Let's bow our heads in prayer for a moment.
Father, we ask that your Holy Spirit would gently but powerfully move in us this morning,
in the very center of who we are.
And Father, one of the things we ask is that you would awaken, that you would inflame the
true longings and yearnings that we have within us, the longings and yearnings to know you
and to be known by you, to be in your presence.
Father, please awaken and inflame these yearnings and desires in us.
And we ask this in the name of Jesus, your Son and our Savior.
Amen.
Please be seated.
So often when I tell you stories about what happens at coffee shops or other places, I
mix up a whole pile of the details just in case one of the people who've been talking
to me listens and they wouldn't necessarily know that it was them.
But today I'm going to do something a little bit different.
So yesterday I go into my local coffee shop in the morning, as I usually do on a Saturday
to do a bit of work on my sermon.
And as soon as I come in, one of the guys that's a friend of mine is there and he says,
oh, I really wanted to talk to you about something.
And he buys me a coffee.
And we go off to the side.
And he says, George, what about that Kenyan death cult?
That's a Christian thing, isn't it?
Like, what do you think about all those Christians out there in Kenya starving themselves to death?
Now, of course, I've been thinking deeply about this on my way over there.
No, I'm just joking.
So just anyway, a little bit of a shout out to my friend if you happen to be watching either
now or downstream.
Thank you for being my friend.
Thank you for asking great questions.
Thank you for buying me coffee as well.
And so I gave him a bit of an answer.
And the conversation moved in different ways.
We talked for 10 or 15 minutes.
And then as soon as he left, I realized that the text that we're going to look at in Ezra
today talks directly.
Like, if he had asked me to show him in the Bible where those two or the three types of
things I basically said to him, I realized afterwards I could have shown them in Ezra.
How Ezra responds to a Christian critique of a Kenyan death cult that claims to be Christian.
So we're going to look at it.
I encourage you to get your Bibles.
We're going to be looking at Ezra chapter 7 and 8.
And just so you know, it's 68 verses long.
And that's way too many verses for me to read all of them in the text.
So basically, chapter 7 and 8 tells you one long story and just a little bit of a geeky
type of moment to place what's happening.
Here's the big story of Ezra and Nehemiah.
Like, every week we can look at it and you can see all the trees and not notice that there's
a forest.
But in chapters 1 to 6, it tells the story of this astounding thing that happens that
nobody would have predicted.
The Babylonian Empire gets defeated.
It's replaced by the mighty Persian Empire.
And Cyrus, the pagan emperor of this mighty empire, he says, I would like Jewish people
to go back and build the temple.
Well, good grief.
Who saw that coming?
Like, how on earth did that happen?
So Cyrus declares this.
And then if you read chapters 1 to 6, you know, they go back.
A whole group of them go back.
Not all of them, but a whole group of them go back.
The Jewish people had been taken out of their homeland like 60, 50, 60 years earlier.
And they've settled in the center of Babylon and Persia primarily.
They have a new life there.
You know, 60 some odd years after, or 50 some odd years, that's like a long time.
Hardly anybody would even remember.
Like, I mean, just, I'm not going to ask for a show of hands, but if I was to, if we
were to talk about something, how many of us were even alive 50 years ago?
Well, I was.
I'll put my hand up.
But many of you weren't even alive 50 years ago.
Like, why on earth would you want to make this journey to a place of rubbles that you've
never heard of?
And it's a Persian emperor who says, let's do it.
And not only does he say, let's do it.
He says, by the way, here's a whole pile of stuff from your temple that you can use.
Here's a whole pile of money.
And here's a whole pile of instructions for people to respect you.
And then what happens in the rest of chapters 1 to 6 is there's all this pushback from the
locals who hate them, hate the Jewish people.
And it ends up, they rebuild the altar so they can worship, but they can't actually build
the temple because there's so much blowback and pushback and hatred and hating on them.
And then, lo and behold, after the work stopped for 17 years, another Persian emperor by the
name of Darius says, I want you to finish the temple.
Who saw that coming?
Like, who saw that coming?
