Episode Transcript
Well, good morning.
It's time for us to begin our Bible study.
We'll be in 2 Kings chapter 21.
2 Kings chapter 21.
I'll do my best Brother Fulton here.
Hello, James Big Wheels Johnson.
Hello, Jeremenys.
Is that alright?
Now I can't look at this phone very long and do that, but I got us started right, didn't I?
2 Kings chapter 21 and verse 24 is our text this morning.
Once you get there, turn to 2 Chronicles chapter 34 and just mark that.
So we're in 2 Kings 21, that's where we'll start.
And I want you to mark 2 Chronicles 34.
34.
Well, our sound team is down, but we have got Jeff up there helping out.
And Brother Brandon already had us online from afar, and the pastor got up here early this morning.
Slick Rick is sick Rick today, that's why he's not here.
And I didn't know you could get the Fonz down with a human illness, but something got him today so I think that's pretty that's quite a an infirmity to take Rick down we miss him but we sure thank you people who filled in and we're gonna keep on rolling today all right I hope you found your place in those two chapters King Manasseh has been replaced by his wicked son Amon and Amon has been killed by his own servants in his own house, his own wicked servants.
And during the end of our last lesson we were studying how the people of a nation are supposed to respond when they have wicked leaders and we concluded that it was not our job to assassinate our leaders.
That was a pretty easy deduction, because that's murder.
And we also learned that God sets up kings and he takes them down as well, and that includes presidents and mayors and everybody else.
And because he sets up leaders and takes them down, people have to learn to serve under their leaders, whether they're good or evil.
Now, do you realize that there's been a time in your life where you served under a leader who was wicked?
And maybe several, and I'm not just talking about national leaders, local leaders as well.
But we have to learn to serve under leaders whether they're good or evil.
And the best way to remember why we do that is that God sets them up and he takes them down.
So this is a biblical stance.
And I'd like to remind you of what God told his people when they were about to be taken captive and transported to Babylon and this is found in Jeremiah chapter 27 verses 2 through 6.
Jeremiah 27 2 through 6.
Thus saith the Lord to me, make thee bonds and yokes and put them upon thy neck and send them to the king of Edom and to the king of Moab and to the king of the Ammonites and to the king of Tyrus and to the king of Zion by the hand of the messengers which come to Jerusalem unto Zedekiah king of Judah and command them to say unto their masters thus saith the Lord God of hosts the God of Israel thus shall you say unto your masters I have made the earth the man and the beast that are upon the ground by my great power and by my outstretched arm and have given it unto whom it seemed meet unto me and now have I given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon my servant and the beasts of the field have I given him also to serve him now I just named off several Gentile nations Moab and Ammon and Tyre and Sidon, but also Jerusalem, Judah, Israel.
And we just read as well that God said Nebuchadnezzar, who was the enemy of the Jews, he said Nebuchadnezzar is my servant.
I've got a purpose for putting him on the throne And I am the one who has given you into his hand."
So that tells us something that it's not just good leaders God sets up, it's all leaders.
And when a nation has a wicked leader then you can be sure that that was in God's sovereign plan and that nation deserves that wicked leader.
You know we don't deserve any good leaders.
We don't.
This country as a whole, since its founding, has just gone off the rails to where we are now.
We don't deserve any good leaders.
We don't deserve anything good at all, in fact.
But when we get that, that's the grace of God.
But while you have a wicked leader, you have to remember these truths that God has a purpose in that and we need to serve And the time period for which all these nations that I named, that I read you about, the time period for which all those nations, including Judah, would serve Nebuchadnezzar was 70 years.
And God threatened that any nation who would not submit to Nebuchadnezzar would be punished.
So both the wicked servants of King Ammon who slew him and the wicked people of Judah who slew those servants were displeasing to God.
Even David, when King Saul tried to kill him several times, David was terrified to touch Saul, to touch the Lord's anointed, he called him.
In 1 Samuel chapter 24, 1 Samuel chapter 24, David had just snuck into a cave where Saul was sleeping.
Saul was on the hunt for David.
He was trying to kill him.
And David snuck into this cave where Saul was sleeping and he cut off his skirt.
Now Saul wasn't wearing a dress.
That's not what that means.
The skirt is the border of the garment.
So he cut that off.
And I want you to listen to verses 10 through 12.
This is what occurred after that event.
And David is talking to Saul across the way.
