[0:00] We are in Ezekiel chapter 4. If you will turn to Ezekiel chapter 4. Hold that chapter. Now I know what you're thinking, not another sermon in Ezekiel, but here we are. Another sermon in Ezekiel.
[0:19] So Ezekiel chapter 4, we're going to read the whole thing. I laughed more yesterday at that opening line than you guys did.
[0:33] I had a good time with that one. Anyway. Ezekiel chapter 4. And you, son of man, take a brick and lay it before you and engrave on it a city, even Jerusalem, and put siege works against it, and build a siege wall against it, and cast up a mound against it, set camps also against it, and plant battering rams against it all around.
[1:03] And you take an iron griddle and place it as an iron wall between you and the city, and set your face toward it, and let it be in a state of siege, and press the siege against it.
[1:18] This is a sign for the house of Israel. Then, lie on your left side, and place the punishment of the house of Israel upon it.
[1:30] For the number of the days that you lie on it, you shall bear their punishment. For I assign to you a number of days, 390 days, equal to the number of the years of their punishment.
[1:44] So long shall you bear the punishment of the house of Israel. And when you have completed these, you shall lie down a second time, but on your right side, and bear the punishment of the house of Judah.
[2:00] Forty days I assign you, a day for each year. And you shall set your face toward the siege of Jerusalem, with your arm bared, and you shall prophesy against the city.
[2:13] And behold, I will place cords upon you, so that you cannot turn from one side to the other, till you have completed the days of your siege. And you, take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and emmer, and put them into a single vessel, and make your bread from them.
[2:33] During the number of days that you lie on your side, 390 days, you shall eat it. And your food that you eat shall be by weight, 20 shekels a day.
[2:46] From day to day you shall eat it. And water you shall drink by measure. The sixth part of a hen, from day to day you shall drink. And you shall eat it as a barley cake, baking it in their sight on human dumb.
[3:04] And the Lord said, Thus the people of Israel eat their bread unclean, among the nations where I will drive them. Then I said, this is Ezekiel saying this, Then I said, Ah, Lord God, behold, I have never defiled myself.
[3:19] From my youth up till now, I have never eaten what died of itself, or was torn by beast, nor has tainted meat come into my mouth. Then he said to me, See, I assign to you cow's dung instead of human dung, on which you may prepare your bread.
[3:37] Moreover, he said to me, Son of man, behold, I will break the supply of bread in Jerusalem. They shall eat bread by weight and with anxiety, and they shall drink water by measure and in dismay.
[3:50] I will do this, that they may lack bread and water, look at one another in dismay, and rot away because of their punishment. This is a visual representation of what God was going to do to Jerusalem.
[4:13] He was to act this out. It was an impending punishment. Matter of fact, this prophecy, he wrote this down in about 592, 593, somewhere in there.
[4:28] Jerusalem was destroyed in 587. So five years later is when this happened. It was a visual for Jerusalem to see what was going to happen, and be a sign for their punishment.
[4:47] Not only for the people to see, but as they walked by Ezekiel laying there, they felt it. They felt God's punishment impending.
[4:59] Ezekiel was used by God to physically demonstrate this impending punishment that God was going to give to them.
[5:12] Well, there's three parts of this prophecy that did come to fruition in 587, and I want to talk about each of the parts. So kind of keep your Bible there, but the first part is verses 1 through 3, and that first part is to build a replica of Jerusalem.
[5:31] And he was to use a little brick and sort of somehow design Jerusalem on that little tile or brick, the little clay, and that sort of went into the center, and then he built up mounds next to it and towers and sort of designed the city there, but also what the siege looked like.
[5:53] So mounds next to it, and the way when they had walls around the city, and so when another nation came in to try to take over a city, they would build mounds, and then they would put camps on the top of those mounds and look down into the city, and then they would cut off all supplies in through the gates.
[6:15] They would stop all the supplies from coming into the city or siege it in that way. And he was to depict this, depict it all on the ground there in this little sort of diorama of Jerusalem.
[6:31] He was also to put an iron pan or griddle. I like the word griddle. He was to put this iron griddle, probably not a black stone.
[6:41] That's kind of what we're used to, right? A big pan in between. So his face and Jerusalem is where this pan would sit. So we know from the next verses that he's actually laying down when he's doing this.