I want you to finish the temple.
Well, here's the orders.
Tell all those haters to step down and get in line and let them build the temple.
And the temple's built.
Now, chapters 7 to 10 takes place 57 years after the temple has been built and dedicated.
57 or 58 years depends a little bit.
Numbering is a bit loose back then.
57, 58 years later.
So in terms of us, if you just think about it for a second, 57 years ago, that's 50,
let's say 58 years.
That's 1965.
So it's as if the story's gone to 1965.
Once again, I don't know how many of you were even alive in 1965.
Most of you weren't.
And now the story continues.
And this story is even more astounding.
And that's what's going to be told in 7 and 8 and then 9 and 10.
Because all of a sudden, another Persian emperor named Artaxerxes, 57, 58 years later, says,
I want that whole region around the temple, I want them to all live their lives by the Torah.
What?
Who saw that coming?
Nobody saw that coming.
A Persian emperor who's pagan says, I want everybody to live under the Jewish law who lives in that region.
And he doesn't just sort of say it because he was in the bathroom one day and the idea popped into his head.
And then like a lot of us, we have ideas pop into our head in the bathroom.
And 24 hours later, we forget about them.
But no, if you go back and you're like this, chapter 7, verses 1 to 10 sort of gives you the big picture.
Then it fills in the details.
And it even gives you the letter because Artaxerxes, he puts money in the game.
He picks this guy named Ezra.
And by the way, in Ezra, you'll see in a moment, it says he does his cry.
But actually, the literal translation is secretary.
And what that means is it isn't like secretary when we think that like a big shot, you know, boss, she has a secretary to do her.
No, no, no, no, no.
That's like the secretary of the exchequer in Britain.
It's like the homeland secretary in Britain.
It's like the secretary of defense in the United States.
That's the secretary.
So this guy is like a high-level bureaucrat.
He's also a priest.
He's also a scholar.
And so this emperor says, good grief, you know, I think all the people in that region should live under the Jewish law.
So I'm going to send my secretary.
He's going to go.
And he's going to, and I'm going to give him a whole pile of gifts.
I'm going to give him these three letters.
And these three letters say, here's all this money for Ezra to do this.
And by the way, Ezra, all of the priests in the future aren't taxed.
Aren't taxed.
And by the way, he gets to set, train everybody and set up the judges.
And so that as long as the basic law, my basic law is met, I want them all to live under the Jewish law.
Who saw that coming?
How on earth does something like this remarkable happen?
Three Persian emperors all going ahead and making decisions like this.
Cyrus, Darius, and Artaxerxes.
And so chapter 7 and 8 is talking about this.
And so now you're saying, okay, George, well, that's sort of interesting.
But how on earth does this fit in with the Kenyan death cult?
And by the way, you know, when my friend asked this, he's too polite.
But there's a, you know, there's a subtext to it.
And the subtext to it is this.
You know, people who become Christians are kooky.
And, you know, Christianity, from my point of view, often seems to be more on the side of death.
And I'm sort of curious to see, George, how you argue Christianly that it's wrong.
I can understand how if you listen to the view, Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.
You listen to the view or you listen to CNN or CBC.
I could see that if you listen to them, you want to condemn it.
But if you just listen to your Bible, how are you going to speak to it?
Well, let's look.
And so we're going to, I'm just going to jump around.
I've told you the basic story of chapter 7 and 8.
And part of that early thing, verse 6 of chapter 7, here's what it says.
If you can put it up.
Sometimes, I hope it's going to be on the screen.
If not, that's fine.
You can just listen to me or I read it from the Bible or have your own Bible.
And so look what it says here in verse 6.
This Ezra, it's given the long list of his lineage.
This Ezra went up from Babylonia.
He was a scribe, skilled in the law of Moses.
That the Lord, the God of Israel, had given and the king granted him all that he asked.
That's Ezra.
For the hand of the Lord his God was on him.
We're going to look at that phrase in a moment.
But notice this thing.
Because you think, okay, that's weird, George.
