Can we turn again this morning to start our time with the book of Revelation?
Book of Revelation, Chapter 3. We have been using this letter, an exhortation from the Lord to the church in Sardis, as our theme verses for these times together.
Revelation 3, starting in Verse 1:
And to the angel of the church in Sardis write:
He who has the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars, says this:
I know your deeds, that you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead.
Wake up, and strengthen the things that remain, which are about to die;
for I have not found your deeds completed in the sight of My God.
Remember therefore what you have received and heard;
and keep it, and repent.
Let us pray.
Lord, we thank You for that fresh reminder this morning of Your longsuffering, of Your love. How we worship You for that.
Lord, we thank You that, even in that same spirit, You penned these words to the church in Sardis, and You pen them to us today. Lord, in Your longsuffering, Your patience, Your endurance, and Your mighty love, You are calling out, as You called out in the first century, for us to wake up.
Call us to be about what You have called us to do in this hour, to return to You, and to complete the work that You have started. Lord, we thank You that You have called us. You have enabled and equipped us in our Lord Jesus Christ.
As we come today, we present ourselves afresh to You, Lord, that Your Spirit could move within all of our lives, to show us how to live in the hour that we are in, that we could truly be the people of God.
May we not just be something that the world looks at as odd or different, but, Lord, may we be a people known by Your name. May our lives lift up the name of Jesus.
Touch us with Your Word this morning. In Your precious name, amen.
As we have said before, when the Lord wrote these letters to the churches, those seven churches in the first century, they were not complicated letters. He was very simple and direct in what He was looking for.
Within each assembly, He was looking for the very life of His Son manifested in brothers and sisters. Our Lord is the same yesterday, today, and forever. His heart is always one thing: He looks for the life of His beloved Son in us individually and also together.
He is jealous for that. Our God is a jealous God, and He does not accept compromise. He does not accept substitutes or imitations. He knows the reality of the life of His Son.
We get confused a lot of times. We can settle for imitations or counterfeits, this or that. But our Lord, because of that Spirit of life, He knows. He is crying out unto us in this hour for us to have that same jealousy for the life of His Son to be manifested in our lives, that we could really know how to live in the hour that we are living in.
These times are getting tougher and tougher, and we can be encouraged because they are only going to get worse. There is one way through.
In Matthew, it talks about how the love of many had waxed cold, how they had slowly allowed that love to wane within their lives. But He says, “He who endures to the end shall be saved.”
How do we endure to the end? I was thankful for the reminder this morning: we endure to the end because He endured to the end. He loved us to the uttermost. His enduring love and life within each one of us will hold us and keep us.
He can say to us in this hour, “Fear not. I am with you. I will never leave you nor forsake you.” So whatever is ahead, and whatever things we have to deal with in our lives, we have the mighty God of the universe, who has equipped us to go through—not just somehow, but triumphantly in His Son.
I am so thankful for this reminder in this letter to the church in Sardis, how He calls out and says, “Wake up. There are some things I wanted you to be about, but you have not finished them yet. You have settled down. Wake up, and strengthen those things that remain.”
Strengthen the life of the Lord Jesus within you, that you can go on and be about My purpose. He even tells us how to do it. He says, “Remember what you have received.”
Do we ever reflect upon our great inheritance? I love Psalm 16. David testifies that his inheritance was beautiful to him. Do we know the richness of our inheritance in Christ—all of the riches that we have in Him, those unsearchable riches?
I was reading this morning in Timothy how it talks about how He has blessed us with so many things. The thing that touched my heart this morning was this: He has blessed us with these things, the riches. Why? It says that we may enjoy them.
Do we enjoy the riches of Christ? Somehow, I think that we forget that He has given us these things that we can enjoy the riches. We try to find our enjoyment in so many other places, but He says, “I have blessed you with all of this in Christ, that you can enjoy it.”
He wants us to have a good time in Christ. Sometimes we think having a good time is a sin, but He has given us this so that we can have a good time in Christ and enjoy all the riches.
Just as He called out to this church in Sardis, He is calling us out today to return to Him. Remember the riches. Remember our inheritance in Him.
We have been using the stories in Ezra and Nehemiah, in those two books, of how Israel was at a point of great weakness because of their unfaithfulness. We saw the mercy and enduring, steadfast love of the Lord come into that situation and liberate them from Babylon, using earthly kings.
