and the Holy Spirit's working in your heart and prayer, saying, did I really say that? Did I really make you that promise? Or did you just try to name and claim that thing of your own want and your own will and your own desire? And you think, I'm going to answer that, persist in prayer in that, and see where you come out on the other side. You will either be frustrated because you know what you're asking no longer actually aligns with his priorities, or you come out broken and he finally breaks through and you see the thing you've been missing all along. This actually, God was always about me and was not actually about you. That's the principle of persisting in prayer. He has the supply. You have the need, but he wants you to keep coming and asking and seeking and refining in you so that you pray his priorities back to him.
What's the purpose in this all...our last point. I mean, you could say 9 and 10. The why behind it is...it's his hand. He has the supply. He's the one that can give. He's the one that can open. But Jesus is going to highlight here in these last three verses. It's not just about his hand, it's about his heart. He wants to teach you, his child, about his character, which is the best thing about him. The last lesson on persistent prayer of a passionate disciple. He uses a parable that we can all identify with because we had parents. Some of us are parents, and he just draws a simple parallel to our lives. Suppose one of you fathers is asked by his son for Chick fil A, and you bring him Zaxby's. Sometimes I try to get contemporary on you, but the principle is the same. It's the old fakeroo in Jesus time. This father has a son, and his son is hungry for a piece of fish to eat, and he doesn't pull it off and a copperhead comes out. Same if he asks for an egg, he's not going to give him a scorpion. Jesus is just doing something very simple. He's moving in an argument from a lesser to a greater. Verse 13 if you then you in the story being evil, meaning you have sin in your heart, you're not the perfect parent. You don't always know the perfect answer for your kid when you should give them what they want, when you shouldn't. You're figuring that out. You're learning as you go. Jesus isn't. God is never learning as he goes. He's never learning. He's never making a mistake as he goes with you. So if you, being evil, know how to give good gifts, even in your in your fallibility, you can't do it perfectly. You can still give good gifts to your kids. You don't do the switch. How much more will your Heavenly Father give to you? How much more...is the emphasis in this. If you can love your kids and want what is best for them, how much more can your Father in heaven who is all wise and all loving and all powerful and all seeing and all glorious? How much more can he do what's best for you? So this whole section comes to a crescendo on the character of God as Father, not just the power of his hand in 9 and 10, but his perfect heart in verse 13. Are your prayers just wanting to change God's mind without knowing his heart? You just want to see the power of God move on your behalf, but you don't want to know the God behind that power. He wants to teach you about your Heavenly Father, who is always wanting to give much more than you could ask or think or imagine. All of his character and attributes are wonderful. Take any number of them and they fill our hearts with amazement as his children. But the one that draws us closest to his heart is his attribute of a loving father who has moved us from just beholding him in creation to coming to him in His Son, and in justification, but moving out of the courtroom of law, being declared righteous into the living room of his home and his love and your adoption. That's what it means to come to your Father in heaven is to say, you didn't just pardon me in court and declare me guiltless before the throne. You said, come and move in with me, and I'll dwell with you. This is the high point of this passage. Because it's about the beautiful doctrine of adoption. Not just that he can move in power, but that he could provide in love.
When I was in Texas with a couple of my kids last week, we went to the Institute for Creation Research. It was pretty cool. It was like the one in, I think, in Kentucky. They might be rivals. I don't know. But it was it was awesome. I took my kids through. And we are beholding God's power in creation the way that they just surround you with evidences of God's power and hand over everything from the beginning. And I left there thankful. What a wonderful God we serve. I am no scientist, nor the son of a scientist. So when I get around stuff that shows me where the Bible proves it all, you know, it's the chief of the sciences and studies and science and biology and chemistry flow from it. I was amazed I was on a high. My kids just wanted Whataburger. So we went there and that's a different story. So that was my Saturday. And then I woke up to preach the next morning on this passage and be just getting my mind on how good it is to be a child of God. And I came across a quote from Puritan Thomas Watson. And God made a beautiful connection in that moment. Watson said this, "It was much for God to take a clod of dust and make it into a star. How much more for God to take a clod of dirt and sin and adopt it as his heir?" How much more? The heavens declare the glory of God, and we created in his image are not just clods of dirt. We're clods of sinful, fallen dirt, aren't we? Aren't we? And that he can make a star just out of the dust, out of nothing. But he could make a son and daughter out of sinful dirt. How did he do it? He did it by giving his Son on your behalf.
If you're not in Christ this morning and you hear of the wonderful love of God for sinners, there's only one prayer for you. There's maybe many things this morning that you go, wow, that's how it works? I can pray to God. And he could answer, Will he? There's one prayer for you this morning if you're not in Christ, and it's in Luke 18, verse 13. A tax collector, a sinner standing some distance away from the temple, was unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, God, be merciful to me, the sinner. That's your prayer today. You have nothing to ask of God this morning if you're not in Christ, outside of his pardoning mercy, which he offers lavishly and freely to you in His Son. He offers Christ to you.  He says come to me with your burden of sin, with your guilt and punishment, and have your sin be washed away by the blood of my Son, who gave himself for you, who lived a life you couldn't live, who died a death you deserved to die as your substitute, who was risen again for your justification and finished it, and now reigns and rules at the hand of the Father. And all of that is offered to you in Christ this morning. But you have to recognize the gap, the distance, and cry out to him, be merciful to me. That's your one and only prayer to God today.
For those in Christ this morning. I held back one thing...saved the best for last. You see, it's not just how much more will your Heavenly Father give you a gift. He says, how much more will your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit. Who's much more than a gift, isn't he? He's a giver. He doesn't just say, here's a gift and use it, and then it's gone. He actually gives you the giver of gifts, the Holy Spirit, who constantly and continually is there for you every single moment of the day, for every need you have brother and sister. So when you have a need for strength and you fear you're too weak to go on and life is too hard and you can't pray, the giver is there. Romans 8:26, in the same way, the spirit also helps our weakness. For we do not know how to pray, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. When we're weak. Are you weak? You know you're weak, because apart from Jesus, you can do nothing. And when you are at your weakest, he intercedes for you at his best, because he's with you to the end of the age. No matter how hard it gets, he's with you. What greater gift could he have given you than the Spirit to always be with you? If that weren't enough, and you say I lack wisdom, I don't know what to do. I don't know what decisions to make. If God would just show me, he doesn't need to show you it. He gave you the spirit of truth who will guide you into all truth. So you want a decision or you want the spirit of truth? You have him. He's with you. So when you ask for wisdom, he can give it to you. You see how much better it is that saving the best for last? It's just not some generic gift he gives. No, how much does the Father love you as his adopted child? He has given you His Holy Spirit, his indwelling presence and power in you to work through you so that you can pray and know your Father in heaven hears you. So may God remind all of us this morning. When we feel our prayer life is off a little bit. It's not. It may not be merely that our priorities were off. It might not be simply that we were just praying the wrong words. It might be that the Father has said to you this morning, you've not been seeing the right Father. You haven't been seeing me rightly. You need to draw near to my heart, and I long for you to persist with me. Because I love to be with you. Let's pray.
Father, we thank you for your grace and kindness to us in your Son. And if salvation in Christ were not enough, that you sent your Spirit to dwell within us, and to be with us in our weakness, to intercede for us, to empower us to illumine your love to us. For Paul wrote, the love of God has been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit. So even in this moment, the most downtrodden sinner who's too ashamed to look up can cry out for mercy, and you can meet him in his need, bring Christ to him, see him in his glory, repent and be saved. Or the brokenhearted believer who felt all hope is lost but has been given hope this morning in the power of the gospel, to know that his or her righteousness stands in heaven, and it has been sealed with the Spirit to a promise that will never perish. All these blessings are ours, and 10,000 abide. We thank you for that. Amen.

 

Put On Christ

Pastor Kurtis Massey

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Put On Christ

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Well, my name is Kurtis Massey for those of you that are new. I'm the discipleship pastor, and here preaching on behalf of our preaching pastor Adam, who's out preaching in Texas. So we can be praying for him this morning and that worship service and the ministry taking place out there. And we'll take a little pause from 1 Samuel. Uh, but at the same time, some of those principles of 1 Samuel that we've seen, which is the fact that God honors and blesses humility, as we've seen in Hannah's life. We'll see a little continuation of that humility in the New Testament. The continuation of that theme...the things that God honors and blesses. And so why don't you turn to Colossians chapter three and we'll look at verses 12 through 17 this morning. Colossians chapter three, verses 12 through 17. And as you're looking and finding that in your Bibles, you know, I wanted to let you know about uniforms. You know, uniforms play a significant role in our society. You know, you look around in a crowd and you see someone with a police officer uniform. You automatically think that this is the person that's going to help us to bring about protection and service to members of society. If anything goes wrong, those are the people that you look to and you expect them to act...be characterized in a certain way. That's an extension of the government. Same thing with a firefighter or a person from EMT services. They're probably dressed in a certain way, a certain attire. And you know, immediately when there's an emergency, there's a fire, there's something happening...they're going to spring into action and help in a time of need. Their uniform plays a significant role in their character and what they do and how they influence society. And the same is true of the Christian. The only thing is, is that we put Jesus Christ on and we keep him on. Amen? There's never a time that you check out. That same police officer. He can go home after his shift is over, after he's worked his eight hours or 10 hours or 12 hours. Firefighters, you know, they, like, work all the time. I don't even know what their shift is. They don't even know their shift. They just in there all the time. I mean, it's a long time, but at the end of their shift, they can get home and they can take off those garments, and then they can kind of dwell without the responsibility of that service and that role. But for the Christian, we never get a chance to take off Jesus Christ. We never get a chance to check out. We don't get a chance to go to church and put Christ on only to Sunday afternoon. By the time we finish lunch, we've taken him off and thought about living the real life. God wants us, those who have been baptized in Jesus Christ, Galatians 3:27. You've been baptized. You have put on Christ. You've clothed yourselves with Christ. And what Paul is saying is that you've been clothed with him. You need to keep those clothes on. Keep Christ on. There should never be a time where your practice of life is divorced from your profession of faith. And that's what we're going to see even in this passage today as we look at what happens. Because when you're saved, you’re a new creation. 2 Corinthians 5:17, says that if anyone is in Christ, he's a new creature. The old things have passed away and behold, new things have come. And even in Colossians chapter 3, earlier in this passage, verses nine through 11, it lets you know that you've laid aside the old self with its evil practices, and you've put on the new self, and you've put on this new self which is being renewed to a true knowledge, according to the image of the one who created him. That's what happens when we're believers. We're a new creation...a new creature. We're now clothed with Jesus Christ and His character in its fullness. And our job is to live it out and keep it on, and not to ever take it off. And not only did God save us to be a new creation, he's called us to a new community, and we're going to see why it's vitally important that all of us are clothed with Jesus Christ as we dwell together as Christians here in the assembly.
But let me read Colossians chapter 3, verses 12 through 17, and we're going to hear what thus saith the Lord. The text reads as follows. "So as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving each other and whoever has a complaint against anyone, just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you. And beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body, and be thankful. And let the Word of Christ richly dwell within you with all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father."
Let's bow in a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, we come now just thanking you for this opportunity to hear from heaven. We thank you that you are the God who speaks, and that this is the highest time in our Christian experience as to hear God speak in the company of the saints. I ask, Lord, that you would allow your Word to teach us, to rebuke us, to correct us, to train us up in righteousness. I pray, Lord, that you would allow anything that may be on our mind that would distract us from hearing from you, that it would be laid aside. I pray that you would grant divine unction to the preacher. Give me boldness, clarity, conviction to proclaim the truth of Christ before the hearers today. And I pray that your Spirit would empower our time, that we all might be trained up in the truth. We love you, Lord, and praise you for this precious, magnificent opportunity that we have. And we ask this in Christ's name. And all God's people said Amen.
Well, as we've seen in this text, Paul is giving really the character of Christ. And I've titled this morning's sermon "Put on Christ". Put on Christ because it's our desire, and it's the commandment of God that we put Jesus on. Be clothed with him completely, never to take him off. And what Paul has done is he's writing this letter to the Colossians. He recognizes that this is a group of saints that Epaphras really was able to share the gospel, and a lot of them were built up in truth. But as much as they were built up in truth, they had other people telling them that, hey, you can be a Christian, but you also can take these traditions. You can be a Christian, but you also got to have these rituals. You can be a Christian, but you also gotta, you know, do these kinds of things in order to truly be holy and pure. And Paul was saying, no, Jesus Christ is supreme. He's letting them know that Jesus Christ is over everything. In chapter 1 he says in verse 15, he is the invisible God and the firstborn of all creation. So Jesus Christ is God, true God, and therefore he is supreme because he's over everything. He said that he's also not only supreme because he is the creator and is over everything. He says that he's over all things pertaining to the church, and that's only fitting. Christ is over the church being the head because he is the Redeemer, purchased her with his own blood. So Jesus Christ is head over all creation and he's head and ruler of the church. But the question Paul wants to get them to in chapter three is, is this Christ over you? Is he over your heart? Yeah. He's over creation. Yeah, he's over the church. But is he ruling and reigning in your life? Is that what's happening on a day to day basis? Or do we just say praise him because he's the Lord on high? But is he the Lord down low when it comes to the things of your life? And as he transitions into the beginning portion of chapter 3. He says that if you've been raised up with Christ, you need to keep seeking the things above. He says that's where your affection is. Your allegiance is there. Everything in your desires are there. So your life needs to reflect that down here. You set your mind there. And guess what? Your life needs to be hidden with Christ in God so that when people see you, they see who?...when they look at you? They see who? Christ. All right. We lost an hour. We're just trying to get it all energized before we get the Word in. I'm just trying to stimulate you to love and good deeds right about now. That's what that is. But when they see you, they see Christ. That's what Paul is letting them know in this great epistle of Colossians. And therefore they had to kill certain aspects of their life, and he gives that list all the way from verses 5 through 9 there. Verse 5 to 8, he talks about all these vices and things they need to kill. But then he transitions and he tells them who they are. And as he lays this out, he's going to give us three ways that we need to ensure that we put on Jesus Christ and keep him on. Three ways that we're going to see this. How to make sure that when you get up in the morning, from the time you wake up to the time you pillow your head, that you're clothed with Jesus Christ completely, that there's never a time where you take off those clothing of righteousness and lay them aside. You lay your sins aside, you kill them, but you be clothed in Jesus Christ. And we're going to see that in three specific ways.