Like how on earth do you get anything to do about the Kenyan death cult from that?
Look again at verse 6.
Here's this statement about the scriptures.
He was a scribe, skilled in the law of Moses.
Okay, that's the law of Moses.
That the Lord had given.
And it's this classic description of what Christians understand the Bible to be.
And by the way, why do we understand the Bible to be this?
That's because we learned it from Jesus.
And I'm not going to give you an argument for it.
Other than to say that I think it's a very reasonable thing to believe.
That if Jesus predicted he was going to die by crucifixion and rise from the dead.
And he did.
It vindicates him.
Like that's a reasonable thing to believe.
It vindicates him.
And it vindicates what he said.
And that's what he teaches about the Bible.
He teaches on one hand it's the words of a human being.
But at the end of the day, it's words that God wanted to have done.
And that's why it has authority.
That's why we listen to it.
And so here's the thing.
If you could put up the first point, that would be very handy.
I'm not sure if you have them.
But if you could, that would be great.
Here it is.
The true God has revealed himself in an open, public way through his word written.
Now, you see, here's the thing I said.
First thing I said to them about the Kenyan death cult is I, and I said, I almost said
my friend's name, but I'll say it's Bob.
I say Bob.
So the first thing you have to understand that what's going on here is a common human problem.
It's a human problem that we see in lots of areas of life.
And it's caused lots of heartache and turmoil throughout the world.
And I said, what it is, I said, there are people who come to believe that they know the future
and that where the future is going is good and that we need to get with the program.
And it's basically, some of them times they'll have a very religious thing that it came from
a law or that it came from, you know, it came from the Buddha or it came from Krishna or it
came from the Bible or God of the Christians.
But it has a secular form as well.
Like Marxism, I'm going to upset some people here today, and I will.
That's all I can say.
I don't like upsetting people, but I will.
At its very heart, Marxism believes that the universe has downloaded into Marx where history
is going and that it's a good thing that everybody should go.
Well, one moment, February 15, 2020, nobody predicted the lockdowns for three years.
Why does any human being think that they somehow know the future and that the future is good
and you have to do it?
Almost all progressive thought is the same type of thought as the Kenyan death cult.
Not that it's going to cause deaths like that.
But somehow or another, ordinary human beings think, whoa, the universe has told me how history
is going to move.
It's going to move in this direction, and we need to get with the program, and we need
to do that.
What?
Well, that's what this guy thought.
He thought he had a pipeline to God.
And he suckered a whole pile of people into thinking about it.
It's a human problem.
But notice what has just been said.
I don't know if that first point is up here.
Here's the thing which makes Christianity radically different.
God's word written is open and public.
It's not secret.
I mean, when Matt was saying the reason we have the creed is that, in a sense, it's to
hold me accountable.
And it's to hold me accountable because you folks can look at the Bible and say, George,
you know, you said this and you said this, but look at the Bible.
It says this.
It doesn't say those things.
It's an open truth.
It's a public truth.
Open to all.
Anybody can go online and get a copy of the Bible.
Anybody can go to a bookstore and get a copy of the Bible.
It's open.
It's public.
It's the complete opposite of a Gnostic, secret, private revelation about where things
are going.
But I could see my friend thinking, aren't sort of Christians ones who just believe in faith,
not reason?
And don't you, in a sense, if you want to be a Christian, sort of have to kiss your mind
bye-bye or at least hold it in suspension for a period of time?
And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, you can say all that.
And the fact of the matter is, if people say that, they've met Christians who act that way.
There was a group of Christians that I was involved with about a year or so, two years
after I became a Christian.
And I was having severe intellectual doubts about the Christian faith.
And when I tried to talk about it with them, they said, you just need to pray more.
Well, okay, I always need to pray more.
I mean, that's true.
But I'd actually like an answer, like, in terms of reason or evidence as to why, you know,
this doubt, how I can handle this doubt.
So, I mean, there's something.
But you see, when they say this, Christians who say this are often very, very well-meaning,
but they're wrong.
They're not speaking as Christians.