He turned the king’s heart to liberate them so that they could return to Jerusalem with one purpose: to build the house of God. We thank the Lord that some returned the first time under Zerubbabel. Others returned the second time under Ezra, and they restored the altar and rebuilt the house.
Let us turn again to Ezra. This morning we are going to be looking at Ezra, Chapters 9 and 10.
Last week, when we were together, we looked at Ezra as seen in Chapters 7 and 8. Really, we had two things there. First, we were looking at this man Ezra. Who was he, and what can we learn from his life?
The verse that impressed itself upon my heart so much was Ezra 7:10. It really described the secret of Ezra’s life, and it is a secret for our lives:
For Ezra had set his heart to study the law of the Lord, and to practice it, and to teach His statutes and ordinances in Israel.
Ezra was one who was living the message. There is that great need among the people of God in the day we are living in—that we, all of us, as the messengers of God, live that message.
What is the Lord looking for in the messengers? He is looking for His life manifested. Just as He is looking for His life manifested within those letters of Revelation 2 and 3, He is looking for His life manifested in us.
We see how Ezra brought the Word of God in to strengthen the people, to beautify the house of God. Ezra 7:27 really summarizes Ezra’s burden: Ezra returned to beautify, strengthen, and adorn the house of God.
What is beauty? Again, it is one of those things we cannot describe, but when you see it, you know it. Beauty is when everything is in its right place. There is proportion, balance, symmetry, fullness, and completeness.
We look upon the life of our Lord, and we see fullness. We see completeness. We see everything in balance, and that is beautiful.
Beauty is destroyed as things are taken away from it or as something else is added to it. It is tragic within the house of God how we have taken things out that are supposed to be there, and we have also added to it.
It is good for us to remember: we all—I guess because I am the most guilty—whenever we hear messages and hear things, we always relate them to other people.
Now, who was God writing to here? He was not writing to those still back in Babylon. He was writing to those who had returned to Jerusalem with one purpose: to build the house of God.
He said, “You are the ones who have not beautified My house.” He did not expect it in Babylon, but He expected it of those who had returned with one purpose.
The Lord is looking upon us in this hour. We do not need to be looking at others and what they might be doing. The Lord is speaking to us. What are we doing? How are we about our Father’s business? How are we bringing more of Christ into the house? He is the beauty of the house.
As we see Christ in one another, as we are the house of God in Christ, we see His life coming forth. As the life of Christ increases, there is a beauty being restored. This is what the Lord is so jealous for.
May we be those who are given to this purpose and to this heart. Thank the Lord that Ezra responded.
Today we would like to consider Ezra 9 and 10. If we look at the first five verses in Ezra 9, Ezra has returned, and all the gifts that they brought back from Babylon have been given to those in charge of the temple. Now Ezra looks around at the people and their condition.
Ezra 9:1:
Now when these things had been completed, the princes approached me, saying, “The people of Israel and the priests and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands, according to their abominations, those of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites.
For they have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and for their sons, so that the holy race has intermingled with the peoples of the lands. Indeed, the hands of the princes and rulers have been foremost in this unfaithfulness.”
What was Ezra’s response?
When I heard about this matter, I tore my garment and my robe, and pulled some of the hair from my head and my beard, and sat down appalled.
Then everyone who trembled at the words of the God of Israel on account of the unfaithfulness of the exiles gathered to me, and I sat appalled until the evening offering.
But at the evening offering I arose from my humiliation, even with my garment and my robe torn, and I fell on my knees and stretched out my hands to the Lord my God.
After Ezra had returned, there were ones who came to him and said that those who had returned with this purpose to build the house of God—the called-out people, those who were to be separate—had sinned. They had intermarried with those who were not of the race and seed of Israel.
It had brought unrighteousness, sin, and unholiness within the city. Ezra was there to beautify the house of God, and he had to deal with this.
There are really three things I would like us to consider as we look at Ezra’s work in Jerusalem during these two chapters:
Thank the Lord that we are in this together. There are times when we can come alongside one another and help each other avoid some of the traps and sins that we face in our lives.
There were still some within Jerusalem who trembled at the Word of God. Even in the midst of this unrighteousness, there were those who trembled at the Word of God. I believe it was because of their prayers that Ezra was raised up at that moment to come back, beautify, and restore the house of God to what He intended.