[6:58] And so as he's laying there, the pan is in front of his face, and his diorama of Jerusalem is on the other side, right? There's a couple of ideas of what that pan and him on the other side might represent.
[7:15] One of those ideas is the strength of Babylonian. That's in 587 who comes in is the Babylonians. They come in and lay siege and wipe them out.
[7:28] So maybe it's the Babylonians and their strong siege and iron will of that nation coming in.
[7:39] There's another idea, and I think I resonate a little bit more with this idea, is that that pan, as Ezekiel laid there, the pan was in the way.
[7:52] He could not see Jerusalem. And it's like a separation from God. They were being punished for years, centuries, centuries of disobedience.
[8:09] And that pan was a separation between God and them. He would not even be able to hear their cries, which you know they would.
[8:22] There's a truth here I want to remember. The truth is what God has ordained will happen. What he has ordained will happen.
[8:34] I am the Lord. The second part, verses 4 through 8, is Ezekiel. It describes how he's to lay on his side and what that looks like.
[8:47] Notice the use of the word punishment in verses 4 through 8. It happens five times. He describes over and over this punishment that's coming.
[9:01] God will punish sin, won't he? This is not something that's going to go without. He's holy. He will not exist with sin forever. A second truth from this account is sinners will be punished.
[9:18] God says, I am the Lord. 390 days representing years. 390 days you lay on your side and with this pan in your face with the diorama on the other side.
[9:36] And then another 40. But 390 days representing the house of Israel. Israel at this time, so there was David, then Solomon.
[9:46] And after Solomon, the nation split into two. The northern group was called Israel. The southern group was Judah. And Israel at this time had already been gone for a long time.
[10:01] They were already wiped out and destroyed. Jerusalem was left. Judah was left at this time until 587, about five years later. That's when they were taken into captivity.
[10:13] So as we look at 390 days from Ezekiel's prophecy, or 390 years from Ezekiel's prophecy, what time span was that? If you go back 390 from that moment, it would have been in the reign of Solomon.
[10:34] 1 Kings 11, 11 through 12. Therefore the Lord said to Solomon, since this has been your practice and you have not kept my covenant and my statutes that I've commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom from you and will give it to your servant.
[10:52] Yet for the sake of David, your father, I will not do it in your days, but I will tear it out of the hand of your son. 390 years prior to Ezekiel prophesying and doing this in the middle of Jerusalem, God told Solomon he was going to take it away.
[11:15] From that time, from Solomon's reign until this, until 587, they sinned. And if you're familiar with all the accounts of one king after another, after another, they were sinful.
[11:31] They didn't care. They even lost at one point the scriptures for years and they were uncovered and no one even knew what was in. They sinned against God in all that time.
[11:45] The 40 years, there's a lot of discussion. You can look at different things. There's a lot of ideas of what these years or these days that Ezekiel is laying down actually represent.
[11:57] But the 40 years, one idea is that maybe that was the time from Jesus's death to AD 70 would have been about 40 years.
[12:09] And then Jerusalem again was destroyed and taken completely apart and they were dispersed. That's a possibility. They're not exactly sure.
[12:21] Not exactly sure. 430 years is the total. That is also a very important number because that's what they spent from the time in Egypt until the time of coming into the promised land.
[12:35] So these numbers are a little bit unknown. Exactly what it is. But there's a couple of key things within that. There's further specifications to the prophetic picture.
[12:48] leg on his side. But then he is to prophesy with his arm bared. And that is the symbol of God's arm.
[13:03] God's arm of punishment, of strength. And that's represented through his bared arm there.
[13:17] God also places cords on him. So not just does he lay there on his side, but God straps him down so he doesn't move.
[13:28] Doesn't move at all. Jerusalem is not moving or getting out of their punishment. It will happen.
[13:39] It will happen. I, in the study of this there, the question comes up to me, was he there that whole time? How many months is it?
[13:50] That's, you know, so 430 days. We're talking, what, 15 months? What's the number on that? Well over a year. Was he there that entire time? Well, when I read that the cords are there and he doesn't move, I kind of think, yes, he was.
[14:05] There's other things that say, well, he was there much of the day that maybe he, you know, packed things up and went home in the evening or something like that. I don't know. But what I do know is that he spent a lot of time laying there.