And the first thing that we see, the first way to make sure that we put Christ on and keep him on, is that you need to consider your 'position in Christ'. You need to stop and consider your position in Christ before you even get out to start your day. You need to consider the fact that you have a spiritual union in Christ, and that spiritual union gave you a spiritual standing before God that is different than unbelievers across the world. And the first feature of that position is that you have been chosen. You have to consider the fact that you have been chosen. Verse 12, it says, so as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved. You know, Paul starts this phrase to emphasize the gracious initiative of God in salvation. God was the one doing the drawing to men and women unto himself. It's an amazing act that God made the first move. Every person that has ever believed in God, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, was a direct result of God moving with divine mercy and drawing them to himself. It's an amazing thing. You cannottake my word for it. You can look at this with your own eyes. Why don't you go left into Deuteronomy? Let's go back to the Torah, the writings of Moses. You can go back to Torah. It's the last book of the Torah. And look at chapter 7. Deuteronomy chapter 7. And, um, this is God talking to, talking about his people. And chapter 7, verse 6, you see these words written. He says, for you are a holy people set aside for the Lord your God. And the Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession. Out of all the people who are on the face of the earth. Now get this friend. There were all kind of nations on the earth at that time, and God chose Israel. It's amazing. He could have chose all of the ites in the Old Testament, right? The Amalekites and the Amorites and all those I just call them ites because I can't keep up with all of them. The Hittites and the Gershonites and the Abbasites and the the IT ites. I mean, it's a whole bunch of ites in the Old Testament. And out of all those ites, guess what? God says this will be my people. He Eventually named them Israel. But God said he set his affection, chose them for himself. And then when he chose them, he showed them his law. He showed him his ways, showed him his love, raised them up in affection. And even in verse 7 it says that the Lord did not set his love on you, nor chose you, because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were fewer than all of the peoples. But because the Lord loved you, and kept the oath which he swore to your forefathers, and the Lord brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh, King of Egypt. God did that because he was motivated by love. He says, I'm going to allow you to be my people. God chose them. You'll even see this truth if you turn in the New Testament. Turn to go right in your Bibles and go to Ephesians chapter 1...Ephesians chapter 1. You will see this truth revealed in Scripture as well. Many people like Ephesians chapter 1 and verse 3 because it says, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. Can I get an Amen on that? Amen. We love that. But how do we get all of those precious promises? Well, you see, in verse 4 it says just as he...what? Chose us in him, Jesus Christ, before the foundation of the world. Before God said, let there be light and there was light. He said that he has chosen all of those that he would bring to himself in salvation, both before the cross and after the cross. It's an amazing truth. And he did it that we would be holy and blameless before him. You see, God did this because this doctrine of election that we have. God chose people to save, and he did it apart from any merit or work that they would have. But he was motivated by his love. And the reason that this is important is that it takes the attention away from any merit that we would have, any human effort that we would bring to salvation. And it places the emphasis on the power and the promises of God. It doesn't mean that you were a mere robot, right? No one just was robotic and just came to the point where they said, oh, I guess I will place my affection on God. That's not how he did it. He showed you his love and his forgiveness and the depth of his character and compelled you to come and be drawn to him. And any believer that knows, you realize your life, even if you weren't, you know, killing people and you weren't robbing banks, even if you weren't doing gross sexual sins, you knew that you were living a life apart from God, and he moved upon your affections and drew you to himself. It's an enormous reality in the life of the believer. It's a grace. And what happens is it exalts the grace of God. Just as Ronald read earlier in Romans 8, God foreknew us, and that foreknowledge, meaning that he had an intimate relationship with you even before you were born, knowing that he would bring you to himself. And he predestined us, and he called us. He justified it, and he glorified us all. One theologian said this about this doctrine of election. He said, this doctrine crushes human pride. It exalts God. It produces joy and gratitude to the Lord. It grants eternal privileges and assurance. It promotes holiness and makes one bold and courageous. For one who has been chosen by God for eternal life has no need to fear anything or anyone. End quote. That's it. You're secure. You know that God placed his affection on you and that helps you to understand this position. So being chosen of God, it saturates your soul with so much grace that it helps you from going from one extreme to the next. On one extreme, you could be, you know, having a bad week or a bad day, and you're just in sin and you're like, man, how in the world I call myself a Christian? You've been chosen of God. He did that. And once he established you and placed you in his hand, there's by no means will anyone snatch you out? It keeps you from being weak and saying, there's no way that I can be called a child of God. And then it also keeps you from that other extreme to where you can be conceited in righteousness. You done had a good week. You done had a good day. And you're like, boy, I am the man in Jesus Christ. No one. That's an oxymoron. I am the man in Jesus Christ. How about Jesus Christ is the man. He's the God man that made it possible. So you see how that happened? Being chosen of God keeps you from going on any end of that spectrum, because you know that you're God's child. You're secure in him. He chose you for his own glory. But it doesn't go. It doesn't stop there. It goes further to say that not only have you been chosen of God, you're holy. This term literally means to separate, to set apart. It's sacred. It's used to describe the angelic hosts that are in the heavens crying out, Holy, Holy, holy to the Lord. That's you Saint. That's why you called saints...a holy one. It's not that people need to pray through you to get through something in life. We're not that kind of saint. Saint just means God's people, his holy folks that are set apart. That's your position before a holy God. He's holy. And so his people gotta be. What? Holy. Same thing he mentioned to Israel. You are to be holy because the Lord your God is holy. That's your position. And you've got to fully embrace that if you're going to put on Jesus Christ.  The moment you stop forgetting that you’re holy and called to be holy is the moment that you will stop reflecting the full character of Jesus Christ. You're holy, holy people. Even in that passage that I mentioned in Ephesians 1, when you get down to the latter part of verse 4, it says that we will be holy and blameless before him. You know that Jesus Christ is called the Holy One in Mark chapter 1 verse 24...the Holy One. You know, as a believer...well, you know, this holiness is supposed to aid you in living up to your calling that you get from Jesus Christ. But I would love it if people, you know what if they, instead of calling you a Christian, called you a Holy one? Would that phrase match your character in your life? The people at your work be able to say, man, you know what, man? I got this joke I want to tell, but yeah, but I don't know about Bob. He probably don't want to listen to this because he's a he's a holy one. He's holy. He has certain things that he just don't like to talk about or with your family on certain activities they do on the weekend or friends, people in your neighborhood, would they say, man, we would like to include you, but we know you're holy and we don't even want to tarnish you like that. Would they see you that way, a Holy one, or would they say, man, join the club? What do you mean? What do you mean? Tell me you holy...you Christian now all of a sudden. Or is that the consistent pattern of your life. Paul is about you saying this is your position. So let your practice be commensurate with that position of holiness, because you see, if you don't regard yourself as holy, you won't regard God as holy. And you know what happened when people don't regard God as holy. Just ask Nadab and Abihu in Leviticus chapter 10. Or we can look at Eli's sons that we saw in 1 Samuel. You don't regard God as holy. God has to deal with you. But if you're a believer, you've been chosen of God and you're holy. Not only that, you're beloved. That beloved is a term of endearment. It's an affectionate term. It means that if you are beloved by God...you are the object of his divine affection, his unconditional, unfailing, everlasting love. That's what you are. You're beloved. The people of Israel were objects of God's love in the Old Testament. As I mentioned in Deuteronomy 7, he said he set his love on them, and it wasn't because they were mighty or numerous, but it was because he loved them. He loved them. That love that is sacrificial and unconditional and expecting nothing in return. That's what God gives to his people and both the church as well as the Old Testament saints. They were able to be objects of God's love. And in Ephesians 1:5...I just read 4, that next verse says, in love he predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to himself. And it was all according to his intentions and his will. That's an amazing thing. This love is one of affection because we're children of God. We're children of God. Some of you are parents and you know how it is with your children. You have a natural affection that goes beyond anybody else's kids, right? Even on their worst day. You have a love for them, you know. That's why they stay alive, right? They alive today...even on their worst day. Because they your kids and because you have love for them. I'm alive today because my mom loved me when I was a knucklehead. You know? That's what happens. But it's that love. And that's the same thing that God has for you. Even when you're out of step, out of character and out of his will, he has an unfailing love for you. You've got to remember that. Not only is that a love of affection, it's a love of protection. God protects you with that love, even as he writes Zechariah 2:8. It says, for the Lord God of hosts, he says, after the glory he has sent me against all of the nations who were trying to plunder Israel and said, if you touch them, you are touching the apple of my eye. You realize that all these pagan nations, you touch those people, you touch the apple of my eye. That's my people. God protected them, gave them all the things that even they don't deserve, just simply because they were his chosen folks. It's amazing. You know, the believer's position is based on the fact that everything else flows out of this passage from that. Because, see, we're about to see some things that God expects of you. He expects his character to be to be on display. But you need to recognize your position that you're chosen, holy and loved by God in order to be able to fulfill all those things that this passage is demanding...keeps you in its proper perspective. Or else you're going to be doing these things in your own works and in your own strength, and it will not be done Christ's way. But if you do. That means it's only because of your position is right before God chosen, holy and beloved. That's the principle that God would have us to see through Paul's pen right here in Colossians 3. And that's what helps us to understand how to put Christ on. You've got to realize that you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people after God's own possession.