As I was thinking of that, I was convicted. When was the last time I trembled at the Word of God? I can take it so casually.
The Lord has this precious promise in Isaiah:
But to this one I will look,
to him who is humble and contrite of spirit,
and who trembles at My word.
There are some things that we have lost. I do not even want to get into it today, but I think of phrases like trembling at the Word of God. I think of phrases like the fear of God.
When was the last time any of us heard a message on the fear of God? We just relate that to the Old Testament. I read an interesting little excerpt: in the New Testament, we are told to fear God more times than we are told to love God. That surprised me.
It is just an interesting thought. Is there that reverence for who the Lord is, or have we allowed things to become so common?
I thank the Lord for the great ministry that He raised up through Ezra: this ministry of beautification, restoring, and reconciling the people back to where they were to be.
As we look at this first aspect of being a peacemaker, that is what a peacemaker is. He sees something that is not right, and he comes in because he has God’s interests upon his heart.
A peacemaker is not looking out for himself. That peacemaker is looking out for God’s interest. He has God’s interest and desire upon his heart.
That is why it says in the Beatitudes:
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called sons of God.
We hear of sonship. It is those who have grown into that relationship, who understand their Father’s heart. They are not just children, but they have accepted some responsibility. They have grown up and are living to achieve what their Father’s purpose and desire is.
The Lord needs us to be raised up as sons in this hour, that we can be peacemakers upon this earth—ones who will face a difficult situation head-on and not run away from it.
When Ezra came into this situation, there was a great temptation. Ezra could have said, “I am Ezra, the skilled scribe of Israel. All of you are a mess. I am going to go do my own thing.” But Ezra did not take that attitude.
Ezra came alongside them. He did not become disillusioned or discouraged by the failures of others who should have known better.
That is a tough thing to do. When we see ones who should have known better and they are not walking the way they should walk, it can really disillusion us. It can really discourage us. We say, “What is the hope? If they are not doing it, how can I ever do it?”
It is all by the grace of God. Ezra was able to keep his eyes upon the Lord and work through this, not allowing even the failures of others to keep him from doing what the Lord had called him to do.
He came to restore that right relationship.
What is peace? We hear a lot about peace upon the earth in this hour. All of Paul’s letters, and Peter in the New Testament, start off with “grace and peace.” What is peace?
There are really two aspects to peace. Yes, there is the removing of enmity and strife—the removing of unrighteousness, getting it put aside and dealt with. There is the taking out of something.
But there is more than that. There is the bringing in.
G. Campbell Morgan said peace is “the binding together of that which was intended to be together, but has been separated.”
Brothers and sisters, who is the peacemaker? We know it was our Lord Jesus. Is that not what He did at Calvary? Our Lord made peace through the cross, and today He maintains peace through all that He did.
When we think of the two aspects of what our Lord did at Calvary, yes, He dealt with sin. He removed the enmity, strife, unholiness, and unrighteousness that were there.
But praise God, it did not stop there. He also brought in life. We were reunited in life. We were originally intended to have this life of oneness with our Lord, but because of sin it had been separated. Our Lord dealt with sin, and He brought in life.
Throughout the Gospels, whenever the Lord talks about going to the cross, He also speaks of His resurrection. When we think of the cross, yes, we think of death and burial of sin. But praise God also that He has arisen and life has been brought in.
This is the ministry of what Ezra did. He dealt with things, but he also brought God into the situation. He brought the people before God, and he brought God to the people. This was the ministry of the peacemaker.
Do we have that heart today of being a peacemaker, or are we just peacekeepers? We separate ones: “You sit over here, and you sit over here.”
The United Nations is great for this. They send peacekeepers everywhere. They never solve anything. Peacekeepers might remove the enmity, and there might not be outward battles, but is it peace? No, it is a truce.
Brothers and sisters, within the house of God today, there are too many truces. We do not need a truce with one another. We need peace with one another, and we need things settled in our lives so that we can go on together.
Peacemakers take the initiative to do this. I thank the Lord that He took the initiative to come and make peace between us and God, and we are reconciled in that.
Sometimes we can be peacekeepers, but there are also those of us who can be peace fakers. This is the denial mode. “How are you doing?” “Everything is fine.” The whole house is falling down, but everything is fine.