[14:21] I tend to think he was somehow supernaturally there the whole time. Because the cords held him there. So, even hours a day, though, would be tough.
[14:35] The third part of this picture is in the eating and drinking, verses 9 through 17, the last part of it. Here's the third truth from it. Sinners will suffer.
[14:47] Sinners will suffer, won't they? We know this. That's what was being depicted. The food that he had was this grain, bean, millet mix that was rationed out in a very, very small portion.
[15:03] Depending on what you read, it was basically a portion. The size of ESV kind of leads us to see a size of 11 grams, which 11 grams is about the size of a AAA battery.
[15:19] That's pretty small. The most I saw, there's some discrepancy on the exact size of this, but less than a cup. So, from a AAA battery to less than a cup is kind of what he had per day to live on.
[15:34] Also, this bread was not like the Ezekiel bread. You know, when we go to the store and we get this nice pack of Ezekiel bread, it's somewhat yummy, we can toast it or whatever we want to do. That's not what this was.
[15:47] One thing that I read said that this was so yucky, the dog would not eat it. It was basically basic nutrition to keep the dude alive.
[15:58] That's all it was. And then he had water as well. What this, less than one quart is what it comes out to for the water. While he laid there with straps, looking at a pan with a diorama on the other side.
[16:16] It represents the rationing that's going to happen. When they lay seeds to Jerusalem, they shut off the gates. What happens is the food goes down, down, down, down. Then God first instructs him to cook his little bit of bread over his own food.
[16:37] Right? And he says, hey, that will defile me. And God respects that in what he says. Okay, let's use cow dung instead.
[16:48] But the truth of the matter, and you see in verse 12, it was in their sight. This was all done in their sight.
[16:59] And what will happen five years from then when everything gets shut down? All the animals will die because they will use them because there's nothing to eat and nothing to get.
[17:11] Which means they will be reduced. Any cooking will be on human dung. That's just the beginning of the ugly paradigm.
[17:23] What often it does get reduced to is cannibalism. That's in their future. The visual was so they know I am the Lord, God says.
[17:41] He repeats that same phrase 60 times in the book of Ezekiel. I am the Lord. So a couple of notes on this that I want to share.
[17:56] One is God's character. I want to talk about God's character from this because he's the same, isn't he? He's the same in how he deals with Ezekiel. He's the same with us today.
[18:08] So his character is what perseveres across all of this. So let's look at a couple of character things. Number one, he's jealous for his name. He is to be glorified and honored.
[18:20] They didn't do that. They didn't do that. In their hearts, they didn't do that. They didn't glorify him in any way, shape, or form. For you shall worship no other God, for the Lord whose name is jealous is a jealous God.
[18:38] Exodus 34, 14. God will not share a throne with any other small g God that we may want to serve. He will not share it.
[18:50] That's not how we glorify him. That's not how that works as a believer. That's his throne and his alone.
[19:02] The second thing is in his character is long suffering. 430 years. And as you read through those kings and the things that they did and the ways that they just completely took in anything and everything other than God, he was very long suffering, very long suffering.
[19:32] He showed them his kindness. He sent prophet after prophet after prophet. We know from the New Testament that they were killed and they were sawn in half and they were treated miserably.
[19:47] But that was God's kindness to have them repent. Now, remember, what Ezekiel is doing here is not a repentance message. It is a you're going to die message.
[19:59] It's repentance, that time has passed. Now, it's punishment. That's Ezekiel's message. It's different. But he sent many, many, replete with turn, turn from your wicked ways.
[20:17] How many times did he do that? His kindness, his patience. Numbers 14, 18, the Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers and the children to the third and the fourth generation.
[20:43] The third character trait is God is purposeful. He's purposeful. He has purpose in his prophetic word. This punishment is going to happen.
[20:56] That's his purpose. Proverbs 19, 21 says, many are the plans in the mind of man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand. His purposes in punishment, his purposes in dealing with his people, these things will come to fruition.
[21:18] Sin will be dealt with by a holy God. He has a plan for the Jews as his chosen race. He's their God, and he continues to have a purpose with them as well as all of us, mankind.
[21:38] So I want to apply some of these character traits to us today. God doesn't change. We have established that.