Well, why, look at what comes up in verse 10, chapter 7, verse 10, if you could put
it up.
And this is the end of that part that Monique read earlier on.
And it sort of here encapsulates the basic biblical message from Genesis 1 to the end of the book
of Revelation.
And it describes Ezra, verse 10, for Ezra had set his heart to study the law of the Lord
and to do it and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel.
Notice what it says.
Ezra has set his heart to study God's word written and to do it.
He's not studying it to find loopholes.
He's not studying it to make it look ridiculous.
You know, anybody with an IQ above 60 can try to make things look ridiculous.
Like, it's amazing how many, I've had so many conversations with people who, with a big,
proud, self-satisfied smile, try to make something about the Bible or the Christian faith ridiculous.
And they just look ridiculous.
Like, it's easy to do that about anything.
It doesn't take very much intelligence or very much thoughtfulness to do that.
And it's very easy to be self-satisfied about it.
And, in fact, actually, especially when it comes to things like the Bible, it's, in fact,
sort of seen as a virtue to interrogate the text.
And by interrogating the text, it means nitpicking over it to make it look like it's colonialist
and oppressive and a whole pile of bad things.
But, you know, what they actually don't do is actually listen to it.
They don't stop to think there must be some reason why this book is still being read 2,000 years later,
where the words of my professor or the academic article or the newspaper article that I read
that's teaching me to do this, it'll be forgotten in five minutes.
Like, they never sort of stop and think about that.
And so here's the point.
If you could put it up, that would be great.
The true God desires, okay?
It's a feature, not a bug.
The true God desires that you bring the best of your mind and heart to bear on understanding
his word written and how you shall then live.
It means to bring your intellect.
It means to bring your learning.
It means to bring those rational faculties.
It means to bring your creativity.
It means to bring your imagination.
It means to bring your will and your attention to try to understand the word.
And some of us have very, very high IQs.
Just a bit of an aside.
Some of you know the apologist David Woods.
He's sort of an odd duck.
He has an IQ of 185.
That's the stratosphere.
So some of us have very high IQs.
Some of us don't have high IQs.
That's fine.
The Bible doesn't say people with high IQs are better than people with low IQs.
It's just a thing indifferent to God on one level.
But the point is that to the best of your imagination, the best of your ability to read,
the best of your ability to remember and to think, the best of your creativity,
or to bring it to bear to hear and understand the word and then to do it.
That's what God desires.
You see, it's the complete opposite.
You see, once again, at the end of the day, when you have people who believe that somehow or another
the universe or God has dropped into their mind where history is going,
and how somehow or another we have to overlook normal morality and jump on this new morality
and go there.
And whether it's something secular like we see in much of first world thought,
or whether it's this Kenyan death cult leader, what they want you to do is stop thinking.
And the Bible says that's not ever God's plan.
I say that not because CNN says that.
In fact, I don't even know if CNN says that most of the time.
I think they just want us to accept what they say.
I mean, there's a reason why there's a huge desire going on in the world right now to control information,
and there's a reason why there's pushback against it.
I know there's complexity issues and all that, and that's fine.
But at the end of the day, the Bible wants us, and not just to that, but in general,
God wants me to use my mind.
He wants you to use your mind.
Wherever vocation he's called you to be in.
Now, it's weird, you know, because when I was in my conversation with my friend,
we ended up getting into, I ended up getting into the reality of evil in the world,
and how I said to him that there's one thing about the Christian faith which only the Christian faith holds,
and it's empirically provable time and time and time again,
and people don't sort of recognize it.
And that is the fact, not that every single thing a human being does is evil,
but that no human being can go very long without doing some evil.
None of us can.
I can't.
And if you think you can, you're deluded.
Sorry.
And if you were to say with a straight face, actually, I don't do anything wrong,
all the people around you would go, oh, yeah, they don't think they do anything wrong.
That sure doesn't pass the smell test.
And, you know, I said to him, and, you know, even at an institutional level,
there's, you know, you can, there's a, you know what I mean by the whiff of sulfur,
and that's where we got into demons.