And once you realize that position, then you can move to the next aspect, which is your 'practice'. And that's the second feature that we'll see as to how we put on Jesus Christ. After you consider your position, now you've got to carry out your practice of Christ likeness. Got to carry out the practice of Christ likeness. And we'll see that in verses 12b through 14. You see your position, influences practice. Your calling, influences your conduct. And what is that practice? Well, we see it here in the bpart of verse 12, that that practice of Christ likeness is seen in Christ's character. He's about to list five virtues in verses 12 that really are the opposite of those vices that gripped your life in verses 5 through 8 of Colossians chapter 3. But if you look in 5 through 8. Look at those things that used to grip your life...those vices: immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, greed. And even down there in verse 8, anger, wrath, malice, slander and abusive speech. He says, those are the vices that used to grip your life and the old self and the old man. But he says, now, if you're going to practice Christ likeness, you need to lay aside and kill those vices and be clothed with these Christian virtues. Now these are the virtues. These are the character, the fruit of Christ's life that needs to be on display each and every day. And the first one he says here, is put on a heart of compassion. That 'put on' it really could be said, clothe yourself. And as I mentioned earlier, you clothe yourself and you keep those clothes on. You don't ever have a wardrobe change in Christ Jesus. Amen. You'll never get a chance to be like, you know what? Let me go and take these Jesus clothes off. Somebody done made me mad on the interstate. I just need...Jesus, I just need 10 seconds to take these righteous clothes off, yell at them, honk and do a little something, something else. And then I'll put these clothes of Christ back on. He says, no, no, no, no. Put the clothes on and keep them on. And how do you do that? This is in the context of brothers and sisters in the household of God. He says, put on a heart of compassion, put on a heart of compassion. You put them on and keep them on. And I gotta say, this, man, because some people, they talk about their salvation in past tense. You ever heard somebody talk about their salvation? It's back in what happened in 1985. Like, boy, yeah, I got saved back in 1985 and it was great. Well, I mean, I tell you, I was just I was on fire. I was reading my Bible. I mean, I was memorizing verses left and right. What Romans what I got you Galatians got you. I mean, Ephesians. Got you. They were just all. I mean, they had outfits, you know, and it's back in 1985. But Jesus wants to know about present day Christianity. Present day Christ likeness. Are you excited about Christ today and walking in truth today? And that's why he says, put it on and keep it on. This heart of compassion. This heart of compassion really is means you have mercy and pity and tenderness toward someone who's suffering. And what you do is this this person, this mercy and pity, ought to lead you to act on their behalf. There's a lot of people that says they have compassion, but when they're thinking about compassion, they're thinking about, you know, just, uh, you know, looking at someone else and saying, oh, my goodness, I have compassion. I wish I could do something for them. Maybe they see pictures of little kids starving in a third world country on television and they say, oh, I just feel so sorry for them. I have so much compassion. That's not necessarily compassion. Your compassion ought to lead you to action. It's one thing to have pity and mercy, but the compassion of Christ leads you to act on behalf of someone else. Jesus had compassion because it compelled him to act on others behalf, even to come out of the heavens, to act on behalf of sinners. Even the crowd, as you see, Mark 6:34, when Jesus went ashore, he saw a large crowd, and he felt compassion for them.  It's a deep movement of the inner part of emotion. And he said he was like as they were like sheep without a shepherd. And so therefore he began to teach. He realized they didn't have a shepherd. So he said, I'll be your shepherd. And not only was he their shepherd, he was the good shepherd that gave his life for the sheep. That's the compassion that Jesus has. And he had that for us. My question is, do you have that compassion for brothers and sisters in the house of God. You see them in situations that are calling for mercy and help. Do you walk by or do you show them love? I would pray that we would have compassion for our city. I'm grateful that we had a chance to have that how to share the gospel without freaking out class...help you to have confidence in doing that because we got a city that needs to hear about Jesus. We'll go out and share the gospel and door knocking, and we'll go out there and engage with people. Do you realize there are folks out there that that don't know about Jesus Christ? It used to be a day where everybody at least was going to be in church at Christmas, Easter...might come around Thanksgiving when family around, but people are not even in church these days, haven't been raised. They need to hear the gospel. The compassion in us should overflow in showing that to them. And not only that, we should do that with one another. There are people that God is sending to this church. They don't know much about the gospel. We should be moved to act on their behalf. That's Compassion that God wants us to have, and even kindness is another virtue he puts in there. This Greek word combines the idea of goodness, kindness, and generosity, and it's found all through the Psalms when it refers to God and His character. Because this is what he did, he expressed his goodness even at the face of the sin of Israel. I love Jeremiah, he was the weeping prophet. He only preached to a hard hearted, stiff necked, rebellious people. But even in Jeremiah 33:11 it says, for the Lord is good, and his loving kindness is great. He says, for I will restore the fortunes of the land. Even though Israel was hard hearted, weren't doing what they should. God says I, and my lovingkindness is great, and I'm still going to give you what you don't deserve. Do people get what they don't deserve from you in the congregation? They're brothers and sisters that aren't really worthy of your kindness, but out of the overflow of your generosity of goodness, you extend it to them. That's what God wants us if we want to put on Jesus Christ and be a household that he appreciates and loves and affirms, and not just in the house of God, but even in your own house. I've seen some parents who've had hard hearted, obstinate, rebellious children, and they've tried every trick known to man to get their child to act right. They've done everything to choke the life out of the child in order to get them to act right. But that's the very opposite of what God does, right? Because even in Romans 2:4, it says it's the kindness of God that leads you to repentance. God wasn't choking the life out and saying, you better repent. You better repent. You repented because you were amazed by the depth of his kindness, even when you were a sinner. Even when you were a sinner, dead in your sins, Christ died for you. That's Romans 5:8. But God demonstrates his love for us, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. It was this kindness that was moved us to say, man, I must repent and love this God. And he says, If I've done that to you, you should do that for one another. In the household of God demonstrate kindness to one another, even when they don't deserve it. Humility...this is not having a high estimation of yourself, but it is esteeming others as greater than you. It wasn't cool to have this term in the Greco-Roman era, and in fact, the Greeks didn't even have this word in their vocabulary. They were like, we don't even want to use this. They put it out of their literature, out of all their poetry books. They was like, we don't even want to be associated with humility because it was rugged strength. It was rugged determination. But Jesus Christ comes on the scene, and he made this an attractive characteristic and virtue because he is the epitome of humility. Realize that he is meek and mild and humble. And just remember, meekness is not weakness, and kindness is not spineless. And Jesus Christ, was both of those. And even in Philippians 2, it says that although he existed in the form of God and did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but what did he do? He emptied himself, taking upon the form of a bond servant being made in the likeness of men. He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross. That's amazing humility. God himself looks like a regular human being, goes to a cross and he dies to the very creatures he created. It's amazing love and humility. He says, If I've done that and given you an example to follow when you're clothed with me, I've given you the capacity now to walk in that humility with one another. Look, we're going to have ministries together that we're going to be planning. You're going to have your idea. Somebody else is going to have their idea. Who do you think idea is going to be the one that you're going to appreciate the most?...it's yours because it originated with you, right? I don't know about you, but my ideas are always the best ideas. Every ministry meeting I come to, I'm like, my idea should be the one. Let's choose the way I said it. I thought it. This is how it should go. This is the way it should be. But can we exist that way and be one body in Jesus Christ? Yes or no? We have to demonstrate humility, showing preference, saying, I desire this and I'm passionate about it, but I'm going to give preference to your idea so that we can be harmonious and do this ministry that God called us to do. Ministries are coming up...VBS, summer camp. You know, you got life group ministries. Hey, let's do this for event week. How about this? You can fight over an event week. Mess around...the one thing that should unite you together divides you. We can be that way in Jesus Christ. But he says, demonstrate humility to one another. Be willing to lay your life down, even in your marriages that should exist. Some folks say they can't even be on the same page when they try to figure out what they're going to have for lunch after church. You done just left the worship service filled with the Spirit...arguing over lunch. What you want to eat? It don't matter. You choose. I choose this. Why you want to eat that? Before you know it you can't even eat lunch. Forget filled with the spirit. It's just gone, gone, gone. See your spirit. See you gone. That's a joke. The Spirit lives in us. That was just a joke. He didn't leave us and come back. But humility is what we should have. Humility. Humility. Humility. I love what someone said in our small group one time. He said, you know what?...God is so concerned about us demonstrating this aspect of Jesus Christ that either you will find humility or humility will find you. God is so concerned about that road being well worn in your life, that road of humility because Jesus went down that same road, right?...the path of humility. He wants you to go down that road. So either you're going to find humility and humble yourself, or are you going to be humbled by the Almighty because he wants you to understand that characteristic of Jesus Christ. Demonstrate humility to one another. He even says gentleness. This is the opposite of arrogance and self assertiveness having a consideration of others. This is really saying I'm willing to waive my right to be angry with you. I could be angry. I could be frustrated, and I could lash out my venom on you, but instead I just want to waive that right and be gentle instead. I mean, when was the last time you waved that right to be angry with another brother or sister in the body of Christ because you were concerned about the harmony that existed among us? That's like Jesus, right? It says, Father, forgive them. They know not what they do. Forgive them. They know not what they do. That gentleness of Christ, knowing that some of those will be very much his disciples. Forgive them. They know not what they do. And I say that in the King James for the dramatic effect. But at the end of the day, that's what we should have, is that gentleness of Christ and the patience, that ability to suffer long. That's what that term means. It means that you can suffer for a long period of time and still not go back into the old self. And some people say, man, I can suffer but 2 or 3 strikes and you're out. That's not how God says we ought to be. Suffer long. You ought to have a long temper. It ought to take a whole bunch for someone to arouse your anger. And even then you say, nope, you're not going to cause me to sin. Just because you sin, we're not going to compound it and sin again. That's the patience of God. That's what it means to still put on Christ, even when you've endured wrongs and someone has exasperated you. Instead of flying into rage or desiring vengeance, you put on the patience of Jesus Christ. That's what it means to put on the likeness of his character and practice Christ likeness. And we do that in his character also in his forgiveness, he says, bearing with one another and forgiving each other. That bearing with one another, it's mutual forbearance. You see, here in the Colossian church, there were some people that were new to the body, and they had been in some of the pagan clubs, if you will. They were partying and drinking sexual immorality. They were cursing and swearing. They were stealing. That was all a part of their life. And they had just got saved. And they're coming to the church. And guess what? Those Colossian Christians had to deal with those newbies. They were like, man, they still cursing, they still drinking, they smell like alcohol. But guess what? God says that that's what you got to do is bear up with one another. They're going to be some people in our church that God's going to bring that are just new in Christ. Can you bear up with them until they mature up? I mean, they're going to still have some language that's messed up. I think I'm like, oops, my bad. That slipped out. It might even smell like something. They're going to have all kind of tendencies. Can you bear up with them? I mean there's some folks that that just they so fresh and saved.  They still got the fires of hell...they smoking...I mean when they come to church, you know. But can you still say, you know what, I know that you're a new Christian, but come alongside of me and follow me as I follow Christ. That's what it means to bear up with one another. Can you do that, believer? Because that's what it means to put on Christ. People can talk about it, but can you be about bearing with one another? Dealing with each other's inadequacies, shortcomings instead of having the fleshly tendency rouse up. And then, he says, forgiving one another. I think he puts these together because you've got to do that. Bear with one another and forgive one another. Whoever has a complaint, just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you. He says the gospel ought to come on display in your life. It's the gospel. You see, God has allowed us to be detached from our sins, and therefore Christ paid for that, gave us forgiveness and kept us from hell and condemnation. He says, I forgave you as far as the East is from the West. You should forgive each other that very same way. There should never be anything that should separate you from your love for one another. Forgiveness. Forgiveness, Saints...forgive. I council so many times I see marriages, I see families, I see even singles. One thing that is a reoccurring theme is a lack of forgiveness. Can't let it go. But you don't know my life, pastor....you don't know what I have to deal with each day. Forgive. But you don't know what they like when they get home. Forgiveness. But you don't know what it's like to serve alongside of them in ministry. Forgiveness. God wants you to forgive. It means going and acknowledging the fault. Being willing to forgive. Making that exchange and putting it to bed. Putting it to rest and never to bring it back up again. That's the forgiveness that God would have us to demonstrate. Let's do that for one another and do that by putting on his love. In verse 14, it says, beyond all these things, put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity. One theologian put it this way, he says, in keeping with the motif of putting on clothes. Love is the belt or the sash that pulls all these things that are just mentioned together. It's like it's the one thing that pulls all those virtues together is love. Love does. Love is a priority. It's a priority because it's the greatest commandment. Right? Matthew 22...love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and then love your neighbor as yourself. It's the greatest commandment. Everything revolves around love. So much that if you do anything apart from love, it amounts to nothing. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13, you can speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but if you don't have love....guess what? It's a big fat zero. Zero...amounts to nothing. God can use it, but it's no credit to your account because you didn't do it motivated by love. So love should motivate us in everything. Every genuine born again believer bought by the precious blood of Christ. You're chosen, holy and beloved of God. He's demonstrated his unconditional, unfailing, undying love towards you so that you can demonstrate that towards all of those in the household of faith. And that's why love is a priority. Live a life that's sacrificial.
Well, those are the two ways that we've seen thus far as to how we can put on Christ and keep him on. Make sure that you know your position of Christ. You carry out your practice of Christ likeness. The third one is this. It's to commit to the 'priorities' of Christ. Verses 15 through 17, it says, these are new priorities that we have now that didn't govern our life prior to our union with Jesus Christ. And the first priority is this you gotta prioritize the peace of Christ. Prioritize his peace. The peace of Christ...let it rule and reign in your hearts. There's a couple of aspects of this peace. There's peace that the believer gets with God because his sins have been forgiven. That's like what Romans 5:1 says, that therefore, having been justified by faith, we now have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. That's vertical peace. But I think there's a second aspect of peace, which Paul is referring to here. And that's the peace that now can be experienced and expressed amongst all of believers in all of life circumstances. Life or death. False teachers abusing the church. Financial uncertainty. Conflict between believers. He says you can still have peace. I'm sure there's a situation in your life right now that you're thinking, it's no way that I can have the peace of Christ. You can have and experience His peace. He says, let it rule and reign. You've received that peace at the moment of salvation. Let it rule and reign over your heart. That rule, it's the Greek term. It literally means an umpire. An umpire that would that would officiate the games back in the Greco-Roman era. And as I think of umpire, I go back to my 1985 days when I was playing baseball. That umpire used to sit behind that plate, had the mask and all of his gear, and he would call balls and strikes. I wasn't the best batter back in the day, and I kind of was put off by the fact that he would call the strikes with great accuracy and animation. Strike one. I mean, he would get excited. I'm up there all timid. Stay right. Two. Strike three. You're out. I mean, some parents would get all excited. I was a poor kid back in the day. Like, oh, man, you got to make me feel bad. I done struck out. Now the ref is like, you know, making me feel bad. And I noticed that he wouldn't do the same thing for a ball. He was, like, not passionate. He'd be like ball. Ball one. Ball two. Ball three. Ball four. Take the base. I mean, it was just simple, but he was an umpire officiating that game. And I think about Jesus Christ when it comes to issues in your life. He's just like that umpire. I got a financial stress and strain, pastor. Jesus says...peace. I got issues in my marriage, pastor. Jesus says...peace. My kids, they're not listening to me. What am I going to do? Jesus says, peace. Be still. Peace. Let the peace of Christ rule and reign. It doesn't mean that the obstacle or the challenge or the conflict with the believer disappears. But it does mean that the peace of Christ can rule and reign in that. I can be peace filled and passionate about Christ, even when I engage in that conflict, or that trial or that circumstance. Let the peace of Christ rule over your heart. Call it just like that umpire. Peace. Peace. Even says not only should the peace of Christ rule and reign, he said, let the Word of Christ richly dwell within you. That means that you ought to be in the scriptures, reading, memorizing, meditating on the Word, listening to truth, being in Bible study, getting all you can possibly get. You see, I'm amazed that even when Paul was commanding this or the believers by letting the Word dwell richly in them. They didn't have a copy of the scriptures. They didn't have scrolls. They were going off memory. They were going off the apostle's teaching. They had to meditate on these principles and recall it at the moment that they needed it. And that's why I think he even goes as far as to say, with all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. He said, that's how they had the Word of God is they listened to a song. And it was the truth of God set to music so that it would be a melody in their heart to train them up in righteousness. It's amazing. But is the Word dwelling richly in you, because if you put on Christ and keep them on, the Word has to saturate your thinking. How much are you in the Word? How are you doing on that New Year's resolution that you set? Is the Word of God still richly in you? And if someone was to take a tour of your heart where the Word of Christ dwells, would it look like the Biltmore Estate state where it's rich, things are put in order. Every resource is stewarded and used properly. Or would it be like an episode of hoarders where it's just like everything is thrown in there, not ever utilized. Another verse, another sermon, another passage. Just store it all up. Maybe one day I'll pull it out and use it. He wants the Word to dwell richly in you so that it can come out you, so that you can minister effectively to one another. And he says, do that in these songs. I don't think he's making a case to say the type of music we need to have, but I think God likes and enjoys variety. Psalms like the Psalter. Hymns like the hymns we've sang or like the Greek style in that day. Spiritual songs, like the one that Hannah did when she realized the goodness of God in giving her a child. Songs...Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs that should be the melodies of our heart. And then the last priority there. Not only the peace of Christ and the Word of Christ, but it's also that the name of Christ would be exalted. Verse 17 says, whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus. I think that Paul didn't want to come out with a list of all kind of do's and don'ts. He says, I'm going to give you one principle. Do all in the name of the Lord Jesus. Really, what he could have said is that anything that you do is going to either honor or dishonor Jesus Christ...now to do it.  That should be your guiding principle. I'm about to send this email to this person. Wait a minute. That ain't going to honor Christ. Let me go and delete. I done had some moments where I just had a text and it was long. I was going into it. I can't believe in such and such. And I thought, you know what? This ain't going to honor Christ. Delete. Backspace that thing. Backspace it. Backspace it. Don't forget to backspace. You might accidentally hit send. And it goes. Trust me. Speak from experience. But it should be all to glorify the name of Jesus Christ. That's your guiding principle. You see, you don't put on Jesus Christ just to have another religious activity. You put on Jesus Christ so that a. God would be honored in worship, and then b. that we would experience one body of believers here walking on one accord. And if we do that, Christ would be exalted in this house. You're walking in his likeness. Loving his ways. Praising his name. And you do that giving thanks through him to God the Father. Well, your calling should influence your conduct, and our practice should very much match our position. As you look at how you operate after hearing this rich, rich text, I have just some things that I would challenge you to consider. And that's this.