[21:48] He is to be glorified and we are to bring glory to his name. We act in his will when we serve, love, and sacrifice in a way that brings glory to God.
[22:01] And as we take that principle of glorifying him, that's we as a body, we bring him glory in the things that we do, in the things that he calls us to do, in the things that his will mandates that we do.
[22:23] He is patient and kind with us that we may come to repentance. The great patience that God has with his children. You ever think about that?
[22:34] The patience that he has with you personally. It's tremendous in my life. Stephen Charnock, a Puritan.
[22:47] Let me read this quote. I want to dissect it a little bit because he talks in old words. Let's think about it. We'll think about it again. This will be great. He says, God's slowness to anger is a branch from his mercy.
[23:03] The Lord is full of compassion and slow to anger. Psalm 145. It differs from mercy in the formal consideration of the object.
[23:17] Mercy respects the creature as miserable. Patience respects the creature as criminal. Mercy pities him in his misery and patience bears with the sin which engendered the misery and is giving birth to more.
[23:39] The antithesis of judgment compassion and patience. Now here's I think the best way to illustrate what he's saying there.
[23:51] Think of the person that as we get to the corner and even going out generally there's two or three as I'm heading to back to 435 on the way home.
[24:01] There's usually somebody on the corner in there. There's someone with a sign. There's someone asking for money or food or whatever it is they're asking.
[24:15] I look at them and in mercy I look at them and I say they're struggling. Whatever this moment I can look at them, I look at the way they're dressed, I look at what they're asking for and my mercy would say they're struggling right now.
[24:37] They're having a hard time in life right now. Patience says I don't care why they're suffering.
[24:50] I don't care why they're struggling because if you're like me, I see that person and I can get the mercy there. I can feel the mercy and I feel sorry for them or I have pity on them.
[25:04] But then going to the second part, I think there's things they could do. They probably just want to buy this or that.
[25:17] Probably it's a series of decisions that put them into this place. Patience says they sin but I overlook it.
[25:31] Patience says I don't care why they got there. as God looks at us full of compassion and slow to anger he knows we're sinful.
[25:45] He looks at us with pity. He looks at us as people who fall and struggle and lose it. But his patience bears with us in our sin.
[26:00] God has purposes. He has specific purposes with Christ church. God is a plan for our existence as a church and Jesus is our head.
[26:16] He has purposes we have yet to see. We don't even know. We don't even know yet the things that he wants to do. We're to proclaim the good news and bring glory to God.
[26:29] Similarities between our work and Ezekiel's work. There's a few things that are somewhat similar. So just to illustrate that I want us all to get down and lay on our sides. But there are some similarities between the two.
[26:45] Number one is there are people heading to a certain death. There are people all around us that are heading to a certain death.
[26:56] It's not a matter of is it going to happen. It's not a matter of well maybe they'll somehow get off that road or whatever. They are heading that way.
[27:08] And we have a message. We have a message that says the same thing. If you are apart from God you're heading to certain death. If you don't know Jesus you're heading to certain death.
[27:22] we must be obedient to God's plan no matter what that looks like. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter what it looks like. Big, small, this way, that way, doesn't matter.
[27:38] Our message is literally of life and death. So, what about Ezekiel's experience?
[27:49] That is what I want to talk about. What about Ezekiel's experience with his message? It was boring. It was boring.
[28:01] He laid there. He did nothing. It was boring. Wouldn't you agree? There was just, he just laid there for months doing nothing.
[28:16] God chose to use him in this seemingly mundane mundane visual prophecy. That's how God chose to use Ezekiel.
[28:28] Was in this mundane day after day, looking at a pan, trying to cook, maybe, with cowpoo.
[28:41] God's economy is different. God's economy is different than ours. Maybe we wouldn't have put Ezekiel in that spot. Maybe we wouldn't have said, do something so, what seems so weird.
[28:59] We may not have done that, but God's ways are higher than our ways. Here's a truth that I came to on this study, and I think it's very important. God chooses to use our lives in any way he sees fit.
[29:14] It's not always comfortable. It's not what we think. It's not what we would envision, but it's his way.
[29:25] And I think it's far too easy to get our own thinking in that mix and forget that God uses our lives in any way he sees fit.