And I said, surely you see that even in the world,
there's the whiff of sulfur about a lot of things that go on.
There's something demonic about what goes on.
And, and, and, and, and, and, and he, you know, and I said to him,
you know, here's the thing, if you read the Bible,
the Bible tells you to feed people, not starve people.
That's what the Bible tells you, feed people.
The Bible has feasts.
There's times when you fast, but it's called to feast.
It's called to feed the poor and to work hard.
You know, when the Bible says, give us this day our daily bread,
in a sense what you're doing is you're praying for farmers,
and you're, and you're praying for truckers,
and you're praying for grocery store workers.
You're praying for all of those that those,
that the coffee shops will do their work so that you can have a coffee and a muffin afterwards.
That's what Jesus teaches you to preach.
And, and the whole thrust of the Bible is towards,
this is what I try to tell him, is towards life.
It's towards light.
It's to be against the demonic.
It's to be in favor of goodness.
Well, let's look what Ezra, let's look what Ezra says.
If you just, just jump down a little bit more in chapter 7,
and you have this wonderful prayer,
and, and it's, it's, it's verses 27 to 28.
And one of the things,
which is really cool about the book of Ezra, by the way,
if, if you go back later on, you,
you can look later and you'll see the,
they give a copy of the,
of the decree that Artaxerxes wrote.
And you don't know this in English, but in the original language,
it's in Aramaic,
which is the language of diplomacy in Babylon and Persia at the time.
And it's actually in Aramaic.
We don't know that because it's just all translated in English.
And then it goes back chapter 7, 8, 9, 10,
all keep going back to me and I language because it's Ezra's memoirs.
And here we see Ezra's prayer.
And in Ezra's prayer, remember I said,
who saw that coming?
Then Cyrus says, I want Jewish people to go back and build the temple and worship their God.
Who saw coming that Darius would say,
stop the haters, I want them to finish the temple.
Who saw that Artaxerxes would say,
I want Ezra to go and have all the people in that region live under the Jewish?
Who saw that coming?
Well, Ezra tells you why it happened.
Look at verses 27 and 28.
And this fits back the third point that I tried to communicate to my friend about the Kenyan death cult.
And listen to what he says.
Chapter 7, verse 27, 28.
Blessed be the Lord, the God of our fathers,
who put such a thing as this into the heart of the king
to beautify the house of the Lord that is in Jerusalem.
And who extended to me, this is the Lord,
extended to me his steadfast love, his chesed, his unfailing, his covenant love.
And he extended it to me before the king and his counselors,
and before all of the king's mighty officers.
I took courage.
Why?
For the hand of the Lord my God was on me,
and I gathered leading men from Israel to go up with me.
Now, look how it begins.
It says, blessed be the Lord, the God of our fathers.
And by the way, you can look.
That phrase, blessed be the Lord,
that's all the way through the Old Testament.
It's a regular feature of what I call the Old Testament.
My Jewish friends call the Tanakh or the Torah.
It's all the way through.
And here's what, in the Bible, God blesses.
And when God blesses, it means to cause, to thrive, or to flourish,
in a way, in keeping with goodness and beauty and love and justice and mercy.
Okay?
So it's not helping, let's say, the drug dealer flourish
so that he can kill his rivals and addict more people to drugs.
I mean, when I was walking here between the services,
you know, I saw a guy smoking crack just a block up from here.
Well, God's not causing him to thrive by smoking crack.
It has to be the thriving is in keeping with creation,
God's original intention, creation,
and with his intention in the new creation,
the new heaven and the new earth.
And so it means it's to be in keeping with his goodness,
his beauty, his justice, his love, his mercy,
that God causes you to thrive.
Now, when we say, blessed be God,
well, here's the thing.
It's actually a phrase, and in fact, in the original language,
it implies that I kneel when I say it.
It implies that I kneel before God
and acknowledge the reality of the world as it really exists,
in the world as it really exists.
God is blessed.
That doesn't mean that he does good things.
It means he is good.
It doesn't mean that he does loving things.
He does, but it means that he is love.
