fondation series 20

It’s been a couple of weeks since we were in the foundation series. If you remember the last thing we were talking about in the book of Ezra was the co-mingling of faiths. The people in the land had married foreigners. But I noted that it wasn’t as simple as not marrying other nationalities. And I pointed out that Jesus ancestry included righteous people who were Canaanites and Moabites. Therefore the main point wasn’t being married to different nationalities it is being married to people of different faiths. It is allowing yourself to be serving two Gods and mixing and matching beliefs in worship.

This problem has plagued the church since almost the creation of the world. We don’t want to serve God in the way that he proscribes in his word; we are always trying to add to it. Like Ezra; it should cause us to humble ourselves before God with praying and confession of sin, weeping and prostrating ourselves before god in humbleness. It should but it doesn’t. Does it? I wonder sometimes where our hearts are truly at. Where is my heart? Why don’t I get broken hearted over this?

And the truth is that I do get broken hearted over it. I see the mixture in my own life but more than that in my children’s lives. There is no longer a clear line as to what is right and wrong not because right and wrong have changed their character but because our eyes have become blurry and we can’t see straight anymore. I thank God that my spiritual eyes are becoming less blurry all the time and yet at the same time my clear eyes cause me to be sad; because what I see breaks my heart.

You see when I start to see clearly I see my own sin for what it is. I have spent my whole life trying to embrace the concept of dying to self and I am just now, after 39 years as a professed believer and 50 years in the church beginning to grasp what that means. I used to think that dying to myself meant dying to wanting to have a good job living an ordinary life by going into the ministry. But I am coming to understand that you can give up an ordinary life, give your life to full time ministry, and still not die to yourself or take up your cross.

In my life I am beginning to understand that learning to go to work at a real job, in the real world, making a real living is a major part of dying to myself. It goes against everything I ever wanted to do. I wanted to be a rock star for Jesus mostly because I was hoping for money for nothing and chicks for free. I wanted life to be has hassle free as possible. And I could take all of those things and mix them with christianeze and come up with something that looks like Jesus and sounds like Jesus but really isn’t Jesus at all. It’s just me wrapped in a Jesus costume.

You see that may look good to the casual observer but if I am still doing my own thing even if I say it is for Jesus, well, I’m still doing my own thing and I am not where God wants me to be which is dead to my self.

The goal is to die to your ways of doing things of your way of trying to micro manage the world and your own life and to live on the path of life in obedience to God. For me that meant learning to settle down, to live in a single location for an extended period. I have been in the Nashville area for over 20 years now and the same house for around 9. That is a record for me. I have been at the same job for 5 and that ties that record. Those are big deals for me and they are a part of what it means to die to myself. But even with all those gains I am confronted almost everyday with new ways of dying to myself.

One way that I am being forced to die is in learning to lead others. You see it is much easier for me to just do it myself. I prefer to be left alone so that I can just do whatever it takes to do the job but the goal is to train others to do what is needed. Well, I hate that and hate is putting it mildly. It aggravates me to have to deal with people and manage them because I have to interact with them and I would just as soon be left alone.

God knows this and I think he is getting much pleasure out of forcing me to not do everything by myself and causing me to begin to equip others. I don’t want to do it. It is inconvenient. It messes up my day. It messes up my plans. It gives me ulcers. It stresses me out. Bottom line I prefer to be left alone so I can do my job.

But that is not what a manager is supposed to do. In our day and age management seems to end up becoming 24 hour baby training. My job is to teach people how to work or to put it another way my job is to teach people to do the very thing that they don’t want to do. I don’t want that to be my job. I don’t want to train anybody to work. I want them to know how to do everything already so that I can just coast. I know what my job is when it boils right down to it and I also know how much I hated doing that. It’s the same reason I live with an untrained, unobedient dog that I have to scream after and chase around the neighborhood. I don’t want to be responsible. I want to be irresponsible.

I am finally beginning to realize that until I quit avoiding doing the task that I have been assigned I will never get to move on in the plan. Sometimes you have to learn how to do something before you can be good at the next stage of development. You have to learn to speak before you can learn to spell or learn the math tables before you can do trigonometry.
On good days, I recognize that my whole life has been structured to lead me to this place where I do not want to go but where I need to go to be the man of God that I am called to be. Does that make sense?

But sometimes the thing you need to learn to do is the scariest thing you can think of. It is the thing that you’ve been running away from most of your life. If I could have my way I would run away to the land of irresponsibility. I would do as little as possible to get by in life. But I don’t have my way. God has plans for me and they include me growing up into maturity and learning to do the things I don’t want to do. Part of that is learning to train others to do without punching them in the face or without turning and running in the other direction. Most of the time it could go either way.