[29:42] Even if it's mundane, even if it's boring, even if it doesn't make sense, it's his plan. Ezekiel understood that his life belonged to God.
[29:58] He was truly a living sacrifice, this guy. Truly was. Romans 12 1, I appeal you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
[30:15] Did Ezekiel do that? 100% he did that. No matter what God wanted to do, he was presenting himself soul and body.
[30:27] Ezekiel presented himself soul and body to what God had in mind. He was obedient to whatever God wanted to do. He obeyed all parts of this plan.
[30:40] No quitting or establishing a great start and then falling off. He stuck with this. 430 days laid there, did what God had him do and didn't stop.
[30:59] He submitted to the parts of God's will that weren't all that great. Lying in the dirt, not moving, people walking by, looking at him, teasing, snide comments, maybe kicking dust on him.
[31:18] He was, after all, giving them a message of impending death and doom. You think they liked that? I don't think they did. And they probably took it out on him.
[31:32] Long days, horrible treatment, difficult circumstances, great pain. If you continue to read on in Ezekiel, you'll see some of the pain that God put Ezekiel through, just to get his message out.
[31:49] One of which, his wife died. And he wasn't even to grieve. This was to get his message, God's message, out.
[32:01] And Ezekiel followed and participated. And Ezekiel was effective. He was effective. His work and message was shocking. It had impact.
[32:12] You don't see a person do this very much. Personally, I've never seen a person do that. I don't know if you guys have, maybe. It was shocking. The message was given.
[32:23] It was successful, regardless of what the Jews did. It was successful because God said, I want this message to go out. The message went out. It was successful.
[32:35] He was obedient. He did his best to be thorough and complete in the demonstration, putting everything together the right way, and then submitting himself to what God's plan was in the message.
[32:51] That was Ezekiel's experience. Now let's talk about our experience. First thing I want to talk about is the idea of mundane, this concept mundane.
[33:05] So mundane basically, I looked up some synonyms in the thesaurus. So mundane, ordinary, boring, everyday, humdrum, normal, routine, common.
[33:17] These are all kind of the same ideas of what we might call mundane. I'm often asked what was, I was on nuclear submarine, and I'm often asked what was the longest time you ever went out without coming back up.
[33:35] And the longest time, so going down and then the span of time and coming up was 60 days for me. Now that was in the midst of a 180-day deployment where we spent 140 of those days underwater.
[33:53] 140 days in six months underwater. It's not 430, but we'll get to Ezekiel numbers maybe someday.
[34:04] So when I'm asked that, people think, oh, you know, that's, I don't think I could do because it's like claustrophobia and things like that, but there's also this element of boredom.
[34:17] Lots of boredom. What do you do underwater for two months straight? What do you do? You know, we would play games. We actually worked, we worked 18-hour days is what it turned into.
[34:31] Because you can change the 24-hour cycle because there's no sun, it doesn't matter anymore. So we would work for six hours and you would be off for 12.
[34:42] And so some people they would sleep for every bit of that 12 that they could sleep. Others, you know, would ink or we would play cards or we would watch movies. Back in the day we had a cabinet of VHS tapes.
[34:55] We would kind of fight and discuss until we could pick a VHS tape that we all agreed on for that movie, you know. But you know what? It was boring.
[35:05] It was very boring. The only time I got to see out, we were coming close to an island and I looked through the periscope and I saw land with palm trees for about five seconds.
[35:19] It was awesome. In 60 days. Well, we've all lived parts of life that are ordinary and what we might call boring or common or things like that.
[35:33] We've all experienced this in one way or another. Does anyone remember the commercial time to make the donuts?
[35:45] Any of you guys remember that? It might have been Duncan. This probably was early 80s, late 70s. But this guy, he was like dredging in early in the morning.
[35:57] It's still dark and everything. He's like going in time. It's like how boring. He seems bored. That was the first thing I thought about. That's because I'm a child of the 80s.
[36:12] But anyway, every moment of every day is not a ball of firecrackers and excitement. That's not how we live. I think we would go crazy if every day was just full of excitement nonstop all the time.
[36:28] But there are important realities to the work that God has given us specifically. There's important realities here that God has given us specifically.
[36:42] And Ezekiel's work was truly mundane. I think maybe you would agree with me on that. It was truly mundane. So is there anything that we would have to complain about?