And he said, behold, this day, thine eyes, that is Saul's eyes.
Thine eyes have seen how that the Lord had delivered thee today into mine hand in the cave, and some bade me kill thee."
So there were some people with David who said, "Kill him.
Take him out."
"But mine eye spared thee, and I said, 'I will not put forth mine hand against my Lord, for he is the Lord's anointed.'
"Moreover, my father," this is what David called Saul, "see the skirt of thy robe in my hand.
For in that I cut off the skirt of thy robe and killed thee not, know thou and see that there is neither evil nor transgression in mine hand."
So David said, "If I would have killed you, that would have been evil, that would have been a transgression, even though you have tried to kill me these many times."
And he said, "And I have not sinned against thee, yet thou huntest my soul to take it.
The Lord judge between me and thee, and the Lord avenge me of thee, but mine hands shall not be upon thee."
Now that's the right attitude right there.
We pray for leaders everywhere.
Kings, all that are in authority, that's what the Bible tells us to do.
And whether they're good or bad, we pray that they would submit themselves to God.
You know Manasseh would have been one, if somebody decided to take out an evil wicked leader, that he would have been one to take out, wouldn't he?
But he became a Christian later in life.
It was not God's will that he be taken out.
And compared to Amon, King Saul was a much better king and he had his faults, but he wasn't wholly given to wickedness and idolatry like Amon was.
He was insanely jealous of David.
He tried to kill David and perhaps you remember some of those situations from our study in the books of 1st and 2nd Samuel.
It's been a few years since we've been in those books.
But that's actually how we got to where we are now.
We started in 1st and 2nd Samuel and 1st Kings and now we're in 2nd Kings getting fairly close to the end of those books of the Kings.
And even the people had discouraged or had encouraged David to take Saul out of this world but he would not do it.
And if anyone would have seemed justified to have killed a king, a king who was doing evil, then it would have been David from whose seed the Savior would one day come.
And just like David said in the passage we read, we need to leave it to God to avenge us of wicked leaders.
That's God's job.
We have, as I said before, and as you have exercised many times, you have your voice and you have your vote.
Use them.
But vengeance is not yours.
You have a voice, you have a vote, you do not have the right to vengeance.
God said, "Vengeance is mine.
I will repay, thus saith the Lord."
And look back in your text now, we are in 2 Kings 21 if you've just joined us on the internet.
And we're in verse 24.
And it said at the end of the verse, "And the people of the land made Josiah his son, king in his stead."
Now it's hard for me not to look ahead and to speak ahead about Josiah, But I'll try to remember to stay with you and not jump forward with what I know about him.
Let me read verses 25 through 26.
"Now the rest of the acts of Amon, which he did, are they not written in the book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah?
And he was buried in the sepulchre in the garden of Uzziah, and Josiah his son reigned in his stead."
And if you were with us a few weeks ago in 2 Chronicles 33, we already covered those two verses and what was said in them over in 2 Chronicles.
So now let's go into chapter 22 and let's read about Josiah.
Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign.
And he reigned 30 and one years in Jerusalem.
And his mother's name was Jedidiah, or Jedidah, excuse me, the daughter of Adiah of Boscheth.
Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign.
His grandfather was 12 when he began to reign.
His father was 22 when he began to reign.
You've got to be 40 years old to be the President of the United States, so can you imagine an eight-year-old boy on the throne?
Now, with that being said, he was very likely guided by his mother.
He wasn't guided by his father because he was dead, but he was very likely guided by his mother and some of the officials of the palace because of his age.
And so because there were servants in the palace who most likely helped Josiah, we can see God's hand in the slaying of Amon's servants because they were wicked.
And God, even though murder is wicked, murder is wicked.
God still is sovereign even under evil circumstances.
And those wicked servants who conspired against Amon, had they been allowed to live, would have conspired against Josiah too.
They would have, especially with his age, they would have tried to push him around and draw up close to him and influence him as a boy to make poor decisions.
And they would be decisions that would benefit those servants.
And it says in verse one, he reigned 30 and one years in Jerusalem.
Now, when you hear somebody say, well, I, I worked at such and such company for 31 years, you think, wow, now that's a good long career right there.
You, if you retired, you deserve to retire.
You put your, you paid your dues.
Well if you add 31 to eight, that's 39, that's not a very long time to live, is it?
39 years old.
Except for Sarah, all of us in here have, are just barely 39, aren't we?