We have a dear friend, and I can always tell how he is doing when I ask him, “How are you doing?” If he says, “I am doing okay,” I know he is okay. But if he comes back with, “I am okay,” I know he is not.
So often within the house of God, somehow we think it is unspiritual to say, “There is a problem here. We have a problem. Let us deal with it.”
It is like, “Nope, we are in the heavenlies. We are seated up here.” Which is true. But everything is supposedly fine while foreign wives are being taken and all these things are going on.
We do not need to be peace fakers within the house of God. We need to be peacemakers and face things head-on. Our Lord Jesus saw what needed to be done. He came and did it. Ezra saw this, and he came and brought the Lord into the situation.
Ezra had the courage to face it head-on. If it is not dealt with, it is not going away. It will surface later on with increased fierceness.
I tremble at certain things that go on within the house of God that are not dealt with. We can think, “Oh, everything is okay.” It is not. Excuse my English, but it will surface sooner or later.
As that old commercial said, it is sure a lot better to pay them now than pay them later. We need to settle things in these days in which we are living.
If we have an issue with a brother or sister, in the Lord there is a way to work through this. He showed Ezra the way through, and He will show us that way through also.
I am so thankful in these verses that Ezra did not come in and rebuke the people. He did not come in like the Pharisees and say, “Oh, look at you,” pointing out all their failures and sins.
Why did Ezra not do this? Because Ezra knew himself in the light of God. Ezra knew that he was a man of like nature, except by the grace of God.
He came and humbled himself there. He did not elevate himself. He knew that, left to himself and apart from God, he would go the same way.
We need to wake up and see that any of us, left to ourselves, will do the same thing. Are you ever surprised at your actions? Do you ever say, “Gee, I thought I was further along in the Lord than that”?
Are we ever surprised by the way we handle a situation? The only thing that shows us is that we do not know ourselves. We are capable, left to ourselves, of really anything.
But it is seeing ourselves in God’s light—the light of His love and His completed work. He points it out because He wants to set us free from it. He wants it to be made right within us so that we can go on and more of the life of His Son can come forth.
As we continue in Ezra 9, we see this beautiful prayer, how Ezra came alongside the people. He did not elevate himself. He came alongside the people who were in this situation.
He did not give them a sermon or lecture. He brought them before the Lord, and he brought the Lord before them.
Ezra 9 is Ezra’s prayer. In all these books related to recovery, Chapter 9 is the prayer chapter. Daniel 9 was Daniel’s prayer. Nehemiah 9 contains the prayer there. You see similar principles because they are all identifying with the people.
This is the prayer of a true peacemaker. In Ezra 9:6-15, notice how Ezra identifies with the people. You do not see a “them” and a “they”: “Lord, help them.”
Notice how Ezra says, “Lord, we knew better.” He takes accountability. He takes responsibility. He confesses the sin fully, with no excuses, and he falls into the hands of the merciful God.
These prayers are precious things to meditate upon.
And I said, “O my God, I am ashamed and embarrassed to lift up my face to Thee, my God, for our iniquities have risen above our heads and our guilt has grown even to the heavens.
Since the days of our fathers to this day we have been in great guilt, and on account of our iniquities we, our kings and our priests, have been given into the hand of the kings of the lands, to the sword, to captivity, to plunder and to open shame, as it is this day.
But now for a brief moment grace has been shown from the Lord our God, to leave us an escaped remnant and to give us a peg in His holy place, that our God may enlighten our eyes and grant us a little reviving in our bondage.
For we are slaves; yet in our bondage our God has not forsaken us, but has extended lovingkindness to us in the sight of the kings of Persia, to give us reviving, to raise up the house of our God, to restore its ruins and to give us a wall in Judah and Jerusalem.”
Even though they were in Jerusalem, they were still under the king’s authority. They were slaves. Yet in their bondage, God had not forsaken them.
Ezra reminds them of their purpose. Why were they in Jerusalem? To raise up the house of their God, to restore its ruins, and to receive a wall in Judah and Jerusalem. The wall, as we will see, gets rebuilt in Nehemiah.
And now, O our God, what shall we say after this? For we have forsaken Thy commandments, which Thou hast commanded by Thy servants the prophets, saying, “The land which you are entering to possess is an unclean land with the uncleanness of the peoples of the lands, with their abominations which have filled it from end to end and with their impurity.