[36:55] Whatever God gives us, we're not laying down strapped to the ground and eating the way he ate. We're not doing that. He may call us to the earth, but thus far he has not.
[37:10] All work given to us by God is significant work. Every bit Christ church is work that God has given to us.
[37:23] Us. This is our work. I thought of this illustration that I want to share.
[37:35] Picture a gold bar like a, you know how you see the, like a gold bar, you know, it's all put together and everything. And it's nice, it's complete, it's big, you know, that kind of thing.
[37:50] Imagine slicing off just a little bit of that or breaking off just a small piece of that gold bar. And now on the table I've got the main piece and I've got just a little piece over here.
[38:08] When I take that gold, that small piece, when I take that gold off of the big bar, does it change in property? It's still gold, isn't it?
[38:21] It doesn't become something else. It's not like gold plated something. It's still gold. That's the property. Is it worth the same amount? If I were to measure it out and get worth in ounces, I would measure that and I can weigh and it would be worth not the same as the big one, but proportionally it would be worth the same because there's a number per ounce.
[38:48] Make sense? I think that sometimes we can look at a church plant that comes off of a large church not as another piece of gold but as something less, as something that doesn't have the same value, as something that isn't quite as important, as something that's not quite as significant, but it's still gold.
[39:28] Spiritually, it's still gold. this is his church, isn't it? This is no different. Jesus is the head, we are the body.
[39:41] The work that he gives is spiritual gold because it's of him. It's not a gold-plated something, it's not someday this gold will be worth what this gold, it's now worth the same thing.
[39:56] It's not different, it's not less, it's not a facsimile or something that is going to one day it will be good like this, no, now, it is good like that.
[40:14] We are his bride. Christ's church is his bride. We must serve with excellence because this is gold.
[40:29] gold. His church is gold. We must serve with excellence. Don't cut corners. Put in the effort. Whatever your task is, whatever God has you doing, obviously we have little tasks that if we're not careful it will slip into the mundane.
[40:51] It will slip into a category it does not belong. Everything that God gives us is gold and worth because he is significant and what he gives us is significant.
[41:07] It's his work. Don't skimp. Serve as serving the Lord. Don't look short-sightedly at what you see.
[41:18] Look with spiritual eyes. Yes, there may be a small crowd and it might be smaller on other days when everyone's on vacation.
[41:32] Yes, that might happen. But what we do is still significant. What we do is still significant. There may be five people out there, but that's five lives that God cares about.
[41:48] That's five lives that need the ministry of the body. That's five lives that have the gifts of the Spirit that are there for a purpose because God put them there.
[42:07] We must give ourselves completely. What does he want to do with you? What does he want to do with you? If it seems small, it's not.
[42:19] If it seems mundane, it's not. Are you standing in the way or are you submitted? I wrestle with this at times.
[42:30] I've come up with this sort of thought, and I think I've maybe shared it with a couple of you guys, of giving coins away. Have I shared that before? Did I say it? The idea of when you come together, you give.
[42:44] And it's just like if you had a pocket full of coins, you give them away. You know? The picture is bigger than ourselves. If we relegate our thinking only to what we see, only to what we see here, then there's no faith in our walk.
[43:03] There's no faith. When there's no faith, we'll be disappointed if things don't go our way.
[43:14] And you know what? We'll get bored. And things will become mundane. And they will become just common. Things that are not common will become common.
[43:28] Some causes of the mundane, and here's where I would encourage you just to kind of think about where's your heart on these things, some causes of it.
[43:39] number one is discontentment and envy. Things can become mundane or common or ordinary when we are discontent.
[43:49] I'd rather be over there. I'd rather have this. I wish I had something else. I'm discontent with things, and so then I end up sort of minimizing everything because I'm not happy.
[44:04] second thing is a lack of proper perspective or value. How do you consider or talk about Christ Church?
[44:14] Have you ever thought about the word just? Stacey and I were talking about this, and she has great thoughts on this. The word just, it's a diminishing word.
[44:26] Here's an example. Oh, we're just a small group. So I'm diminishing our group. Oh, we're just a small group. Oh, we just have two MCs.