We just, just over the hump.
Some of us may have seen it twice, but we have made 30, now all of us made it past 39.
And I hope to see it twice myself.
And knowing what we know about how kings reign for life, we can reasonably conclude here that Josiah will not see his 40th birthday.
Now I have a 41 year old daughter, and to me, she is still young.
She's still a young lady.
And she's a wife and a mother and been a hairstylist for 22 years, but she still seems like a young lady to me.
Now Josiah was a boy king for about the first third of his reign.
Now verse 2, "And he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, and walked in all the way of David his father, and turned not aside to the right hand or to the left."
Well that's refreshing.
The last two kings we read about didn't have that said about them, did it?
And in fact, Josiah's father was absolutely wicked all the way to death.
The wicked people here don't believe God's watching them, but Josiah knew God was watching him.
And when Josiah did right, he didn't do right, and this is important, he didn't do right according to what the popular social practices were.
That's not what determined whether he was right.
It says he did right in the sight of the Lord.
Now godly people will know when a leader does right in the sight of the Lord.
Because that leader won't waver when public opinion is against him.
He'll stay with it when the poll numbers are high, When the poll numbers are low, that leader will not waver.
That's a godly leader, and you just don't see very many like that.
One of the reasons I have a low opinion of many, maybe even most politicians, but certainly many of them, is that their convictions seem to change with the direction of the wind.
They'll pound their fist on something like this and shout loudly about what they believe and what they'll do when they take office, if you'll just give them your vote.
However, once they take office and an important question comes up, a particular bill comes up in the legislature or a city ordinance or a proposition, local proposition that affects the way your tax dollars are spent comes up.
Those same people will do, they'll do what Obama called one time evolving in his thinking.
Well, it's okay to evolve in your thinking if you admit you were wrong and you want to be right.
Now that's just growing up, isn't it?
Sometimes we're wrong about things and if Evolving our thinking means we admit we were wrong and now we want to be right.
Nothing wrong with that.
But true convictions about what is right shouldn't change any more than the answer to 2 + 2.
Once you've settled on what's right, you should never move again.
By doing right in the sight of the Lord, Josiah set himself apart from the last two kings, his father and his grandfather.
And here's what was said about the reign of Manasseh and also the reign of Amon.
This is just to remind you.
And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord.
Now that was said about Manasseh and Amon.
But about Josiah, he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord.
The measuring stick for whether a king is good or bad is not how the economy is.
It's not by how many children were born into the country that, or how many nations they conquered, or how many laws they passed.
The measuring stick for a good king was whether he did right in the sight of the Lord.
And that's the way it is for anybody.
In fact, that's the measuring stick for a good father, a good mother, a good boss, a good president, and certainly here for a good king.
And the condemnation of a bad king is whether he did evil in the sight of the Lord.
Not whether, now somebody may say uh... well people don't like my particular candidate that I voted for, they say he's bad and evil and wicked, but all he's done is good since he's been in office.
Listen, once again, that leader is not to be condemned because of what people think of him.
He's to be condemned if he does wrong in the sight of the Lord, if he does evil in the sight of the Lord.
And so whatever your political persuasion is, if you know what's right in the sight of the Lord, and it's found right here in God's word and your vote is for somebody who goes against this.
When you had a choice to vote for somebody who goes who goes by the Bible then you're wrong.
I don't care whether you're a Republican or a Democrat or an Independent or a Green Party or Libertarian or whatever you want to call yourself, this is your measuring stick right here.
It's the word of God.
Now what you don't see is the Bible measuring any of these Kings by whether he does good or evil in the sight of the people.
In other words, according to their standards.
God was not asking for man's approval when he spoke well of a king.
When God spoke well of Josiah here, he didn't say, "Well, let me think about how everybody's going to--whether they're going to approve of him or not.
Let me think in my foreknowledge about whether he was well received by the people or not."
He didn't do that.
He said he did right in the sight of the Lord.
That was all that mattered.
God doesn't mix his opinion and man's opinion together to determine how wonderful a king is.
And that's important for us to remember.
What is Facebook?
Well it's many things, but one of the things it does is it leads people in a wrong direction.
I'm not talking about what we're doing here, we're preaching God's Word, that's one of good uses of it.
But one of the things it does is leads people in a wrong direction about the evaluation of themselves and others.
It's often used to make themselves feel better about themselves.