So now, do not give your daughters to their sons nor take their daughters to your sons. Never seek their peace or their prosperity, that you may be strong and eat the good things of the land and leave it as an inheritance to your sons forever.”
And after all that has come upon us for our evil deeds and our great guilt, since Thou, our God, hast requited us less than our iniquities deserve and hast given us an escaped remnant as this, shall we again break Thy commandments and intermarry with the peoples who commit these abominations? Wouldst Thou not be angry with us to the point of destruction, until there is no remnant nor any who escape?
O Lord God of Israel, Thou art righteous, for we have been left an escaped remnant, as it is this day. Behold, we are before Thee in our guilt; for no one can stand before Thee because of this.
There is a preciousness in this prayer, in how Ezra identifies with the people. When we find ourselves in these situations, how do we respond?
We talk a lot about the house of God and the body of Christ. The reality of what we really see of the body of Christ or the house of God will be reflected in our prayer life.
If we see things going on and desire that the Lord’s beauty be brought in, that more of Christ be brought in, how are we praying? Are we praying, “Lord, meet us. Lord, strengthen us. For we have sinned”?
We are not sitting there saying, “Lord, help them. We pray for them, we pray for them.” No. There is an identification. We are one in Christ. We partake of that one bread, that one loaf. There is a testimony of our oneness in the Lord.
Yet how often in our prayers is there the “them” and the “us”? May the Lord touch our hearts in a fresh way, that we would pray that we, as His people, really need to be strengthened and to strengthen those things that remain of Him.
The people in Jerusalem at this point in time were in a great crisis. But praise the Lord, brothers and sisters, for every crisis that we are in individually or together, our Lord always has an answer for that crisis.
Do you know what the answer to that crisis is? It is our Lord Jesus Christ: a greater revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Lord wrote to those churches in Revelation because He desired that each one of them would have a greater revelation of Christ and return to Him. As we find ourselves in the crisis of this hour, how do we make it through the crisis? It is through a greater revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
So often we can get distracted even by problem solving. As we first come to the Lord and see Him, then we see a greater revelation of Him. Then maybe He will show us the way. But He is the remedy for every crisis, individually and together.
Ezra brought the Lord into the situation. The people were brought to a place of repentance, not simply from what Ezra had done, but by Ezra ministering Christ to them. As Ezra brought Christ into the situation, there was a deep conviction of sin, and there was a response.
I thank the Lord that Ezra was willing to be that peacemaker when he saw this crisis. I pray that, in the hour we are living in, we will be willing to be peacemakers within the house of God when we see crisis, either individually or together.
Can we learn from Ezra in this? Can we take courage and face certain situations head-on rather than avoid or deny them? May the Lord help us in that.
The Lord moved in a mighty way to bring repentance. What were they dealing with? They were dealing with this issue of foreign wives.
When we read this matter of foreign wives, we can say, “How does that relate to us today? What does this mean?” Let us not make it too difficult.
What is somebody who is a foreigner? They are simply not born in the same country that you are born in. They are born somewhere else. Because they are born somewhere else, they have different thoughts, habits, and perspectives.
We have people meeting with us from South Africa, Germany, Eastern Europe, the Far East, India, and many other places. There are many different thoughts and perspectives.
When we talk of something being foreign, spiritually speaking, it is something foreign to the family of God. It is not born of Him.
We are in the kingdom of God, and there is a kingdom of darkness. When we talk about a foreign wife, it is something simply not born within the same nation that we are.
We are a people. We are a chosen race. We are a holy people. It is precious to be this holy people unto God.
But these had allowed certain ones to come in who were not of that same race, and it brought unrighteousness in. It can have an effect upon us today.
It says also that they were wives. What does that mean? When you think about a wife, it is someone you are joined with intimately. It is not just an associate, and it is not even just a partnership. It is one with whom you are joined intimately. Your very heart is given to that one.
What they are talking about here is that there have been things not born of God that these people of God have given their hearts to and have become intimately joined with.
How did this happen? We can see from Ezra’s prayer that they had the Word of God saying they should not do this. But I think it was through a slow, gradual process.
There is a slow waxing cold of love. Love starts cooling off, and all of a sudden what we really have the call upon our life to be about starts to fade away. The reason we are called to return and build starts fading away.
I do not think that, out of the blue, one day, somebody walking strongly in the Lord just goes and marries a foreign wife. It is a result. It is the fruit of a slow process of falling away.