Thank God daily for choosing you. If you're in Christ, just thank him daily. Thank him daily. Give him praise that he chose you out of all the people of the earth. He chose you and brought you to himself. Called you to be holy and share in his holiness, and then love the people that God chose for himself. How do we love those people? Being patient, forbearing, forgiving, gentle all those folks in the body of Christ. They are worthy of you demonstrating that aspect of Christ's character. And then as you identify Christ's character in the scriptures, display it, have your mind renewed in the scriptures, and then live it. That's what you do. You don't look for the Scripture verses just to say you've done your reading for the day, but look and say, how can I imitate the character of Christ and then do it among the body of believers? You know, you can do that in multiple different ways. Sick newborn child, someone has surgery, a widow. Find ways to imitate that character we just talked about and display it in the life of the believers. But if you're here today and you don't have a relationship with Jesus Christ, you can't do any of this. You can't do it all. Mainly what you need is a relationship with him. There's no way you can practice Christ likeness apart from Jesus Christ. And if you don't have him, we'd love to be able to share with you what that is like. It means that you need to recognize that you're a sinner worthy of his wrath. But if you repent and turn to him, you can be a recipient of his love. You too can be walking in the holiness and the beauty of what we just recalled. But for the rest of us, let's put on Jesus Christ and let's keep him on. Let's pray to that end.  
Jesus Christ, thank you for dying for our sins. Thank you for giving us your righteousness to live out. I thank you for the fact that you've brought us not only to yourself, but you've brought us to a body of believers. May we live this life to the fullness of your glory by living in a manner that's worthy of you, being intent on one purpose, and that's striving together for the sake of the gospel, living out humility, gentleness, and patience. Help us to bear with one another. Lord, help us to forgive. Help us to put on the new man the new self that is in the likeness of Christ, and not those deeds of the flesh. Lord, help us to make it our ambition that we'll be killing sin, lest it be killing us. But as we do this, Lord, unite our hearts together with you and with one another, so that we would be the people you've called us to be. Various backgrounds, various denominations, but we're one in Jesus Christ. We love you and pray your blessings upon this time. In Jesus name, Amen.

 

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The Song of the King-Maker’s Mother

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Good morning, HBC, please turn in your bibles to 1 Samuel chapter 2, and we will look this morning at the song of a King Makers mother. We will pick up today and listen in on Hannah's prayer, that was praise. And so we'll figure out later...how does a prayer turn into a song. It's just what's in the heart of Hannah to do as she moves from a low point in chapter one, through a hardship in life to chapter two, where now she's giving spontaneous, spirit-filled true worship that we often see the saints in the Old Testament having to do when...there's a place where something significant happens in the life of a godly person in the Old Testament, and they can't help but break out in prayer and praise. And in Hannah's case, to refresh our memories from last week, she was suffering in her own soul. We saw that in verse ten, greatly distressed and weeping bitterly. Why was she doing that? Because life was hard, and she was married to a wonderful man named Elkanah, but she could not bear children. The Lord had closed her womb. She had suffered that way through no fault of her own. This was just the Lord's sovereign hand, the deck he was dealing from in her life. And yet, Elkanah, to have children makes the foolish decision to take another wife...takes it into his own hands. And as we said last week, sometimes we devise the rod of our own beating. And so Elkanah has a divided home, and he has Peninnah, making Hannah's life miserable, not just in the home, but particularly in chapter one, when they would go to worship at the temple. And so here is Hannah being pestered by a worthless Penny to the point of breaking. But God was using that in her life, ordaining that to bring her to pray a most wonderful prayer in verse 11. And so, yes, persecution from Peninnah could lead to supplication in Hannah, and that was all by God's sovereign design. And so that's where we were last week. And now this week, we begin right at this moment, this very personal moment in verse 28, where she is back a few years later, offering to Eli the priest, the son that she said, Lord, if you give me a son, I give him right back to you, because grace from God leads to gratitude in us, and we have open hands towards him. And so that was Hannah's mark of faithfulness, that she says, you gave him to me not to keep, but to give back and so here he now is yours. And I'm sure to connect to this moment what would be happening in Hannah's heart in chapter two when she's about to pray? We cannot miss what you know as parents has been sad times, if you will. Bittersweet moments of taking your kid to preschool for the first time. I mean, if you really liked your kid, it was a sad moment. If you were like, please take this child, and I'll pay you double to keep him the whole day. No, that sad moment when you knew moms, dads, you were getting that child back in about three hours. Um, but there was some sadness there. Or, you know, later on in life, taking them to college and dropping them off and the tears then. Not to mention, if they came back after four years and asked if they could move in again, but there would be these heart wrenching moments just in your own life. You can connect with that. Whereas what is beyond my understanding is what she felt in verse 28, about to give her little boy over for good, for keeps. No getting him back, she says, as long as he lives, he's the Lord's. And here we have now, chapter two, what ensues in this moment is pure praise. A beautiful prayer that Hannah exalts God in, and her own soul is lifted up too. So, follow along with me as I read 1 Samuel 2:1-10.
"Then Hannah prayed and said, my heart exalts in the Lord, my horn is exalted in the Lord. My mouth speaks boldly against my enemies, because I rejoice in your salvation. There is no one holy like the Lord. Indeed, there is no one besides you, nor is there any rock like our God. Boast no more, so very proudly. Do not let arrogance come out of your mouth, for the Lord is a God of knowledge, and with him actions are weighed. The bows of the mighty are shattered, but the feeble gird on strength. Those who were full hire themselves out for bread, but those who were hungry cease to hunger. Even the barren gives birth to seven. But she who has many children languishes. The Lord kills and makes alive. He brings down to Sheol and raises up. The Lord makes poor and rich. He brings low. He also exalts. He raises the poor from the dust. He lifts the needy from the ash heap to make them sit with nobles and inherit a seat of honor. For the pillars of the earth are the Lord's, and he has set the world on them. He keeps the feet of his godly ones, but the wicked ones are silenced in darkness. For not by might shall a man prevail. Those who contend with the Lord will be shattered. Against them He will thunder in the heavens. The Lord will judge the ends of the earth, and he will give strength to his king, and will exalt the horn of his anointed."
Father, your word is more valuable than gold. Yes, much fine gold. So help us to take the Pennys...the small amounts of the afflictions in our lives and cash them in for the glories of your riches today. As only you can reverse that in our heart through the power of your spirit working in the Word, we ask in Jesus’name, Amen.
I'm pretty sure it's the opening line of a somewhat known book in the Christian world called "The Knowledge of the Holy" by A.W. Tozer. And he starts by saying, "you know what comes into your mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us".  That wasn't just like, a great way to get you, the person who picked that book up to want to read on, right? It's a book called The Knowledge of the Holy. And he basically calls you out like, hey, uh, whatever you think about when you think of the word God that says everything about you. So read on, my friend. But the truth in that is that when you think about God, the first thought that captivates your mind, that captures your attention says, what about your view of him...without being asked, can you give a definition of God? Or can you describe his attributes just naturally? When you think of God, when his name is mentioned, what comes into your mind? In the life of Hannah, prior to this prayer, we saw in chapter one that when she prayed to God in verse 11, the words that came out of her mouth were the picture of the God she was praying to when she said in verse 11, O Lord of hosts. Do you remember what that name meant, what that title meant?...God, Almighty, God of angel armies. No doubt in her mind by what she said her heart was going where?...it was going vertical. It wasn't staying down here where often my prayers tend to stay, especially in the time of trial. They stay right down where I'm at in the muck of life, and yet she is able to look up in verse 11 and pray to the God who reigns on high. And she also saw herself rightly. She mentions a few times in that verse about being a maidservant, lowly, weak, just like we feel often. But the question we come to in our own lives is this...is it not in those low times where we see God most clearly, when we do look up, not from the highest vantage point where we think we're going to get that perfect view, but actually from that low valley.  The book The Valley of Vision, a collection of prayers written by Puritans 1600s, collected and assembled together. The book itself, the title The Valley of Vision, then leads into the opening prayer that this editor put together in the opening of the first prayer goes like this. "God, you have brought me to the valley of vision, where I live in the depths, but see you in the heights. Hemmed in by mountains of my sin I behold your glory." And that's where Hannah is as we start chapter two. She has been hemmed in by not just whatever sins she had to deal with in her own heart sin of disappointment, discontentment, whatever those might be. For Hannah, certainly the sins of those around her, sins of Peninnah and all around what would look dark. She looks up and sees the glory of God, and in chapter two launches into a prayer that I will call a praise that I will just call true worship. Uh, do you want to try to pick apart in your heart when you're praying and it turns into praise and say, okay, over here was this part? No, of course not. They overlap, and that's what we see when we get to know Hannah here, that this true worshiper in the afterglow of this bittersweet moment of handing over her only son at the time to the Lord. The afterglow of this she gives us an example in chapter 2:1-10 of true worship. And true worship is one of faith. Verse one. It's one of faith. Looking back to her salvation. That's what she's grounded in. But it then moves in 2 to 9 to her love...her affection for the sovereignty of God in her life and not just her life. Her life, as we see in these first two chapters, is meant to catch the attention of the reader and say she is representative of a larger picture of what's happening in the life of God's people at this point. Because just as her life looked really dark and hopeless and helpless in chapter one, so it did for the people of God in Israel, because at the close of Judges it says everyone's doing right in their own eyes. There's no one with a word from God. The Word of God was rare. There's no person to lead. There's no judge left. It's barren. The wasteland of Israel's faith, as was her life. So she's representing something to us. And she in the present, after looking back to her salvation in verse one 2 to 9, we will look at the the praise she has for God's sovereignty. This God who can reverse the worst circumstances, as we have said, we see with what?...our own appearance of things horizontally. But that's not always what God sees. And then lastly, in verse ten, she bookends it with a look to the future, a hope in a future king to come. And so that'll be our little outline this morning. Some hooks to hang our thoughts on.  