People use it to, they'll validate their posts, they'll put something out there and then if a bunch of people give it a thumbs up or a like or a smiley face or a heart or something, they'll say, "Oh, okay," and maybe they do put memes on there and take selfies, you know, photos of themselves, glamour shots and all that.
And if somebody gives them a down vote or makes a negative comment about that person on Facebook, then that person gets fended.
Let me feed you a hard truth right here.
This is for everybody.
If you're going to put yourself out there on social media, get ready for people to criticize you, to mock you, or even threaten you.
Now if you can accept that, then do what you will.
But if that changes your opinion of who you are, or of what's right and wrong, then get off that crazy social media.
If your value is determined by social media approval, then you're in for a hard fall.
You know, when we post about our Bible teaching or we post these lessons on Facebook, we normally have positive comments or sometimes we'll have a question here and there.
We love answering those questions.
However, occasionally someone will take issue with something that was said and they'll usually at Brother Fulton and the only thing that matters to us is whether what we taught was right in the sight of the Lord that's all that matters and those haters that are the ones who want to argue and debate that is nothing more than the rat being on the on the treadmill or on the little wheel it just never stops you can't you can keep answering them and answering them and answering them and they're going to fire back and fire back and you may as well just quit.
Give them your best answer and then stop.
But what we don't concern ourselves with is whether somebody has said something negative about our Sunday school lesson, our Bible teaching, our Genesis to Jesus, something the pastor posts explaining a Bible passage.
That's where we get the most criticism right there is when he tries to do the world a favor and take a tough Bible verse or passage or perhaps a doctrine that's misunderstood and explain it to people.
And then here comes the haters.
But you know what?
That doesn't change what we do.
It can't.
We can't let what the world decides to be good or evil determine whether we teach God's Word and try to help people understand it.
So Josiah's was not marked by social popularity but by the fact that he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord.
Now look back in your text in verse 2 it says, "And walked in all the way of David his father."
So added to the first part of the verse is a phrase here that gives us a personal example.
King David, whom the Bible calls a man after God's own heart.
He walked in such a way that kings who lived after him would have their walk, their lives, compared to his.
If they walked according to the way David walked then they did right in the sight of the Lord.
That doesn't mean if they did every single thing David did everything would be right in the sight of the Lord because David was a sinner who had to be saved by grace just like we are, but he walked in the sight, right in the sight of the Lord.
And so what it also shows us because David lived many years before these Kings that we're reading about in the last few months, what David did and what God said about David and what he says about Josiah here walking after the way David walked, he's already said Josiah did right in the sight of the Lord.
That shows us that God's standard for righteous living never changes.
So if people think, well that was Old Testament, the standard never changes for righteousness.
It never does.
And the reason for that is that God's word is never changed.
And it says in verse 2, "He turned not aside to the right hand or to the left."
And the word "turned" there is also translated as "departed."
And the words "turned" and the word "aside" are actually the same Hebrew word.
So it's telling us the same thing.
It's not that Josiah never sinned or made a mistake.
It's that he did not depart from the way of David his father.
He never said in his heart, "I think I'm going to walk my own way from now on," rather than the way my father David walked.
Today we use the phrase "right" and "left" to describe a person's political or social beliefs or actions.
A conservative person may be described as right wing or in the extreme as far right and a liberal person may be described as left wing or far left.
And what we know is that being on the right is not the same thing as being on the left.
That's pretty easy math, isn't it?
Those on the left say and believe that they're correct in their social views or their political persuasions or their religious beliefs.
And those on the right also say that they are correct about all those things too.
And it doesn't matter whether you're on the right or on the left in this sense.
What matters is truth.
That's what matters.
God's truth.
So the question is, where do you stand when it comes to truth?
I'm not talking about the way we view politics and religion and social issues today.
I'm talking about God's truth because that's the standard for it all.
Where do you stand when it comes to Bible truth?
Do you add to it?
Or are you on the other hand, do you take away from it?
Both are bad.
Neither one of those is correct.
The way of the truth is the way.
And we've looked at that word way several times in our study of the, in the Proverbs, the way of the truth is the way on which all people are to walk.
Whether you call yourself left-wing right-wing, moderate, independent, whatever you are, there is one way.
On which you are to walk.
And if you're not on it, get on it.
Because mankind has departed from that way, and when you depart from that way, it doesn't matter whether you turn to the left or the right, you're not correct.