Ezra brought them back to the Word of God, and it strengthened them. If the Word of God could stay fresh within them—and fresh to us—it would keep us from that slow process of cooling off.
How much pain and suffering could have been avoided here.
What was the effect of these foreign wives? It ends in dissipation, and it ends in distracting us from what the Lord has called us to.
We see this illustrated in Solomon’s life. It says Solomon married many foreign women. What happened to him? It stole his heart. His heart was not settled on the Lord like his father David.
It also opened a way for the enemy to come in and bring down the kingdom. By Solomon marrying these foreign wives and his heart being intimate with them and away from the Lord, it opened the way and gave the enemy an opening to bring that kingdom down.
This matter of separation is so important. I am very thankful that lately we have heard about the matter of sanctification, because separation is sanctification.
Again, we need to keep in mind who we are talking about. These were not ones still in Babylon. These were ones who had left Babylon and returned to Jerusalem to build the house of God.
Let us not think it cannot happen to us. Do not think it cannot, because that only shows us that we do not know ourselves in God’s light.
How does this apply to us today? We know that we are primarily speaking of our heart condition.
What are our foreign wives today? What are things with which we are intimate? These can be many things. They can be our jobs. How often do we use the phrase, “So-and-so is married to his work”?
Many of us, as we have gone through our careers, have experienced that. Thank the Lord, He came in and we had that divorce—the good divorce between our work and our walk with the Lord.
It can be money. It can be education. It can be our family. It can be anything that is distracting or dissipating us from being about the purpose that God has.
The Lord said in the Gospels that he who loves mother, father, family, work, farm, or all these things more than Him cannot be His disciple.
It is not saying that we do not have these things. He is saying: do we love them more than we love the Lord, His purpose, and His heart?
Today there is such a focus on education, and we need education. But we can focus so much on getting a PhD that everything else is put aside.
We need to be honest with each other, brothers and sisters. Is there anything in our life that has become too important? How do we know what is important to us? It is the things that occupy our lives. Where are we spending our time?
Even homeschooling, as with any other thing, can be a distraction from serving the house of God and His purpose. Our job can be. The pleasures of life can be.
We need to take these things honestly before the Lord. We need to say, “Lord, is this distracting? Is this allowing something to take me away from what Your purpose is for my life and Your people?”
Are we willing to have a willing heart for Him to answer that question and to hear what He says?
Sometimes we can be so occupied with many things that we do not have time to serve within the house of God.
I can say this because at times I have been so occupied with things. There were times in my walk with the Lord that I was so occupied with sports, playing ball, that I did not have time to go to prayer meeting.
There were times in my life where being on that ball field every Wednesday night was more important to me than being at the prayer meeting. I was married to sports. It was distracting and dissipating.
It can be anything that affects our life. Now we have the internet, all sorts of stuff out there that we can get captured by. May the Lord really wake us up.
Do you know what one of the effects of this is? There is one of the most tragic verses in the Bible. Hold your finger here in Ezra, and turn to the end of Nehemiah, Nehemiah 13.
This is one of the tragic effects of being married to these foreign wives. In Nehemiah 13, the last chapter, Verse 24 says:
As for their children, half spoke the language of Ashdod, and none of them was able to speak the language of Judah, but the language of his own people.
They could not speak the language of Judah. They could not speak the language of God. They spoke the language of the world.
At times, what language are our children learning? Are they just learning the words of Christianity, or are they words of life coming from their hearts?
In the United States, we have many people studying and teaching English as a second language—ESL programs. It is tragic to me that, in so much of Christianity, our children are using Christianity as their second language.
Is Christianity our second language? Do we have a first language that we use most of the time, but when we are around the brothers and sisters, we switch over to our second language?
As we have been going to Brazil, I have been studying Portuguese. I can do a little. I can get around conversationally. But one thing I know: when something has to be expressed from my heart, I always revert back to the language I know the most. I revert back to English.
You will notice that when people are starting to learn different languages, at times of prayer, worship, or crying out to the Lord in desperateness, they revert back to their original tongue and language.
Many people can speak English, but unless they have been here for many years, the language of their heart is their native tongue.
All I am trying to get us to see today is to ask the Lord, “Lord, what is my native tongue? What is my heart language?” In a time of crisis, that is the language that will come out.