It means that he is beauty,
that he is justice.
He is mercy.
He is life.
He is light.
He is freedom.
He is these things in his very nature,
and we're humbly acknowledging that
when we say, blessed be God,
that he is that in and of himself.
And if you think about it for a second,
when in a sense it says that God blesses me,
it's trying to get at,
and I don't know if I'll have time.
I won't probably have time to develop it,
but here's the thing.
Most human thought,
other than very depressed thought,
thinks that there's, in a sense,
a spark in human beings,
a type of light in human beings.
And so your religion, your spirituality,
your means of human technology changing,
you know, through the self-help gurus,
is, in a sense,
always to try to get that light to shine brighter,
that George has to get his light shining brighter.
But actually, the Bible teaches something very different.
And in a sense, on one level,
it's very counterintuitive,
but if you think about it for a second,
it's actually more realistic.
I do not have a divine light within me,
in and of myself.
I am not a flashlight
who just needs to learn your techniques
of religion and ritual
so that I can get better batteries
and more power
and shine more brightly.
I'm a mirror.
And I'll be honest with you,
because of my sin,
my mirror is a bit warped,
a bit cracked,
and it's missing a few pieces.
And that's all I am.
And no light comes from a mirror
unless the mirror is angled to the light.
And as the light hits the mirror,
if it's properly angled,
the light that comes into the mirror,
as warped and cracked
and missing pieces as it is,
flows into the room of darkness.
Every human being is a mirror.
None of us are flashlights.
Only God is blessed.
And when he blesses me,
it's that in some small way,
the light and the life that comes from him
is reflected from the mirror
into a dark world.
In a sense, salvation is,
when it's as if this was a mirror,
it's a stopwatch,
and that's me.
Salvation is a sense
when I stop running from God
and let God pick up the mirror.
And now,
God's light fills the mirror.
That's salvation.
But listen to this verse again.
Blessed be the Lord,
the God of our fathers,
who put such a thing as this
into the heart of the king
to beautify the house of the Lord
that is in Jerusalem
and who extend it to me.
Here's the thing.
The God that is blessed,
that we believe is really,
really, really true,
and has spoken to us by his word,
he moves empires.
He moves empires.
Let me tell you,
this week,
I have been terribly convicted
of how puny my prayers are.
There are large,
systemic evils in this world
that I think are too big
for God to handle,
and I do not pray against them.
And brothers and sisters,
could you pray
that this will convict me?
It might be that we as a church
have to pray for decades
against some of the systemic evils
that go on in our world.
But we are called to pray
against these systemic evils,
the systemic death,
the systemic idolatry,
the systemic darkness and evil,
that God in his mercy
would stop it
and that there would be
human flourishing
as designed and created
by God in intention.
And so you have this wonderful picture
of on one hand,
there's a God who moves empires,
but he's the same God
who has covenant love
to a guy like me
whose mirror is warped,
cracked,
and missing pieces.
And you have this wonderful phrase
that the same hand of God
that can move an empire
will rest on my shoulder and yours.
Sometimes when I'm helping a person
who's struggling with preaching
or teaching,
I say one of the things you can do
that's really helpful
is imagine that when you come to speak,
Jesus is standing right beside you
and he has his hand on you.
He has his hand on you.
It's such a close
and intimate gesture.
We all know that we don't like
inappropriate touch.
We don't want to be touched by people
unless we've given permission.
And here we have this
deeply intimate picture
of the God who can move empires
will put his hand upon you.
Could you put up the point
that goes with this, please?
That would be very helpful.
Here's the thing
I want to challenge you with.
I want to challenge you,
especially if you're watching this
and you're not quite sure
about the Christian faith,
you have a yearning
for the one
who can move empires
yet can put his strong hand of love
upon the real you.
You have a deep yearning for that.
And that yearning is only answered
by the gospel,
by the person and work of Jesus.
And you understand the message
of the Bible
in light of who Jesus is
and what he's done.
You have a yearning and a longing
to connect with the God
who can move empires,
but also will put his hand,
his strong hand of love upon you.