And that's why our text told us that Josiah, he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, like his father David, and he turned not to the right or the left.
He didn't leave the way.
And the only way, and you think, "Well, boy, I've turned to the right or left plenty of times in my life, and I got back on it."
That's because you're a sinner.
That's because I'm a sinner.
None is righteous, none is holy.
But Jesus walked that way and he never departed to the right or to the left.
And so if you're asking, well, how can I walk in that way and never depart from the right or the left?
You've got to do it in the person of Jesus Christ.
He's you can't do it.
You're supposed to, you have to, you're obligated to, but you can't. because you're a sinner.
So the only way I can keep from turning to the left or the right is to walk in the person of Jesus and I am and I will because I'm a Christian.
He walked that way and he walks that way and when I am in him which I am and I always will be then my spiritual man walks in that way.
My flesh opposes it and so does yours.
My flesh says, "Boy, it'd be a lot easier just to not do this and not do that.
My flesh says it sure would be easy just to go find a sermon on the internet and print it out and read it on Sunday morning.
But my spiritual man says, "Oh no, you study God's Word."
He said, "Study to show thyself approved."
He didn't say go to the internet and get someone else's sermon that may or may not be right.
Now before we read verses 3 through 4 in this passage, I asked you to mark 2 Chronicles 34, and I want us to look at some events that happened before verses 3 and 4 in our text, okay?
So, let's go over to 2 Chronicles 34.
You probably already have it marked.
And you'll notice the first two verses in 2 Chronicles 34 are basically the same two verses we just read.
So I'm going to pick up in verse 3, and we're going to learn some more details about Josiah that we don't have in 2 Kings.
"For in the eighth year of his reign, while he was yet young, he began to seek after the God of David his father.
And in the twelfth year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem from the high places and the groves and the carved images and the molten images.
So let's look at that first part for a few moments.
In the eighth year of his reign, now in the eighth year of Josiah's reign he would have been sixteen.
The Bible teaches us that he was young when he was sixteen.
It calls him young.
If you're sixteen, you're young.
If you're forty-one, you're young.
I said that about my daughter a minute ago.
What did Josiah do when he was sixteen?
He began to seek after the God of David, his father.
Boy, there's not anything more important.
No, not getting your driver's license, not anything important than seeking after the God of David, his father.
And oh how the Bible urges young people to seek the Lord.
You'll see that multiple times in the Bible.
Old and New Testament.
Psalm chapter 119 verse 9.
Psalm 119 verse 9.
Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way by taking heed thereto according to thy Psalm 71 5.
Psalm 71 5.
"For thou art my hope, O Lord God; thou art my trust from my youth."
And then Psalm 71 17.
71 17.
"O God, thou hast taught me from my youth, and hitherto have I declared thy wondrous works."
So there is absolutely no reason that young people can't be taught God's Word.
That sounds kind of simple doesn't it?
There's absolutely no reason that God can't teach them from their youth and he wants to and he will.
When is the time to seek the Lord?
When you are a young man or a young woman.
You may say, "Brother Andy, I wasted all those years.
I didn't get around to that till I was much older."
Well, praise God.
You're still young to him, by the way.
But, relatively speaking, that's the time to do it.
How many years did I waste not seeking the Lord in my youth as I should have?"
Because Josiah sought the Lord as a youth, look back in your text here in 2 Chronicles 33, 3, it said, "And in the twelfth year, he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem."
Now this means he was 20 years old.
So he began to seek the Lord his God when he was 16, and by the time he was 20, he had enough good Bible doctrine.
That's four years of seeking the Lord his God.
He put himself through a four-year seminary, didn't he, before there was a seminary.
And no doubt he had a hold of the writings of Moses and the prophets and the Proverbs and the Psalms.
Those were all written before Josiah was ever born.
And he had a lot of doctrine to learn in those four years.
And when he did, it said he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem.
Now to purge is to clean or to purify.
And Jerusalem and Judah were dirty, not just physically, but spiritually dirty.
They were unclean.
Their government, their houses, their temple, their priesthood, all of it was dirty.
And four years after he began to seek the Lord, Josiah began to purge that nation.
And those four years of seeking the Lord were not spent playing church softball or Easter egg hunts or going to worldly things to be entertained or living up to high life and eating all the finest foods and enjoying himself while he was young, sowing his wild oats.
It was spent seeking the Lord.