First verse one...modeling to us true worship has its start, its commencement in God's great salvation.  Hannah prayed and said, my heart exults in the Lord. My horn is exalted in the Lord. I'm trying hard to enunciate the difference between exulting with a 'u' and exalting with an 'a'. Now, I know in poetry things especially in your Bible, when you see poetry and you wonder, how do I know when it's poetry? The end of words...there's no rhyming here. That's because in Hebrew in which it was written, there was rhythm and rhyme. Although it's not the rhyme that we're used to with songs today. That's just the end of the words rhyme. All throughout there would be a cadence and a similar sounding on syllables if you were a Hebrew reader and listener, but just trust me, it's poetry. The cheat code to knowing when you're in poetry in the Old Testament is a very scholarly observation, where you see more white space around the black letters, you have poetry. So you can put that one in your back pocket and try to sound smart at life group. Look right in front of your face at your Bible. You see where there's not a lot of white space around letters. That's called narrative, and where you see more white space around letters is called poetry. All right. Class dismissed. So she launches into this song. Verse one. Also, don't miss, this is personal to her. She talks about herself in verse one, and then she disappears. But when she talks about herself, it has to do with her salvation. And she talks about my heart and my horn and my mouth and my enemies. And I rejoice because we have said here before...saving faith is found in the personal pronouns. When he is not just the Lord, he's my Lord, and he's your Lord, and he's my God, and he's your God, not just a God or the God. So this opening verse says a lot about Hannah's worship and that it starts with salvation. The similarity in that first line my heart exults in the Lord, my horn is exalted in the Lord is about praise. But she tells us first where it begins. All true praise starts in the heart. Exultation with the 'u' is not the same as exaltation with an 'a'. Exultation is a word for celebration and delight. Cheering with gladness overflowing of a heart...glad in something. And here she is glad in the Lord. So she's exalting. She's rejoicing in the heart. But then she's exalted. Her horn is exalted. You're like, what is the horn? It's not a trumpet. It's an image in the ancient Near East, you find in the Old Testament of victorious animals. Horn imagery in the Psalms is the animal that has the horns and gores the other animal, its enemy, and then it lifts up its head in what? Victory! A sign of its strength. So you see the connection between these two, now.  Worship...true worship begins in the heart, friends, but it does show itself on the outside in strength. Horn is a word for strength and power, and that exalts in the Lord not in itself. Everything is focused on the object of worship, right? Notice at the end of both those lines, my heart exults in the Lord, it rejoices in the Lord, and my horn is exalted in the Lord. It's not me so much, it's him. So you put that together in your mind, and you see how in your own life how are you raised above the storms in your life through worship? It's when you're from the heart...you start there rejoicing in your salvation and what God has done for you. And then it does turn to praise. As you looked around the room this morning in worship as we sang, and you saw the countenance of some of your brothers and sisters, it's okay to look at each other. It's one of the reasons we don't turn the lights out when we sing. We want to see each other. What? Sing praise to God as that one song just said it. Come on, sing praise with me. That's the call of the Psalter. It's not just go inward. Me, myself and God. Shut out the lights. Don't look around. I don't know when that happened in the last 25 years that that became the idea of singing. I know it's personal. I know you have a personal relationship with God, but when we gather as saints, we're celebrating corporately what he's done for us. And you strengthen one another that way. You look around, you don't know everybody's story, but you know some of them, and you say, I know that person is praising through persecution or sorrow or loss. Or if you're that person and you look at somebody else singing, it does something to you. We're connected. So it is from the inside. It shows on the outside. And maybe a side note on true worship starting in the heart friend...style can take a back seat. Preference...I like...if I'm going to worship, I need it to be this way. Oh?...because worship starts outside of you. So the arrangement has to be the way you like it or else you can't worship? That doesn't seem to be the case with Hannah or anybody else in the Old Testament, for that matter, because the heart of worship is in the Lord and it's in your heart. I was at a thing at LR last night. Western Piedmont Symphony. And, it was a tribute to some jazz musicians, Duke Ellington and others. But they brought this amazing musician in, this lady from New Orleans playing the clarinet. I mean, she made that thing just sing. It was awesome. And then she, she decides. They decide to lead us in Amazing Grace. And now, normally we sing here, we don't have a full orchestra and a person playing clarinet and singing with this deep voice. But my heart was moved to worship in that moment. And this wasn't a house of worship. It didn't need to be. That was where my heart was. And I'm not saying that to me. I'm just saying style goes out the window when it comes to what comes from within. Now go to your car and turn on the music you like...whatever. But when you gather with the saints, is it really about what you need outside of you to create something? Or as we see in Hannah's heart, it comes from within.  And it does then...you're strengthened when you exalt God and you're not about exalting your preference. Psalm 68:3, let the righteous be glad. If you're righteous in the Lord today, if you have the righteousness in Christ, you should be glad. Let them exalt with you before God. Let them rejoice with gladness. Notice Hannah is our example of faith, but the object of faith here is the Lord. And then she moves into talking about what comes out of her mouth. Well, she says, my mouth speaks boldly against my enemies. I don't think she is turning to Peninnah at this moment, and she doesn't seem like that type of petty woman to me. She's a godly woman. I think maybe she is speaking as she says, the plural enemies about. Hey, my life has maybe been one of hardship. I mean, in her context, in the time and place she lived in, where bearing children for your husband, for his progeny, for the name to live on as the more kids you would have in this culture, the more your future was set up for protection and provision passing on.They usually live near you. You shared what you had with them and then they took care of you in your old age. So there was something she would have felt all eyes on her entire life to this point. It wasn't just about Peninnah. Peninnah would have represented a culture that, for a barren woman, would have been just broken and sad and hard and wondering why everybody else, but not me. And does my husband love me that I can't? And Elkanah did his best to give her a double portion to show he loved her. But she says, now I can speak boldly against my enemies, but she doesn't do it by mocking them and saying, look what I have now. She does it by praising God and saying, look what he's done for me. Do you see the difference? So all of this goes to the end of verse one. I can do all these things. My heart, my strength, my speech. All of it is praise to God because I rejoice in your salvation. That's where it starts. If you're a Christian in here today, if you're in Christ today, the start of your worship, and if it's been cold and if it's been in neutral and if it's been in a ditch, we can't create an atmosphere that can touch what God does in your heart through looking back and seeing what he's done for you in Christ. It starts with your salvation. What's God done for you? We just sang about the blood applied. Thank you Jesus, you have saved my life. Brought me from the darkness. So if your heart has been cold lately, I'm not going to take you to anywhere else today. I'm going to pull the struggle bus over and say, hop out here. Go back to your salvation. That's where it was for Hannah. In a moment that was both wonderful and painful. Giving over her son, she says, why, I can rejoice right now and be exalted in my strength and speak up, is because of your salvation for me. So if your heart didn't exalt today in song, remember your salvation. If your soul didn't exalt today and wasn't strengthened, remember your salvation. If you're mad at your enemies today more than you are glad in God, remember your salvation. I mean, that's the only way you're going to get out of it, friend. You got to go back to that. Remember when God saved you, and you've changed since then. But God has not. He is still the God who saves. Even in Christ, he pulls you back out of that thing you want to fall back into. He delivers you from it. He rescues you still. Even as a Christian, when you find yourself struggling in sin, pulled back into old ways, he will still get you out. Call on him and ask him today to just pull me out of whatever muck and mire my soul has been in that keeps me from worshipping you in the heights, because I have just been face down in the depths. Well, look up, brother and sister. Look up to God in your salvation. He delivers.
She doesn't stay there. That's just verse one. And note, as I said before, she's off the scene. She said what she needed to say about her life. Now she looks around and in the present moment she sees God's sovereignty moving in power, omniscient over everything, knowing all things, doing all things. And she praises him for that. Hannah's faith from verses 2 to 9. In summary, fashion...her faith is now looking to God's sovereignty. And out of that, her praise and adoration grows. She moves from looking back in faith to her salvation, to looking presently to God's sovereignty. And it lifts her up. And the first character quality of God after she has come back to say, I can rejoice because you've delivered me. You've rescued me. What kind of great God are you? You are a holy God, verse two. There is no one like you. You are matchless and nobody comes close to you. The bedrock of moving forward and worshiping this sovereign God, who can know all things and do all things, starts with this quality that makes him able to do that different from all false gods, false religion, false worship around her is that he's holy. He's other. There's no one like him, she says. No one like God in his holiness, in his difference. As you want to lift off this morning and worship, say, hey, I've been good like I. I do thank God for my salvation. But after that, if somebody were to say, what comes into your mind when you think of God, it's like blank space. Start with his holiness then. Start with the thing that is most unlike you. Because, see, maybe in ways in which it's common to man, I would maybe pick a character quality of God that I can relate to. You know, his love, of course, because I understand love and I try to or whatever, his joy or. But when you pick God's holiness to move your forward, move forward to your worship. You're picking a quality of his that has nothing to do with you and exclusively to do with him. Does that make sense? Like, I'm looking at something much greater than me to exalt who? See, that's why holiness just lays it flat, doesn't it? Because then there's nothing I can connect to other than he is worthy of my praise. And who isn't?...me. When I praise God's holiness, when I say you are holy and there's no one like you, I'm included in that...there's no one like you. We're all included in that. So he gets all the praise when we start with His Holiness, his exclusivity of being the perfect God, perfect in...and then you could fill in the rest if you want. He is perfect in his love. That's what makes him holy. He is perfect in his justice, makes him holy. He is perfect in his power. You go down the list of perfections. But do you know they all start at the source of he is holy, holy, holy, Isaiah 6:3. The whole earth, then, is full of your glory. And if you went to Isaiah 6 and saw what Isaiah said next in verse 5, when he saw the holiness of God, he didn't say, yay is me. I'm an overcomer. My best life now. No he says, woe is me. I'm not an overcomer. I'm a man of unclean lips. If that's what you look like when he a vision of the glory of God, it was Christ, actually, John tells us. And I see you where you are it lays waste my pride. But a person that knows that that holy God would love them. See, that's the switch. Because if he's just a holy God and he does nothing for me, then I might say, great, you know, a transcendent God. He's out there, but he's not near. And he was near. He came, he sent his Son. And in a demonstration of his love died for us. That's where you go...a Holy God would die for a sinner like me? So the holiness of God, which initially might have this repulsive effect to the sinner because he's so unlike us, and that holiness has a sense of terror and dread, as it did in the Old Testament at times. Leviticus 10, when Moses's brother Aaron had two sons, Nahum and Abihu, and they brought strange fire to offer before God. That wasn't the way that he commanded according to his perfect law. They were incinerated in a moment. I don't know if you knew that story. Not the best bedtime story, I guess, for our kids. But it does teach about His Holiness because it says fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them. And they died before the Lord right in front of their uncle and father, Moses and Aaron. And this was the Lord's answer. Those who come near me, I will be treated as holy. That's why R.C. Sproul can say we tend to have mixed feelings about the holiness of God. There is a sense in which we are at the same time attracted to it and repulsed by it. Something draws us towards it, like Exodus 3, when Moses sees the burning bush and he is drawn to see what's going on there. This is something different. And God says, hey, stop where about you're going to walk is holy ground. There is a thing that can draw us towards it for the person of faith, and yet there's still something in it that is dangerous and entirely other and gives us, rightly, a fear of God. Because when you ask a person that has no idea what God is like, do you fear him? They probably say no because they're ignorant of him. What are they to fear? They don't know anything about him. But for the person that understands something of the holiness of God, his otherness, his difference from us, it can draw toward. And yet, as Sproul says, we want to run away, and we can't seem to decide which way we want it. That's mysterious and amazing all at the same time, isn't it? And that can kick start your praise today, because it takes the eyes off you and puts it on him. Makes you go up. And as Hannah now is going up, she is exulting in the heart, rejoicing. And she is being strengthened, lifting up in the Lord. She moves from verse three or verse two, talking about his holiness to his sovereign omniscience. And maybe there's a connection there. Well, she says there's no rock like our God saying, yeah, this, this holy God I can take refuge in. That's what a rock was for an Old Testament saint. Some safe place, some safe haven, some cliff to get yourself into, to be protected.  And she calls God her rock.  But then she moves in 3 to 5 to talk about a different quality of this sovereign God, his omniscience. He knows all that. Again, like I was saying before the holiness of God, this idea of transcendence, he's other. But does he care about me? Does he care what's going on down here? How the world works. Verse three. The scoffer would say, nope. The proud and the arrogant. Verse three boast no more. So very proudly do not let arrogance come out of your mouth, you scoffer of God. Why? Because the Lord, the holy Lord, who you think is just not even paying attention. He is a God of knowledge, and with him actions are weighed. You know the way the proud person, the arrogant person. If you want a good definition for a boast, what is boasting? Its arrogance coming out your mouth. Verse three. That's what it is. Want to know a boaster...when arrogance is flowing out of their mouth? Can I give a PSA? Parents, let's help rid the world of boasters by teaching our kids not to follow the bad examples of professional athletes or others who everything has to be about them. I know it looks cute when your four year old, does something and taps there, you know, you know and turns around and does this. But is that really what we want to train our kids to do and tacitly approve of by like, you know, that was a good run. Give it to the kid. Yeah. Let them come over to the sideline and say, great job on that or whatever it might be. But also say, but by the way, who gave you those legs? God did. Did he give you that mouth to make much of yourself with? End of PSA. Back to verse three. These boasters, their boast as you connect it to...For the Lord is a God of knowledge. And with him actions weigh. Why is she warning the proud? Well, you get it when you get the second half of verse three and then verses four and five. The proud think they know how the world works, don't they? Those proud who looked at Hannah's life like Peninnah and her scorn and mockery would have been. You must be cursed by God that you can't have kids, you know. And Hannah, that's just the way the world works, you know. I mean, look at me. I can't. I lost track of all my kids again. There's so many, you know? It's just God loves me and blesses me. And I'm strong and I'll be strong. And I have many children, and they're going to take care of me. And, you know, you're just one of those people that life dealt a bad hand. And that's how it's just going to be. That's life. The strong stay strong, the satisfied stay satisfied. And those who have a lot have a lot. And that's just the way life goes. That's the boaster. As if there's not a God who knows, who's weighing actions, or as Proverbs 16:2 says, weighs the motives. So if you think you can get off the hook of, I'll fool God. On the outside, I'll be a really good person. I want the glory for myself. But if he's just weighing my actions and I'm just doing a lot of good deeds, he'll be impressed with me and life will go the way I want it. Karma, if you will. When I was working in LA, a lot of my waiter and waitress friends loved karma. You know, just because they just cared about the outward action. Everything was just, I'm going to do this good thing because, you know, guys comes back around and they would come around the corner and after they got the big tip, karma baby, I was good this week. I remember these discussions and if they got a bad tip that person's got something coming to