And we have to wrap up
over the next couple of minutes.
And the obvious question is,
does this mean that Christians
never screw up?
Well, we do.
We do.
And this text beautifully portrays
this human frailty
and the fact that it's God's goodness,
not our perfection.
That it's his hand of love upon us
helping us amongst the trials
and tribulations
and changes and chances
of this fleeting world.
You know, he's described the letters
and he's described how he gets more people
and then they come to the point in time
where they're going to leave
to go to Jerusalem
and they will end up being successful.
But they have this,
they have this, you know,
it's so funny
because in literature
or in TVs and movies,
they probably describe
as they have a come to Jesus moment.
And it's so funny
because when people in movies
say come to Jesus moment,
it means you have to be honest.
It's really sort of funny.
It's a backhanded compliment
about Christians.
You're having a come to Jesus moment.
It means you have to confess
and be honest.
And Ezra has a come to Jesus moment.
Look at what happens
in chapter 8,
verses 21 to 26 to 23.
And the text goes like this.
Then I proclaimed a fast there.
They've all gathered.
They're about to leave.
I proclaimed a fast there
at the river Ahava
that we might humble ourselves
before our God
to seek from him
a safe journey
for ourselves,
our children,
and all our gods.
It's about a 1,400-kilometer trip.
And why?
Verse 22,
For I was ashamed.
I was ashamed
to ask the king
for a band of soldiers
and horsemen
to protect us
against the enemy
on our way.
Why?
Well, since we,
but he means me,
since we had told the king,
the hand of our God
is for good
and all who seek him
and the power of his wrath
is against all
who forsake him.
So we fasted
and implored
our God for this.
And then,
thank goodness,
he listened to our cry.
Now,
it's a very puzzling text.
It's a little bit,
and I guess what I'd like to say,
it's a fine line
between presumption
and faith.
And much of what
he said is true.
But the problem is,
though,
that,
you know,
when we left
the Anglican Church of Canada
in 2008,
I think you could,
you could bet $100
that the Diocese of Ottawa
didn't think we'd last
three months.
Fifteen years later,
here we are.
Are we a megachurch?
No.
Are we big and mighty
and bigger than the diocese?
No.
Are we a failure?
No.
We're here.
We've borne witness
consistently for 15 years.
You know,
if you haven't seen it,
it's really neat
to go and watch
the Giannis interview,
the star for the Milwaukee Bucks
after they were eliminated
by the eighth-place team,
and a sports reporter
asked him whether he thought
he was a failure.
And it's a,
you know,
normally interviews
with players afterwards
are sort of like
a waste of time
to listen to,
but he's really profound
about why he's not a failure.
And one level
from the eyes of the world,
I mean,
on one level,
they thought we'd just be,
we'd be disappeared by now,
and on the other hand,
they might even say,
oh,
well,
they're just tiny
and they're just like
a little ginger group
and they have no impact.
Well,
hello,
GAFCON.
But the point of matter,
here's the point,
if you could put up
the point,
Anderson,
that would be great.
The true and living God
is untamed,
untameable,
and pure goodness and love.
You see,
to sort of say
that you'd make this
correct doctrinal statement,
therefore this type of success
is going to happen to me,
that implies that God
is sort of like a labradoodle.
You know?
Something you can have
nice Instagram posts with,
they always do what you like.
But God
isn't a tame lion.
He's not tamed,
he's completely untameable,
and fortunately,
he's good.
And here's the thing,
our God is playing
the long game
and the deep game.
He's playing the deep game
because he's trying
to turn his children
into a very different person,
one who's fit for eternity.
And sometimes setbacks
help fit you for eternity.
Sometimes diminishment
helps fit you for eternity.
And he's playing
the long game for eternity,
he's playing the deep game in you.
And so you can't be,
and we take these doctrines
as if somehow or another
God is going to give us
exactly what we want
right now.
No, no, no, no, no,
he's not tamed.
He's untameable,
but he's good.
And here's the other thing.
Do you notice what it said?
It's a bit of a scary thing.