Josiah was growing.
He wasn't just growing physically, he was growing spiritually.
He was drinking spiritual milk and at some point during those four years he began to eat spiritual strong meat.
And that's the natural course of things.
Sometime during those four years, Sister Sheila Josiah had an "aha" moment.
He realized what bad shape Jerusalem was in and Judah and at 20 years of age he was spiritually mature enough to know it's time to clean house and he purged Judah and Jerusalem from look back in your text there in verse 3 the high places and groves and the carved images and the molten images all of which we've studied before so we won't go into great depths here about what those things are.
However, by looking at the writing of this verse, we know that groves, high places, carved images, and idols made Judah and Jerusalem dirty, made them unclean.
And yes, the objects themselves were unclean because of what they were were used for.
But the people who worshiped them were more unclean.
You know, there's nothing wrong with a piece of wood, is there?
You look at a piece of wood, you look at a beautiful tree, you don't think, "Well, that's an unclean tree."
No, it's a beautiful tree.
It's growing just like it's supposed to.
It has its bark and its branches and its leaves and maybe have flowers or fruit depending on what kind of tree it is.
Nothing wrong with that piece of wood.
There's nothing wrong with a vein of gold or with a carving knife or a hammer or a building tool.
Nothing wrong with any of those.
It's what they're used for that determines whether they're unclean or not.
You know a baseball bat is just a baseball bat, isn't it?
But if somebody picks it up and starts wailing away at their next door neighbor and beats them up with it, then it's become a deadly weapon.
But in the hands of a skilled baseball player, it's a beautiful thing to watch a baseball player be able to hit something thrown at him 95 miles an hour that moves like a morning dove and he can zero in and hit that thing out of the ballpark.
Beautiful thing to see.
You don't call it a deadly weapon there, do you?
And these images and all of that, they were made out of things and made with things that of themselves are not unclean.
Romans chapter 14, verse 14, and if you're taking notes, put a little letter A.
Romans 14, 14a, because I'm just going to use the first half of the verse.
Paul wrote, "I know and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean of itself but because these materials and the tools in our text were used to make idols and images in high places then they were unclean and they needed to be purged.
Those idols needed to be purged and what we're seeing is that although Manasseh had cast out the idols, you remember we read that word it means he hurled those idols out of the city.
The altars and the strange gods and all that that were in the house of the Lord, he hurled them out but Jerusalem was not purged of them completely at this time.
The people held on to their images or perhaps they built more images when after Manasseh died, certainly during Amon's reign.
They held on to their false religion right here in their hearts.
But Josiah would purge Jerusalem, not just the house of the Lord.
He would purge Judah, not just Jerusalem.
And in verse four it says, "And they break down the altars of Balaam in his presence."
Now this was important.
To break down the altars of Balaam was to outwardly tear down the place of sacrifice to the religious figure that they once held in high esteem, who was Baal.
However, it's not so much whether they broke down those physical altars.
It's not so much whether they tore them down outwardly, but whether they broke them down in their hearts.
Man is pretty good at faking repentance in the presence of others when his heart remains just as dark as it was before.
Perhaps you've watched televised revivals, religious revivals, or crusades.
Perhaps you've been to a camp meeting or youth meeting or some or even a regular church meeting if you'll call it that, and you've seen people make some kind of outward spectacle of themselves as a sign of their supposed repentance.
Or maybe they're saying, "By doing this I'm renewing my faith," or "I'm rededicating myself to the Lord," and perhaps some of them are sincere in their repentance, they're just misled about how to express it, But many are not.
They'll run around the church building, roll on the floor, seem to faint in the arms of another person.
They speak great swelling words and make solemn promises in front of everybody, hoping others will say, "Wow, boy, he's really sincere."
But they don't convince God.
He knows their dark hearts.
And if this tearing down of the altars of Balaam outwardly is not coupled with a true repentance and faith, then the people of Jerusalem and Judah are going to be in big trouble with God.
And we'll pick up with the rest of that verse next week.
Father, thank you for those who came and for those who tuned in online.
We miss our people who aren't here, but Father, we know that that your word reaches across the world because of the internet.
Thank you for the good use of that wonderful discovery that others may hear.
And Lord, we pray now for the next hour for the pastor as he preaches, for the people as we sing and pray, and as we listen to your word, that we all may grow and bear fruit for your kingdom's sake, in Jesus' name, amen.