Ezra finds himself confronted by the sins of the people and his response is to humble himself by praying, making confession, weep and prostrating himself before God. And while he is doing this a very large assembly, men, women and children, gathered to him from Israel, the church; for the people wept bitterly. Ezra humbled himself and the people followed suit. It is important to understand that we lead the body of Christ by example. I can speak to you every week about what you should be doing but you will learn to live by the way I live. I demonstrate what I believe by what I do when I’m not preaching. My actions show you the gospel. That’s a wee bit scary to me because I’m not sure what you’re learning from that. I hope that you are learning to be humble before God but I know in my own heart that there are plenty of times when I am not modeling that to you.

At the same time I hope that you are beginning to understand the depth of sin in our hearts. I hope that from what I tell you about my own life that you understand that my struggle with sin is very real and very deep. It is personal. And it includes all of my life. I tell you about my struggles with growing up, with facing my fears and learning to walk in the faith that casts out fear so that you will know that grace is there to cast out those things that you fear too.

I know plenty of people who would rather die than stand up to the things that they fear. I was that way for a long time. I would rather kill myself slowly with substance abuse than face the things that I feared. I am slowly learning that if I want to turn and run from something, some area of my life then there is probably something there that I don’t want to face. There is something there that I would prefer not be dealt with. And what that tells me is there is something there that I don’t want God to deal with. Whenever I find myself wanting to turn away from an area of life by running to an addiction I’m learning that there is something there that I don’t want to die to. And if I am going to continue to grow and mature then that is going to have to be dealt with. That is really what this passage in Ezra is all about: Being confronted with sin and then dealing with it.

In this instance it is a huge corporate sin – almost the whole body of Christ is involved in this sin. Notice that God draws the leader to repentance over the sins of the people and then he draws the people to repentance. Ezra doesn’t sit around and point fingers at all the sinners. He humbles himself and the people follow him.

In verse two they begin to confess their sins: One of the sons of Elam, said to Ezra, "We have been unfaithful to our God and have married foreign women from the peoples of the land; yet now there is hope for Israel in spite of this. 3"So now let us make a covenant with our God to put away all the wives and their children, according to the counsel of my lord and of those who tremble at the commandment of our God; and let it be done according to the law. 4"Arise! For this matter is your responsibility, but we will be with you; be courageous and act."
There is a time to be sad and grieve over the sins of the nations but there is also a time to act and be responsible. Good leadership, leads the people to action. I want you to understand that it takes courage to stop sinning. It takes courage to do what is right and to change your behavior. It takes courage to climb back on the path of life and try to stay there.

Ezra rises to the occasion. He stops weeping and he begins to implement repentance in the church. He begins with the leaders and he makes the leading priests, the Levites and all Israel, take oath that they would do according to this proposal; so they took the oath.
We notice in verse 6 that even though he was beginning to do he did not stop mourning over the sin. He is so concerned over this sin that he is fasting. And then he sends out people to proclaim an assembly at Jerusalem. Now get this, this is such an important meeting that if over the course of three days you did not show up for this meeting everything you owned would be taken away from you and you would be excluded from the body of Christ.

That is an amazing act. It shows a level of authority that is really impossible for us to comprehend, I think; at least in the area of the church. We are so self centered in our day and age that if any leader of the church were to say something like this we would run them out of town on a rail. We wouldn’t stand for it. We probably wouldn’t stand for it from the civil government either unless they backed it up with force. I think it ties in with our lack of humbleness before God. We are too used to each man doing what is right in his own eyes and as a result we have lost a true sense of community, of body, of the church and the authority that should reside in the leaders of our communities and churches.
But in this day and age they at least understood those things and so all the men of Judah and Benjamin assembled at Jerusalem within the three days. It was the ninth month on the twentieth of the month, and all the people sat in the open square before the house of God, trembling because of this matter and the heavy rain.

I hope you can see that this is such an important matter that they are standing outside in the rain, cold and wet; trembling not just because of the weather but also because they understand the severity of their sin. This should give us a clue as to the depth of meaning behind the phrase If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray. This is a picture of being humble before God.

In verse 19 we read: Then Ezra the priest stood up and said to them, "You have been unfaithful and have married foreign wives adding to the guilt of Israel. 11"Now therefore, make confession to the LORD God of your fathers and do His will; and separate yourselves from the peoples of the land and from the foreign wives."