Look at what he says
in verse 22 again.
He says,
For I was ashamed
to ask the king
for a band of soldiers
and horsemen
to protect us
against the enemy
on our way
since we had told the king
the hand of our God
is for good
and all who seek him
and the power of his wrath
is against all
who forsake him.
And in a sense,
it describes
that all human beings,
apart from grace,
that we have forsaken
the true and living God.
And it's a very powerful thing
here to hear
that his wrath
is against us.
But you know,
for those of us
who are Christians,
what do two gospels say
that Jesus said
upon the cross?
My God, my God,
why have you forsaken me?
What's my hope?
If you could put up the point.
When you and I
had forsaken
the true and living God,
Jesus came to die
forsaken by God
so that you could truly live
as his adopted child.
That's the hope of the gospel.
When I had forsaken God,
Jesus came to be forsaken by God
that you and I
might truly live.
That's what the gospel is.
That's what we receive,
the personal work of Christ.
And it's in that context,
just in closing,
how we are to understand humility.
Because humility doesn't mean
thinking bad thoughts
about ourselves.
It doesn't mean
belittling ourselves.
It doesn't mean
saying,
I'm so stupid.
I hate my...
That's not humility.
That's the devil.
If you could put up
the last point,
that would be good.
As the person and work
of Jesus becomes
more real to your heart,
his presence
and his word
help you to de-flatter.
I just made that word up.
De-flatter yourself
and live authentic
and free in the real world.
See, what's the Bible doing?
I, in my pride and vanity,
like to think
I'm a source of light.
I'm a source of blessing.
I'm a source of wisdom.
I'm a source of power.
I'm a source of all of these things.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
George, you're not
a spark of the divine,
blazing bright
that everybody should marvel at.
You're a warped,
cracked mirror,
missing pieces.
And all the light
that comes through you
has come from me.
And you know what?
To learn that
is to be in the real world.
That's to be humbled.
It's to be humbled
by the truth of God's word
and humbled in a way
that I don't have to be,
I don't have to try to pretend.
I start to learn
not to pretend,
not to think more of myself
because I can remember
that Jesus cried
from the cross for me
who had forsaken God,
that out of love for me
he called out,
my God, my God,
why have you forsaken me?
So I can become his child
by adoption and grace.
And as that becomes more real,
I can allow the work
and the person
and the word of Jesus
to deflatter myself
by the truth.
It is very freeing
to know that you are
but a mirror.
That Christ points
to himself
and into the world.
That is so freeing.
The burden,
pride,
pride crushes you.
Always being right
crushes you.
Never doing wrong
crushes you.
building your own identity
crushes you.
It is freeing
to know that you are a mirror
in the hands of the living God.
Please stand.
Close in prayer.
Just bow our heads
in prayer.
Father,
if there are any here
who,
they've been searching,
they've been watching,
trying to figure things out,
and Father,
this is spoken,
you're,
if there are any here
listening to this
as I pray to you,
Father,
and they conceal
a pull
that they know
they do have that longing
and that yearning
and they want to set down
the burden of their pride
and actually to finally
be authentic and free,
Father,
help them to know
that it is you,
it is your son
knocking at the door
of their heart,
and Father,
help them even now
to turn to Jesus,
to imagine
and to say,
I open the door
of my heart
and I ask that you
would come in
and that you would come in
as my Savior and Lord
and I give you
the run of the whole place
and I want to know
your love
and your freedom
and please be my Savior
and my Lord
and Father,
for all of us
who've already
maybe had that moment
or realize
that we've had that moment
or grown into that moment,
we ask, Father,
that the Holy Spirit
would help us
to so remember Jesus
and so trust his word
and his goodness
and his untamable
goodness and love
that we might trust
his hands upon us
and his hands on our life
that he is always
turning us towards you
that your light
and goodness
and beauty
and justice
and mercy
might shine into the world
and so, Father,
we ask that your Holy Spirit
would do that wonderful work
of grace within us
and we ask this
in the name of Jesus
and all God people said,
Amen.