them. So my apologetics in that moment was...so help me understand this. You got a bad tip from them. So the karma wheel starts. The karma circle starts now, with their bad action, that's going to give them something bad. But what if you're actually on the receiving end of that? As in you did something bad this week. And the reason you got a bad tip is because you're a bad person. And they didn't have an answer for that. Karma only worked when it was to their what?...advantage of the way that the boaster or the arrogant sees the world. And so all Hannah is doing so far is just saying, I praise this sovereign God of knowledge who...Proverbs 16:2...He doesn't just weigh our actions, he weighs our motives. In Proverbs 21:2, he weighs the heart. Look, he sees us inside and out. None of us are pulling the wool over his omniscient eyes. So that humbles us. But it gives hope because verses four and five say, hey, listen, have you watched in life that sometimes the bows of the mighty get shattered, the strong become weak, And sometimes the feeble gird on strength. Ha! Not only that, those who were full and satisfied are so broke now they're begging for bread. And those who were begging. Now they have ceased. And then she gets to herself. She's not talking in the first person, but she goes, you know, even those barren women give birth to seven, which is a number of completion, perfection or satisfaction. And yet those who have many children, she doesn't say loses them or she just says, languishes as that thing you thought was a sign of God's good favor on you because you're such a great person, you turn around and find yourself, Penniah, going...all these kids won't come out and milk the goats with me. Send them back. It's the God of great reversals is the story here in this song under his sovereign omniscience. And she's saying, you who boast and think you've got it figured out. You have another thing coming. And that's what Hannah could give praise for in her life. Can you praise God for that in your life? How do you do that right now? Well, a starting point would be, you know, as we're warning and saying life isn't always just the way it appears. Um, so things might be coming up you right now. You're strong, you're satisfied, and you're well supplied, which is a perfect recipe for being a little too comfortable. Not to say you shouldn't be thankful if you're strong, satisfied, and well supplied. If you see every good thing is a gift from God. But if you start to put your faith in those things and hope in those things, and even maybe pride comes in and says, yeah, you know what? I've just been on such a good streak lately, I think I have all this because I kind of earned it, I deserve it. You get that kind of Self-righteous, comfortable. What can God reverse? He can send an affliction. He could send a trial to try to wake you up and say, if you thought it was always just this way and you've got me in this kind of cycle, that you do this, and I do this, and it leads to your own pride in yourself rather than exaltation of me, then maybe that comfort is going to lead to some affliction, just maybe. And on the flip side of the God of great reversals, when you see those who are weak become strong, and those who are hungry are fed, and those who are barren give birth to seven for the afflicted in the room today, there's a lesson in saying maybe the hardship I find myself in, I don't need to resign myself to the idea it's going to stay this way forever. And life may have beat you down long enough that you actually have started to believe that. Like nothing's going to change and everything I do, it just backfires. And the older you get, the more you just almost want to feel like giving up. And Hannah wants to say no. The God of great reversals can switch those either way, in your affliction, he can now bring you comfort beyond what you could ask or imagine. Do you believe him? Do you trust him? Because one of the great things that humble us is when we do just come to grips with, no matter how long we've lived and how wise we think we are, and if we read knowledge of the holy frontwards and backwards and underlined everything, we can have all of that knowledge. But we're not the God of knowledge, are we? And you just have to admit, as I do, none of us has a fat clue of what tomorrow's going to bring. A bill of debt, a bill of health, a neighbor named Bill who just really gets you upset. You don't know what tomorrow's going to bring, but you can trust the God of all knowledge. He knows. He's sovereign. So that's lesson one. His sovereign omniscience she praises him for. Now the scoffer, or even the skeptic might say, oh, well, that's fine. It's just he has foreknowledge. He knows everything. I'll grant him that. But does he do anything about it? Well, then you move into verses 6 to 9 and listen to all of the action verbs of Yahweh. The Lord kills, he brings down, he raises up. The Lord makes poor, the Lord makes rich, the Lord brings low. He also exalts, he raises the poor. He lifts the needy. He keeps the feet of his godly ones. Sounds like he's not just sovereign in his wisdom. He's sovereign in his power. He's not just willing, but he's able. And in His holiness, because that's where we started. He has the perfect understanding of everybody's situation all the time. And so not only could we trust his sovereign wisdom watching our lives and how they're going, but his sovereign power of when he determines to reverse something or not. And so Hannah just launches into all these different proofs of God's power that he is sovereign in his omnipotence. And it makes her praise continue to lift. I just picture like an airplane. She just keeps going higher and higher in this song. And at the heights, it's that he's in control of it all. Verse six, she says it two ways. It's still the same thing. It's a merism in poetry when you, you know, say, you know, oh, where's my keys this morning I searched high and low. That means you tore up the whole house, right? Every little nook and cranny of it. I saw somebody look at their wife just in that moment. Just staring at the Bible. But I see these things. Um, maybe it happened before church. The Lord kills and makes alive is just a all encompassing phrase saying every millisecond of your existence he's in charge of. You can accept that or try to reject it, but it's true. He brings down to Sheol and he raises up. So that's your material life. Your physical life. And then she moves to seven and eight. Talk about your social standing. Uh, your standing in the world, your job situation, your the house you live in. I mean, I'm just adapting these phrases from the Old Testament like, you know, when's the last time you've been in an ash heap? But you have had a bill that you can't pay. And he says he can reverse these things, and he can raise you from the dust. And you can find yourself sitting with nobles, inheriting a seat of honor. You can get the promotion, you know, or I know. It's all over. It's everywhere. But we know it's in our church. The marriage you think has no hope. It's in the ash heap. It's ready to be taken out. There's no hope for it. No. That can be reversed to friend. He has the power to do it. He has the power to change you. He has the power to change your spouse. He knows everything about you already. He knew everything about you when you thought you knew everything about that person wanted to marry them in the first place. And now you find yourself years later, feeling like you don't know them at all and they don't know you. He knew you then, put you together, didn't look away, didn't make a mistake, and he's all powerful to fix whatever you think is an uncrossable divide at this point. But you got to believe that this sovereign God, this God of great reversals, can redeem it. That's step one. And to put the punctuation on. You know, he's in the the totality of my life, living and breathing and dying. And he's in the totality of my life. My day to day existence, my life, my job. She takes it in verse eight to creation. The pillars of the earth are the Lord's, and he set the world on them. She goes back to like, how much can this God reverse everything? He was the God that started with what? Absolute nothingness. And out of that created everything. So what are the material things in his universe he can't turn around. You got it. He's going from the argument from the lesser to the greater to the greatest. If we go back to the beginning, he started it all and he didn't have anything to work with. But what? His own sovereign power. So he can do it there back then. And he could do it right now in your life, knowing every single part of it. And it humbles us because we have to trust then whatever hard things come. Verse nine, he keeps the feet of his godly ones. Can you look in your life and see small moments? This is what Hannah was doing that was so helpful and practical to us is she's seeing in the small moments a bigger story. This is what God does to keep his people. I saw this in my life this past week. The killing and making of life. Last Sunday night I go home. I'm in the mood for chocolate, and I go into my cabinets and grab a box of chocolates that was for my wife. Maybe that was my first sin. And, um, I read the label as my wife has trained me to do after 13.5 years, because I am. And I'm trusting you by telling you this, that none of it's going to come back to me in some little concoction. I am deathly allergic to cashews. They are my Kryptonite. So I get this box of chocolates out that says I read the label three times because I read things for a living, so I'm good at this. Peanuts. Good. Walnuts. Good. Pecans. Good. Almonds. Good. I'm good. So I take some...my lips getting tingly. Oh, nuts. So I throw it in the trash. And all it took was a little nibble to close my throat. And some Benadryl is not helping. An expired EpiPen was my salvation. Yahweh was my salvation. But the expired EpiPen helped. And Shannon, of course, is like, did you read the label? And then I go, you know, my dad got you those chocolates. He may have mixed the tops. He's prone to do silly things. Um. And so she finds the chocolate in the trash, melts it off, looks at it, and says, that was an entire chocolate of cashews. It was a cashew cupboard. And it makes me think of this down the little. I mean, how lame would it have been to find out your pastor's dead? Not because he took the gospel to the Aborigines. No. Death by chocolate. And he's in the nitty gritty of your life that way. Do you see that? Can you look back this week when you praise him for his sovereignty continuing in your life, both in his knowledge of it and his power over it? It's the small stuff maybe you have to look at first to back up like Hannah does and says, all the way to creation, he's over it all. And here's the warning in verse nine. So if you think you're in control and you're keeping yourself...last part of verse nine, not by might shall a man prevail. I don't care how strong you think you are. There's something that can take you out. Maybe it's not a cashew. But not by your might shall you prevail. He's pointing you back to him. She's pointing us back to God, saying the godly ones he'll keep. And the wicked who boast and think they're all powerful. And they're all knowing they will be silenced. I mean, that's really the summation of sovereignty. It ties nicely in, if you like John 15, apart from me, you can do nothing. Because it's good sometimes when we run a thread from our Old Testament to our new and we see two different verses can say the same thing. Apart from him, you can do nothing. Not by your strength you'll prevail. Whatever it is you think you need to prevail in right now, it's not going to be in your own strength. It's going to be in going back to him and saying, God, I need you. Every circle of life and pattern and situation. You're sovereign over. So I need to deal with that.
Last she moves from her present circumstances where she could praise God's sovereignty over and believe it in every aspect to look at the future. And that's where her hope comes from. Her love and her affection for God were raised with looking at his sovereignty and wisdom and power. And now in verse ten, she ends looking to the future of what God can still do and will do. And we know that because she uses 'will' five times in verse ten. Those who contend with the Lord will be shattered, against them he will thunder. The Lord will judge the ends of the earth. Nobody is going to escape his final judgment. And then this most interesting end. He will give strength to his king. It's interesting. Israel has never had a king. I mean, Hannah would have known about kings of other countries and lands and people groups around her, but it seems somebody whispering in her ear what's about to happen as they move from theocracy to monarchy? As God says, you know how I'm going to. I got a plan still working here. I'm going to use a man, a king to pull it all together. I'm going to take what is messed up right now in Israel, because there's everybody's doing right in their own eyes. So stick around for the rest of Samuel to find out who that is.  But she's looking way down the road saying he will give strength to his king. Because later on, the people want a king. But it's not his king. His king? Who could that be? And he will exalt the horn, that strength. It's going to be lifted up a name above all names that everybody will bow to. That's how strong he's going to be. His anointed and that word anointed is what? His Messiah. So, friends, here's a prophetic word from an unlikely preacher, Hannah, because it says in the New Testament that people long to look into the mystery of the gospel and in who this Christ would be. And they spoke of that which they didn't know, but it was the Spirit of Christ in them. So how beautiful it is to see this Hannah, who just a chapter ago seemed to be left behind in the dust and the ash heap, and now she is praising Yahweh with all of her heart, and her last words get to be her most memorable. Jesus is coming. She says it in faith. She says it in hope. There's a king who's coming to be the Messiah and exalted and strengthened. And he did come, but he didn't do the first time what he'll do the second time. He didn't set up a physical kingdom here. He was actually rejected in the eyes of man. The cornerstone, the rock on which if you fall, you will be crushed. But if you bow, you'll be lifted up. You'll be put back together. So he comes the first time with the good news that he came to die for sinners, not the righteous.
So are you one of those sinners today that needs this good word from Hannah? That God does have a man and it's his Son, and he sent him to die for you. And you don't receive the benefits and the goodness by anything you could do. I hope you've seen that so far, that the great reversal in life isn't because that person, in their own strength, tried to prevail. It's because they abandoned all hope in themselves and put their hope in who? They put their hope in God. They put their hope in this coming King who's already come. His name is Jesus Christ. He lived a perfect life, completely fulfilled the perfect law of God, the holy God that you and I can't. And then to take away the sin of us who would believe he dies on a cross in our place, and he offers salvation to you today? If you would see yourself as needy and bow before him. If you are in Christ today, you have the same future hope that Hannah has that Christ will return. And even if your present circumstances you're going to, you're going to be working through those...you just would admit today. It's been tough. Life's been hard. I've experienced a lot of loss. He knows that. And he was powerful enough to stop it, but he chose not to in his sovereign wisdom and purposes in your life. But he hasn't left you without hope. Because if you're in Christ today, you have his Son. And so you have hope that's going to go into eternity. And so maybe you're in a valley of vision now and you need to look up. You need to see that maybe as that poem ended, it's quite a paradox that the way down is the way up. To be low is to be high. The broken heart can become the healed heart. The contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit. The repenting soul is the victorious soul. And to have nothing but to have Christ is to possess all. That to bear his cross is to wear his crown one day. Because in the daytime, stars can be seen from the deepest wells, and the deeper the well, the brighter that star shines. Take hope, Believer.  
Let's pray. Father, we thank you that because you are our salvation that we find light in the darkness. We find life in our death. We find joy in our sorrow. We find grace in our sin. We find riches in our poverty. Help us to look up. May your holiness, may your wisdom, may your power, and absolutely your salvation in your Son be our faith and love and hope today to say as we're about to sing, that you are our salvation. The Lord is my salvation is the greatest hope any of us could say and walk out of here with today. And if somebody doesn't have that hope that they would turn to you. And by your Spirit's work, trust in your Son right now, we ask this in Jesus name. Amen.

 

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The Rise of a King Maker

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Morning Saints of HBC, please turn in your Bibles to God is My Name, chapter 1, verse 1, also known as...Samuel. All right, you're with it. I think. We said last week that that's what his name meant, and that was a name that was good for Israel to remember that back in the dark times, when God's Word was rare and his plans seemed lost and a man of God was nowhere to be found, spiritual depravity of the nation had led to moral bankruptcy in the people. And what was in the book of Joshua meant to be a promised land in the Book of Judges has now become barren. And if we just judged by the appearance of things, we would say that that kind of soil, nothing will grow there. And yet what we find as we read through the plan of redemption in the Bible, that that kind of soil is the only kind where a mighty and powerful God can plow through to plant one seed in the most unlikely place, and unlikely time for a king to grow in. And that is what we find in the Book of Samuel. A very unlikely place and an unlikely time. A dark time, a barren time, in the time of Israel, and yet God is going to work in this soil as only he can. And if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, we will realize that maybe the same thing is true in our lives. That the time that we think we're in the situation we think we're in, the hardness of the soil that's around us may be exactly what God is wanting to use for a single seed to be planted in your heart today. A seed of hope that takes you back to the man of his choosing, Jesus Christ. And we will get there as we go through Samuel. But we have to start in a pretty low moment. And that's chapter 1. So let's read chapter 1 together and see the lay of the land. Verse one...