This is how important staying out of sin is: It is important enough that if your marriage is causing you to fall into idolatry then you need to separate yourself from it. Now the word used there is not the word for divorce. The point of this passage is that the people who are confessing have been unfaithful to God and they have been serving other Gods in the context of their marriage. That has to stop. Now if the unbelievers want to repent of their idolatry and stay in the relationship that is ok but if they refuse to repent then the believer must separate him or herself from that which is sin.

I am reminded of our Sunday night study on 1 Corinthians chapter 7. I think Paul probably had something like this in mind when he wrote: to the married I give instructions, not I, but the Lord, that the wife should not leave her husband 11(but if she does leave, she must remain unmarried, or else be reconciled to her husband), and that the husband should not divorce his wife. 12But to the rest I say, not the Lord, that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he must not divorce her. 13And a woman who has an unbelieving husband, and he consents to live with her, she must not send her husband away. 14For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband; for otherwise your children are unclean, but now they are holy. 15Yet if the unbelieving one leaves, let him leave; the brother or the sister is not under bondage in such cases, but God has called us to peace. 16For how do you know, O wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, O husband, whether you will save your wife? 17Only, as the Lord has assigned to each one, as God has called each, in this manner let him walk And so I direct in all the churches.

It’s important that we understand that the key issue here is not marriage it is idolatry. That is the issue before us. I think to often we come to Old Testament passages like this and we just take them at face value and say this means you should marry people of other nationalities or races but that is not what this passage is talking about. It means you shouldn’t marry anyone that would lead you into idolatry. And if you find yourself in one of those relationships then you should separate yourself from the idolatry immediately and if after that your unbelieving spouse can choose to stay or leave but the condition must be that idolatry stop.
This is serious business. God does not tolerate sin in his people without pouring out consequences at somepoint.

What’s amazing to me in this passage is that the Holy Spirit is working on these people’s lives so much that as a group they seem to come to repentance. Look at verse 12: Then all the assembly replied with a loud voice, "That's right! As you have said, so it is our duty to do. 13"But there are many people; it is the rainy season and we are not able to stand in the open. Nor can the task be done in one or two days, for we have transgressed greatly in this matter. 14"Let our leaders represent the whole assembly and let all those in our cities who have married foreign wives come at appointed times, together with the elders and judges of each city, until the fierce anger of our God on account of this matter is turned away from us."

Notice that they are willing to repent but they also understand that true repentance, really changing the way that you are living and even thinking, takes time. Verse 15 tells us that there were a few people who objected to taking extra time. They wanted this to be over and done with but verse 16 tells us that the exiles did so. In this case the majority won. And so Ezra the priest selected men who were heads of fathers' households for each of their father's households, all of them by name. So they convened on the first day of the tenth month to investigate the matter. 17They finished investigating all the men who had married foreign wives by the first day of the first month. Most of the rest of the chapter is a list of all the men that had fallen into idolatry. The chapter ends by saying: All these had married foreign wives, and some of them had wives by whom they had children.

And that is how this book ends. There are a couple of things that we should take away from this book. The first is that repentance is not a quick one time process. It is a life long duty. The closer you get to God the more of your sin you will see and the more you will find yourself needing to repent. It takes time to grow up to maturity.

The second thing that we really need to grasp is that your sin isn’t just personal. Your sin affects the whole body. This passage shows us that sin is not just between you and the Lord. It affects you, your family, the body of Christ, and your community. I think this is one of the most important things that we have forgotten about sin over the last hundred plus sin. We have made our religion personal. Me and Jesus we got our own thing going. Me and Jesus we got it all worked out. Well that’s nice in theory. But the truth is your relationship with God affects everyone you come in contact with and a lot of people that you don’t even know. Your sin or your repentance determine the health of the rest of the body and the health of the body of Christ determines the health of the culture at large and until we get that in our heads and hearts we are going to remain sickly and weak and almost dead. Unless we begin to see with biblical eyes the ramifications of our own sin, our own selfishness not just as it effects us but as it effects our spouses, our families, our friends and our communities. Your sin is not just personal. Your idolatry is a part of why this nation is in the pitiful shape it’s in.

It is my prayer that God will stir our hearts to repentance, true, deep and extreme repentance that will not allow us to serve two Gods. Because as Jesus says if you have two masters you will love one and hate the other. It’s time to submit to the only true master God the father and his son Jesus Christ our Lord.

Let us pray: Oh Father, humble us before you. Give us eyes to see our idolatry. Give us hearts to want to change. Give us the power to change. Your grace is our only hope. In Jesus name we ask these things. Amen.

Here the words of our Lord Jesus from Matthew chapter 7: 3"Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 4"Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' and behold, the log is in your own eye? 5"You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye. 6"Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces. "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. "For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. 9"Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? 10"Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? 11"If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him! 12"In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets. 3"Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. 14"For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.