[44:38] I'm diminishing what we're doing. I'm diminishing the work. I'm diminishing the goal. I'm trying to steal somehow that I can't do. The value from what this is.
[44:53] The word just, you have to listen for it. It creeps in. This illustrates a small picture of what we are and who we are in Christ.
[45:04] proper perspective and value is not present in diminishing thoughts. Lack of proper value, always diminishing thoughts, if that's going on, that also diminishes our actions as well.
[45:24] Another area is lack of faith. Another area that mundane will creep in is through lack of faith. is there a deep, dark secret in your heart?
[45:36] I'm asking this. Is there this deep, dark secret in your heart? And here's the secret or some form of this. I don't really believe this is going to work.
[45:54] I don't really believe this church is going to succeed somehow. I don't really believe this is the right group. I don't really believe fill in the blank.
[46:08] The Lord instituted his church. Jesus himself instituted his church.
[46:22] Christ's church was sent out in prayer. Sent out. And Jesus himself leads us in his purposes.
[46:35] If there's any form of I don't really believe this is going to work, that creeps in or tries to get a foothold, we've got to put that to death.
[46:46] We've got to put that thought to death. This is who he sent and others, others to come. This is who he sent to do this work.
[47:00] Anything in our thinking that doesn't measure up to these truths is a lack of faith. It's a lack of faith. A fourth way that mundane creeps in is just plain lazy.
[47:15] Just plain lazy. Not doing what you know that you need to do. Not doing what the thing, and we know that to be sin, don't we? When you don't do what you know you're supposed to, it's sin.
[47:28] Laziness, we can get lazy. And then we fall into mundane, we fall into common, we fall into not rightly seeing what the church is and its importance.
[47:41] There's plenty of work, but mundane creeps in, and work gets ignored in laziness. So what's the antidote? This sermon, I thought about a few different titles for the sermon.
[47:53] So there's a couple, let me see if I can remember them all. The first one was I want a diorama for Christmas. There's one.
[48:06] The other one was ring around the poosie. The other one has to do with, it's kind of a throwback to Paris Reed had 10 shekels in a shirt.
[48:24] I thought about 10 beans in the dirt. Is that one good? Actually, the title of the sermon, so that was the intro.
[48:36] The title of the sermon is Joy in the Mundane. Joy in the Mundane. And what's the antidote for mundane?
[48:50] It's to find our joy. Well, how do we find our joy? Number one, joy in Jesus. 1 Peter 1, 8-9. Though you have not seen him, you love him.
[49:00] And even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy. For you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
[49:15] Can this inexpressible joy coexist with boredom in the church? No. It's his church. He's the head. Jesus is who we follow.
[49:28] Jesus is where our salvation is. Can these two things coexist? Bored at sweeping the floor, bored at making a meal, bored at going out, bored at listening to a brother or sister ministering to them.
[49:45] Can these two things, joy in Christ and boredom, exist simultaneously? They can't. They can't. Second thing is joy in submission and suffering.
[50:01] James 1, verse 2, counted all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds. Ezekiel could find joy in his prophetic activities.
[50:13] grace. We don't know what he thought or how he acted. What we do know is he was obedient.
[50:25] And the Bible doesn't say that he walked or that he fought back or that he was upset at what was going on. I'm assuming that he found joy in what he did.
[50:38] Not just laying there, but as I mentioned earlier, even later, losing his wife. So God could demonstrate a principle in suffering.
[50:52] If the mundane edges towards suffering, we can still find comfort in knowing God is at work. And that's the rest of that James chapter 1.
[51:03] We can find, we count it all joy because in these trials, because we know that he's working us toward maturity. Even if it's Monday, we jump in and it's good.
[51:20] The third thing is joy and salvation. Going back to 1 Peter 1, 8, and 9, he ends 9 there with the inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, salvation of your souls.
[51:36] Also, Psalm 51, 12, restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold me with a willing spirit. If we are lacking excitement for the work, if we are bored at the perceived monotony, it is not monotonous.
[51:57] Please hear me. It is not boring. It is not monotonous, the work that God gives us. It is perceived on your part if it is monotonous.
[52:11] If you find yourself in that space, we are spiritually dry. Pray that verse. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold me with a willing spirit.
[52:29] God, restore to me the joy of your salvation. Let's pray.