"Now there was a certain man from Ramathaim-zophim, from the hill country of Ephraim, and his name was Elkanah, the son of Jerohaam, the son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, the son of Zuf an Ephraimite. He had two wives. The name of the one was Hannah and the name of the other, Peninnah and Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children. Now this man would go up from his city yearly to worship and to go sacrifice to the Lord of hosts in Shiloh. And the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were priests to the Lord there. When the day came that Elkanah sacrificed, he would give portions to Peninnah his wife, and to all her sons and her daughters. But to Hannah he would give a double portion, for he loved Hannah, but the Lord had closed her womb. Her rival, however, would provoke her bitterly to irritate her, because the Lord had closed her womb. It happened year after year, as often as she went up to the house of the Lord, she would provoke her. So Hannah wept and would not eat. Then Elkanah, her husband, said to her, Hannah, why do you weep, and why do you not eat? And why is your heart sad? Am I not better to you than ten sons? Then Hannah rose after eating and drinking in Shiloh. Now, Eli, the priest, was standing on the seat, or sitting on the seat by the doorpost of the temple of the Lord. Hannah, greatly distressed, prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly. She made a vow and said, O Lord of hosts if you will indeed look on the affliction of your maidservant, and remember me, and not forget your maidservant, but will give your maidservant a son, then I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life. And a razor shall never come on his head. Now it came about as she continued praying before the Lord that Eli was watching her mouth. As for Hannah, she was speaking in her heart. Only her lips were not were moving, but her voice was not heard. So Eli thought she was drunk. And Eli said to her, how long will you make yourself drunk? Put away your wine from you. But Hannah replied. No, my lord. I am a woman oppressed in spirit. I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have poured out my soul before the Lord. Do not consider your maidservant as a worthless woman, for I have spoken until now out of my great concern and provocation. Then Eli answered and said, go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant your petition that you have asked of him. Hannah said, let your maidservant find favor in your sight. So the woman went her way and ate, and her face was no longer sad. Then they arose early in the morning and worshipped before the Lord, and returned again to their house in Ramah. And Elkanah had relations with Hannah, his wife, and the Lord remembered her. It came about in due time, after Hannah had conceived, that she gave birth to a son, and she named him Samuel, saying, because I have asked him of the Lord. Then the man Elkanah went up with all his household to offer to the Lord the yearly sacrifice and pay his vow. But Hannah did not go up, for she said to her husband, I will not go until the child is weaned. Then I will bring him, and he may appear before the Lord and stay there forever. Elkanah, her husband, said to her, do what seems best to you. Remain until you have weaned him. Only may the Lord confirm his word. So the woman remained and nursed her son until she weaned him. Now when she had weaned him, she took him up with her with a three year old bull, and with one ephah of flour and a jug of wine, and brought him to the house of the Lord in Shiloh although the child was young. Then they slaughtered the bull and brought the boy to Eli. Hannah said, oh, my lord. As your soul lives, my lord, I am the woman who stood here beside you, praying to the Lord. For this boy I prayed. And the Lord has given me my petition, which I asked of him. So I have also dedicated him to the Lord. As long as he as he lives he is dedicated to the Lord and he worshiped the Lord there."
The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. So, Father, make us simple ones wise this morning, through the testimony of your perfect and restoring word, we pray. Amen.
Those of you who have lived around this town for a long time, and some of you who are new to it, uh, may see this differently. The town, the roads in our town. Our fair town of Hickory. They're baffling at times. I speak from experience. There is a ball field in the northeast section of town called Civitan Park, which should be called the Bermuda Triangle because when you attempt to find Civitan Park from 127, using your own instincts as your guide. And I consider myself a suburban Daniel Boone who has rather good instincts making my way around cities, small and large. I get lost every time. I know in my mind, when I look at Google Maps where Civitan Triangle is and where I am, and the roads that should connect me there, 90% end in dead ends. And so I have to backtrack to another road that okay, I just make a right. Make a right. Nope. That one doesn't go there either. And um, that's kind of like what we have going on in this opening chapter that what seems like at every turn we're hitting a dead end, God has another road for his people to people to take. We're going to take some back roads here and some dusty streets to a place called Shiloh. It was where the Ark of the covenant was currently resting, and it was the tabernacle of worship for the people of God, who were still some worshiping him as required by the law. Whereas, as we saw at the end of the book of Judges 21:25, there was no man of God in the land, and everyone was doing what was right in their own eyes, except for a few people like we meet this morning, and even in their own lives. Not just looking at this at a wider national level, saying, Where is God in the life of the people of Israel? In zooming in to this family, they would be thinking, God, where are you in our situation? And we have to remember that things aren't always as they appear, even when we start the story and it seems to be certain disaster.
First point a man arose in worship...the story of Elkanah. Despite the darkness of where the Book of Judges ends and overlaps with this story, God still has a man in mind and a plan he's working out. And so we see a man of faith named Elkanah. And the main thing, even though there's a genealogy there that basically if you did the digging, would see he is part of the Levitical line. The tribe of Levi, I should say, he's not a priest. Um, but he seems to have the instincts of a man of God. Except then in verse two, where you see he has two wives. And so now we have three characters. And, um, is it three's a company, four is a crowd. No. Three is a crowd, as we might expect. Um, and two reasons for that. One is any time you disobey God's Word, uh, bad things happen in the sense of you can be sure God is not pleased. He can make something out of that disobedience, as we're going to see today. But when, Elkanah decided to take a second wife. Peninah he thought, well, I can't get any children for my first wife, Hannah, so I'll fix this. And what ensued is what we encounter here in the relationship in the home between these two women. Peninah, we're going to call her Penny for short today. It's just easier that way. And, I think that that name preaches because pennies have little value, but they do matter. So Penny is an awful woman. She mocks Hannah for her barrenness. She has a PhD in cruelty. And, it's unceasing Because year after year, verse six says, every time they go up to Shiloh to worship, she is labeled in verse six as the rival of Hannah, provoking her bitterly. I mean, so she is an irritant and aggravator a vexer. Now, why is Penny this way? I mean, you could say, well, it's Hannah's fault because she gets a double portion, and we don't know that's necessarily Penny's reason. Some people are just mean spirited and wicked, and they want to twist the knife however they can. So here we are. Elkanah is a man of God who takes his family to worship. But he also broke God's good design in marriage between one man and one woman. Genesis 2:24, and polygamy, anytime we see this in the Old Testament, is never God's design. Yet there is a laundry list of Old Testament men, righteous men who think they know better. And, uh, the household drama that would be Elkanah's duplex. Because he certainly built a duplex. There was no way this was all happening in one house. He was keeping these women separate. And so this mess was his own creation, to which one Puritan summarized his folly, "thus are men often beaten with rods of their own making." Brothers, don't say amen. Just put your head down and take it. Beaten with rods of their own making. So that is Elkanah's problem. And yet we have to remember that when we look at characters in the Old Testament to learn from, as we are told in the new, uh, they are there for our instruction, Paul writes. That no character, maybe Penny aside, but characters like Elkanah. They're neither perfectly wise or utterly corrupt like you and I, right? I mean, we're a mixture of good and bad decisions based on circumstances we find ourselves in. And so here we find with Elkanah, um, the choice he made to take a second wife and the problems that ensued in his home. Yet we see his faithfulness as a worshiper, leading his family every year, verse three says, to pack them up, jump on the camels, ladies, I'm gonna put you a few camels apart if you can't get along. And all the kiddos and they're taking their sacrifice to Shiloh. It says that in verse three, they're going every year and they're going despite verse three, the presence of wicked Hophni and Phinehas, which we will learn about in chapters two and three and derelict Eli as a father, who is the high priest and should be run in the show. He keeps going back. He could easily, um, say it's not worth the headache. I mean, look around. Nobody's worshiping Yahweh anymore here in Israel. Why should we? Because he wanted to obey God's Word. Because for whatever reasons, he chose to take Penny as another wife and have children, knowing that he shouldn't have. Maybe testament to what becomes culturally acceptable after a while, even in religious contexts. Hey, some of the patriarchs did it. Why can't I? So that aside, he is trying to keep Deuteronomy 16 and 17. Three times a year all your males shall appear before the Lord your God in the place which he chooses at the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and at the feast of Weeks, and at the Feast of Booths. And they shall not appear before the Lord empty handed. He's keeping that. Every man shall give as he is able, according to the blessing of the Lord your God, which he has given you. And he's keeping. Deuteronomy 14:23. You shall eat in the presence of the Lord your God, at the place where he chooses to establish his name. The tithe of your grain, your new wine, your oil, and your firstborn of your herd and your flock, so that you may learn to fear the Lord your God always. So, there is, amidst life trials and hardships in Elkanah's life, he is attempting to love God and lead his family in a way that God commands. And that cannot be said for the majority of people in the country this time. So here's a little side note dads, no matter what the situation is and how dark the days are in society and even how troubled your home might get, lead your families. Get them to church...baseline. I remember a few hours ago, this dark and stormy morning around 6 a.m. and I was thinking, I wonder how that will affect attendance. You know, now that people know they can catch it on the live stream. I'm thankful for the live stream. I'm thankful that people could watch when they're sick at sick at home and the gospel gets out that way, but man, is it easy to skip now. On top of that, dad's commitments to other activities, things pulling at you, kids that don't want to go. It is easy to mail it in and give yourself a pass. But that wasn't the example of Elkanah. He was committed. He was living out Joshua 24:15, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. I'm not saying he was perfect, but he wasn't passive. He owned his responsibility. Even as you can imagine, the drama every year that happened to spike when he was taking them to worship in Shiloh, because it spikes when they get to Shiloh, because there is no keeping Penny away from Hannah, and whatever she would do to twist the knife in Hannah at these times of worship, whatever little side comments she would make that she knew Hannah could hear about how wonderful it is that we've been blessed with all these kids, right, Hannah? I mean, unless you're cursed. I don't know. So this is the dead end that Elkanah seems to be at. And we see in verse 8, he's trying his best in this current visit to comfort his wife, because it says in verse 7, they do this year after year and this particular year, she's being provoked and she's weeping right there in the tabernacle and wouldn't eat. And so Elkanah tries his best to comfort her, his brokenhearted bride, his word choice is maybe not the best. I mean, you read those words however you like. Hannah, why do you weep and why do you not eat? And why is your heart sad? I think we're reading it going. We know why, but he's trying. And he says, am I not better to you than ten sons? And what's. What's that say? What's that supposed to mean? So this is the dead end we seem to be at, isn't it? It's not a pretty place to be. Even in an attempt to be in a place of worship with the people you love. A hard spot. As we started today saying the ground is tough. There could be nothing growing here. What good could come out of this broken moment?
Well, let's move from this dead end to a new road, because the focus of the camera moves from Elkanah to Hannah in verse 9. And now we see road number two. A woman arose in prayer. Elkanah, despite his flaws, would rise and lead his family every year to go worship Yahweh together and bring sacrifice. As hard as it was, and as many times as this has happened, and now we take a new road and the focus is Hannah, whatever, Elkana said. However, that helped her. We don't know. But she rose and ate and drank, and she goes to Eli in the temple of the Lord, sitting by the doorpost passes him by. Greatly distressed, praying to the Lord and weeping bitterly. She does what many of us know to do. I don't want to call it a last resort, but wherever it falls in your life, when you don't know what else to do, you pray. You pray, and she prays intensely. And she prays intimately. What do I mean? Well, that the intensity you could see in the words describing her distress and her weeping, the intimacy and that her lips were moving, but she wasn't making any sounds. I don't think she was saying, I'm afraid to speak up here. I think that's some prayers you've had, haven't you? Where the words can't come out. But they're in there. And she knows. She knows something about God. She has no leverage. Other than this...one quality about God. She remembers that he hears. Psalm 102:17 God will respond to the prayer of the destitute. He will not despise their plea. That's what Hannah knew. And then what she says displays her theology. The first phrase out of her mouth is O Lord of hosts. That phrase is used back in verse three, and it's actually the first time it's used in the Old Testament. It's used 230 other verses in the Old Testament, but this is the first time we encounter it. And some of you that love to study the names of God, this is the God of angel armies, God Almighty, Yahweh of hosts. And it's a title that describes his invincible omnipotence. So if you feel like you're in a hard spot and you are powerless and hopeless and helpless, here's a title of God maybe to start with. O Lord of hosts, meaning you command all of the armies of heaven. You are all powerful. You have everything at your disposal. And so we exalt God as we ought to. And then she does not exalt herself. In fact, she is abased. She is low, because immediately from looking to the heights of heaven to this Lord of hosts, she says. And if you will indeed look on the affliction of your maidservant, and remember me, and not forget your maidservant, she goes from the heights to the lows, right? She sees herself rightly before her. God. Uh, what do I have to offer you? Nothing. Nothing. I'm a maidservant, and I'm distressed. I'm afflicted. Echoing the language of Exodus 3:7, when God speaks to Moses and says, I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have given heed to their cry. I am aware of their sufferings. What did she know about Yahweh, Lord of hosts? He can hear the cries of the largest and the littlest all at the same time. He could hear all of Egypt back at the beginning of Exodus, crying out how oppressed they were in their suffering. And she believes that God hears her. Why else might she bring up this language of affliction and maidservants? Um, I mean, she would have known the stories of the wives of the patriarchs. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all had barren wives. Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, all stories of women who shared her same affliction. And so what she knows is she knows God can do something. It's just a matter of if. She knows. So she asks, remember me? Don't forget me. But would you give your maid servant a son? And I will give him to you. Is that bargaining with God? Is that the same as saying, God, I win this lottery ticket? The church gets half. Adam gets paid. The God who owns cattle on a thousand hills isn't really interested in your bargaining chip of the lottery. But he seems to be interested in Hannah here. Why? What's she saying? She says I will give him to you all the days of his life. He'll never have a razor touch his head. We know. Judges 13:1,.Manoah's wife was barren, and she was given a child. And Samson was under the Nazarite vow. And so she's echoing that story. Two books earlier. This kid will be will be dedicated to you. Why would that matter to her? Why this now? I'm sure she has asked before for a son. But it appears that this might be the first time. As far as we could tell, that she now says. Look, um. He's yours. God, you give me this one thing, you get everything. Because he will be everything to me. But you get him for your service. The best I can make of this would be that she is more interested in the glory of God being revived in Israel by the service of a godly son, which we're going to see contrasted by ungodly sons in Hophni and Phinehas, the ungodliness of the era that she's living in, the lack of a leader, no judge in the land, that maybe that motivation is what she's thinking of here. When she looks around and doesn't see anybody, anyone stepping up and she comes to this temple and she, like everybody else, sees the bad behavior of Eli's drunken and scoundrel boys and Eli himself a gluttonous slob, a depraved priest raising two awful sons. And it prompts in her not to pray, to curse Peninnah, but to praise God and ask, can you raise up a son for your glory? Yes, he'll be mine, but he's actually yours. And we say that around here a lot, that when you recognize grace, when she is praying to Yahweh, Lord of hosts, and recognizes his grace, that her the gift she would get back is out of gratitude right back to him. Because when your theology is one of grace, your ethic is one of gratitude. God, this is the picture of stewardship. It's all yours. He's not mine to keep. So if you would like a son dedicated to be useful to you. Here I am, your lowly maid servant. Remember me? Remember me. Well, back to the action 12-14. She's continually praying. So verse 11 is a portion of her prayer that the Holy Spirit intended for us to hear. But she is praying, continuing to pray. And Eli is sitting there just watching her. And, um. Because he's a louse of a man, she in his eyes, is been pouring out wine, not pouring out prayer. His view of things mistakes intensity for iniquity, because often in the eyes of the sinful, even prayerful earnestness could seem drunken foolishness. That's a side note. I think we learned something about Eli and ourselves. The potential in ourselves to commit the error that our own vices become the view in which we see other people. And beware of that log speck thing. When you see think you have such an accurate read on someone else's sin, what you perceive is sin. And Eli, blind to his own sins as a priest and a father, and certainly turning a blind eye to his sons. But how accurate or precise he can make a measurement of godly Hannah. So beware, friends. Be slow to speak of what we think we see in someone else. With all this distress and duress that Hannah is under, look at her gracious response, verse 14. I'm sorry. Verse 15. Um. Hannah replies, no, my Lord. A title of what? Honor and respect to one who deserves none of it. But she gives it. She calls him Lord. And then she explains herself. I mean, she could have said, you know what? I don't owe you an explanation, Eli. But she says, I'm. Here's my deal. I am a woman oppressed. That's why I'm doing what I'm doing here. And I'm oppressed in spirit. This is a spiritual issue for me. She doesn't bring up her problems at home. Um, I've drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I am pouring out my soul before God, so please consider me not worthless. How could she not have just slid in like your boys? Um. She didn't. I'm not a worthless woman, a scoundrel, a drunk. I'm speaking now in what you're seeing in me. Why is a great concern and provocation in my life? And so that gracious response sobers Eli up enough to what appears in verse 17 to be some priestly benediction. I'm sure he had it memorized. He says, go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant your petition that you have asked of him. There's no shepherding here. He doesn't care what she's going through. It's just the Lord bless you and keep you and you know, whatever. But you know what? In the humility of Hannah, she receives it. Verse 18, let your maidservant find favor in your sight. And she goes up, leaves, eats, and her face is no longer fallen. She's no longer sad. I mean the godliness. So sometimes we say, give me a good definition of godliness, and we flip to our New Testament and we find the verse godliness is this, and we rattle off words to describe. And that's good. But sometimes we say, what's godliness? And you say, it's it's a woman like Hannah. That's what godliness looks like. That in the face of provocation and persecution and in the presence of trials, did not lead to a response of sin, of doubt, of anger. But this is what we learn from this second, what seems to be dead end, because there's no light shining at the end of verse 18 other than from her face. Pretend you don't know what happens in 19 and 20. But in the midst of this furnace of affliction, God has melted away some dross in her heart that led her to this amazing prayer. Penny's provocations and Eli's accusations were the direct road to this supplication she makes. Do you see that in your life? Can you see your afflictions in the same light? I mean, I asked my question this week as I'm studying this text. Would Hannah have prayed as persistently and earnestly as she did, if not for the sin that Penny committed against her? Do you understand? In the sea of side characters we live in, that every single one of them, in God's providence, is used for his glory and your good as a child. There's no one out there as awful as they are, as awful as a Penny and an Eli who in this story joke's on them, find themselves unwillingly being used as Yahweh's servants because it brought Hannah to this point, this prayer, this request for that seed of a kingmaker to be planted. So I ask you again. What trial in your life that you have come to despise the most? Could be the very thing God's ordained to bring you to absolute dependence on him. Working out a plan that only he could design. I don't pretend to know the answer for you. But I can read this text and see that that's how God works in painful providence. And wouldn't it be harder to live in a world where God's not with you, on that barren road that you think is another dead end? I mean, as hard as it is to put yourself on that road and see what looks coming like a dead end, wouldn't it be worse to feel God's not there? Yes. And there's nothing actually beyond that dead end. There's no other way to go. And in Hannah's case, we see that many of God's precious saints find themselves in trials by no fault of their own, by no fault of their own, only by God's design. So through those trials, God forges in Hannah a tested and true faith, and will soon form in her a king making son, which is road number three.
Out of all this pain, out of persecution. A son arises in promise. Verses 19 to 28. Now the...I get myself in trouble on these. The Christian filmmaker, if they were doing this screenplay at the end of verse 18, would have done what Christian films often do is make things cheesy. And so right after verse 18, angels come down and there's a gender reveal party in the clouds. It's like, right, immediately there's no pause. There's no beat, there's no drama. It's just let's just wrap this up in a neat little package. No. Verse 19 back to normal life. They wake up early in the morning and they worship Yahweh. Nothing changed. And then they get back in their country squire station wagon with the wood panels. Because Hannah is beloved. She sits in the front where the AC still works. And Penny's in the back with all the bad kids. Sothey're on their way back to Rama. But nothing's changed. Other than Hannah has hope, but she doesn't know the answer. Verse 20. It came about in due time. Hannah conceives and gives birth to a son and names him Samuel. Because I have asked him of the Lord. In other words, God has heard my prayer. That's not the same as the name we said it meant. God is my name. So you put those two names of Samuel together. What it meant in the Hebrew God is my name. But what it sounded like to the Hebrew ear. God has heard my prayer. And that's a beautiful way to live your life, always believing that God hears. Not always knowing what his answer is going to be. But God is his name. So I'm going to keep asking. Persisting in prayer. Never giving up because God is his name, and maybe Samuel will remind you of that. Another twist in the road that we all see coming. Is she going to keep her vow? Verse 21 and 22. Elkanah is going back up. Samuel's been born. It would be time to bring him. But Hannah says, um. Verse 22, I won't go until the child is weaned, and then I'll bring him, that he may appear before the Lord to stay there forever. As in ,ah listen. This vow is real, but I'm playing for keeps. And that, uh, when he's weaned, when he's ready. I'm not going to come this year just to take him and then to bring him back. So I'm going to wean him. I'm going to raise him. I mean, I can't help but think in this moment, I'm one that's just a good mama. And Eli would be a lousy person to hand your kid over to, particularly an infant. So maybe at least she can love on him a few years, care for him as mothers do so well, so important those first couple years. Just raising them, loving them, pointing them to Yahweh. And then when he's weaned, I'll bring him before the Lord. And then he stays there for good. And this thought occurred to me, if I'm Elkanah. So he says, what sounds like a little bit of a timid approval, a cautious consent. Do what seems best to you. let him remain until you've weaned him. And is he being passive there? I don't know, he's conflicted. Right? He's not a perfect character, but maybe crossing his mind is, um. That could have led him to not want Samuel to go. If my wife was so distraught and sad without the son, and now she has him, and I know he she loves him to death, how much more sorry will she be if she gives him and never gets him back? Maybe I don't know. You know, sometimes we use our sanctified imagination. But the most important thing Elkanah does say is this. Only may the Lord confirm his word. What does he mean? Establish his word. As in, he understood enough of what happened when Hannah prayed earlier, now three years earlier, that there was a word of confirmation and that word of confirmation between Yahweh and Hannah was evident in Samuel being born. And so he's basically saying, Hannah, between you and the Lord, if this is the deal you made, if this is the vow you gave, then keep your part here. Raise this boy, and then the day is going to come where you're going to take him. So he leaves without her, and she remains and nurses her son until he's weaned. And verse 24 picks up. Boom! Time passes. Just like raising kids. Days are long, years go fast. Verse 24, he's a couple years old and she takes him up with her, with a three year old bull and an and an ephah of flour and a jug of wine, and brought him to the house of the Lord in Shiloh. Even though he was young. And so this is a lavish sacrifice. It actually echoes Numbers 15. Didn't think we'd get to numbers today, did you? Here we are in Numbers. Because everything points to the godliness of this home of Elkanah and Hannah. They want to keep the word down to the jot and tittle. They're thankful for this, son. And they're going to bring Yahweh exactly what he would have them. And so Numbers 15, verse eight. When you prepare a bull as a burnt offering or a sacrifice to fulfill a special vow. You bring the bull, then you offer with that an offering of 3/10 of an ephah of fine flour mixed with one half of a hin of oil, and offer as the drink, offering a half of a hin of wine. But in our text it says a jug of wine and a whole ephah of flour. Not 3/10. So actually in the original, like oldest Hebrew text, that three year old bull is actually the phrase three bulls above and beyond, which would match up with the amount of flour and wine brought. Sometimes there's a later text that a scribe is copying over and writes something wrong. And is it a three year old bull or three bulls? I would venture to say I think it was three. I think it accords with the amount of the other stuff brought. And I know you're like, who cares? I think it matters because it shows they were there to celebrate, to worship, to give to God what was his above and beyond and above and beyond the amount of bulls and above and beyond the amount of flour and above and beyond the wine and above and beyond this gift of Samuel. He's yours. She sees Eli waiting in the narthex and says, oh, my lord. Do you remember me? I was here three years ago. I prayed you thought I was drunk. No, she doesn't say that. I mean, she could. So many opportunities. Hannah could get a dig. But her word, her name meant gracious woman. She doesn't get a dig. She says, for this boy, I prayed. And the Lord has given me my petition, which I asked of him. So I have dedicated him to the Lord. He's yours. Eli. He's God's, but he's going to stay here with you. How does Hannah do this? Faith. Faith. Faithfulness to keep the vow. But faith not in, certainly not in Eli is going to be a really good example to this guy. Faith in the God of Samuel. Which is how we parent, isn't it? We have faith in the God of our children. But the hard part comes. She's going to leave him. How can she do it? It's what we said last week. Hannah. Like all of us side characters, realize we're not what? We're not the main character anymore. This gift that God gave her was to give back Samuel wasn't hers to keep. His story was going to be part of God's story. He was going to be set apart to serve God all his days and bring restoration of the kingdom back to Israel. And we know that we look at the rest of this book and see it, that this has all the makings of when God restores. God starts something new when this new child is born, whether it was Moses being born in the circumstances he was in raised up to deliver, whether it was Samuel being born in the circumstances he was in meant to restore, and of course, all pointing to Christ born in the in the midst of a dark time in Israel, of course, where there is no word from God for hundreds of years. And out of that darkness and difficulty and hardness of soil, the Messiah comes. But she had to know that Samuel was not her dream to keep, but it was a joy to give him over to the God who granted it. So what would maybe appear as a last dead end is actually opening up the rest of this wonderful book. Now, I know in the notes that you probably picked up at the door, it said I was going to go into Hannah's song. We're going to save that for next week. It's too good to rush through. But maybe a closing thought. We said any character in the Old Testament given as instructive, good or bad, if they are a person of faith, they can be an example to follow, but they're not the object of our faith. So we could see some good examples in Elkanah and Hannah to learn from examples of prayer. Examples of worship. Examples of faith. Examples of trust. But the object of our faith is beyond this passage. It's pointing to Christ, the ultimate hope in the ultimate darkness. And for you who aren't in Christ today, this Old Testament story gives you hope. How does it give you hope? Well, you see in the life of Christ. When he walked the earth, he showed us something about his Father that he just seemed to have this irresistible draw to the humble. He said I came to seek and save the lost. In Luke 5 he said, I didn't come to call the righteous. I came to call the sinners to repentance. And it seemed when he would say those things, certain people would respond and be drawn to him because he was drawn to them. And the people that thought they were already good and didn't need him, he had nothing to offer. But he teaches us about our God throughout the entirety of Scripture, who has this same irresistible tendency to be drawn towards the humble, to be drawn towards the person who says, I'm helpless. Would God still want me? You're the only person he would take. If you're not helpless, he doesn't have anything to do for you. But you're desperate, like Hannah was. If you're a desperate sinner here this here this morning. Who everything around you is hard and there seems to be no hope. You're exactly the person he's drawn to save. But that's got to come from here in you. And even look at everything around you, the Pennys and the Elis in your life. And rather than feel like you're just the victim of everyone else's evil. Well, if it's driven you to here today looking for some answer, it's exactly what God designed for your good to see that your only hope is not in man. Good or bad. Your hope is in God. Your hope is in His Son, Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for you, the sinner. For his righteousness to be given to you that you don't have and you can't offer. But you can receive his mercy if you call on him today. And those in Christ. A final word on Penny, because I know you just love hearing about her. What can we learn from her life? Well, we can learn this. Uh, we can praise God, as one preacher put it. Who can take even the venom of a Peninnah and use it to fill a cradle with a kingmaker?  
Let's pray. Father, we thank you. For your loving providence. We could say that as your children. We could say it through tears. We could say it after tears, too. When we can look and see how your hand has directed our lives. Protected. Allowed pain. Refined us. Changed us. Answered us when we thought you forgot us. Remembered us when we weren't remembering you. You designed it all so that this morning we can read a story as if we're in it. Because we understand it. We need reminded of it. We need reminded. Things aren't always as they appear. Even wherever some people sit this morning that you're working and that you would promote your children the faith to call out to you again, even when they've not felt up to it, but that they would this morning asking for help and for those who are not in Christ this morning that you would draw them to yourself. Draw them with that love that we find irresistible, only in you that loves those who find themselves helpless and unable to do anything for themselves, that you would save them. Lord. We ask this in Christ's name. Amen.