Do we come out with a fighting spirit to defend ourselves, or do we come out with the words of our Lord in a spirit of humility? A crisis will reveal what is within us.
These ones, when they were in crisis, went to the foreign ones. Ezra came in, and he was trying to bring them back to their language.
May we really come back to allowing our heart language to be the language of our Lord and not the language of this world.
What language are we teaching one another? What language are we teaching our kids? This gets back to Ezra, because ones learn language from us, from the language that they see us speaking.
They see us talking one thing but doing something else. They saw within Ezra one who not only studied the Word but practiced the Word.
It is amazing the insight children can have. They can see right through us. They know. They know if the way we act here on Sunday, Wednesday, Friday, or whatever day is different from the way they see us act elsewhere.
What a contrast. Which language are they learning?
We do not need to allow this to condemn us and say, “Woe is me,” and all that. But we need to say, “Lord, I want, first for myself, to be one whose first language is that language of love—the language of God within my heart.”
May that language be taught to our children. Would the Lord really help us with that?
There is another thing as we think about this whole concept of foreign wives. Normally, a wife takes her husband’s name.
Today, as we have touched on before, we have many things out there in the name of Christianity. But what is their origin? Is it just a foreign wife with a pretty name? Have we married it and called it Christian?
Within Christianity, we have Christian music, Christian aerobics, Christian diet books, Christian dance, Christian sports leagues—we have everything. What is the origin of it?
Do we just take something, clean it up a little bit to ease our conscience, tag “Christian” on it, and then say it is okay?
If the origin is not of the Lord, I have to ask myself, why? Why do we go to the world so much to have fun?
Do we fail to equate enjoyment with the house of God? The Lord has given us so much of Himself. He has given us all of Himself that we can enjoy it.
Do we see the beauty of the Lord? Do we enjoy the Lord, or do we have to go to the world?
I was reminded of that little phrase: imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Why are we imitating the world? Why is the world not trying to imitate Christ in us? Why is the world not drawn, while we find ourselves trying to imitate the world so much?
I was talking to a brother who lives in another state. He was saying that many youth groups in the town where he meets now have Christian poker nights for the youth.
Because the World Poker Tour has taken off and they polish it and make it look pretty, people take it and say, “Oh, but they do not use real money.” All the kids come in, receive the same amount of chips, and have their little poker night. That is their fun.
Everybody says, “Oh, it is so good. My children go to youth group every week, and we have our Christian poker night.” But it shows us how somehow we tag this name “Christian” on something and lose sight.
May the Lord bring us back. May He awaken our conscience to the days in which we are living.
Who were these foreign wives? In Ezra 9:1, we read all those names—the Jebusites, Hittites, and others. Who were they? These were the ones Israel had already conquered before.
They had conquered and defeated these people and driven them out. They had been brought into subjection to the people of God. But the things they had defeated, they allowed to come back in.
Are there things within our lives that, by the grace of God, at some point we had victory over, but then at some point we allow them to come back in?
All of a sudden, they get a foothold on us again. We say, “Gee, I thought I dealt with that many years ago.” But somehow we let it come back in, and it starts to rob us of our relationship with the Lord.
This can be doctrinal things, legalism, sectarian spirits, or personal things that we separated from in the past but somehow allowed to come back in.
I was watching an interview this week called The Marketing of Evil. It was an individual who had written this book, and it showed how the enemy is marketing evil to desensitize us as believers to sin.
We can get confused. We take television, movies, DVDs, or whatever. Maybe when we are first saved, we say, “I need to put that aside. That is not edifying.”
But then we say, “Well, I am a little stronger Christian now. I can watch this.” We think that because we are stronger, we can watch some of this sin and perversion, hear profanity, and it will not affect us.
We kid ourselves into thinking that we are stronger. Actually, the reason we can watch sin and pornography and hear cursing within movies is not because we are stronger and it has no effect. It is because we are weaker.
Our conscience has been weakened to the convicting work of the Holy Spirit so that sin does not impact us.
If we are the people of God, how can we sit there and be totally desensitized when someone uses our beloved Savior’s name in vain—when they are cursing and using His name in a defaming way—and we say, “Oh, it was not that bad”?
No, that is desensitization. We need our conscience awakened by the working of the Holy Spirit, so that we are not lulled into thinking, “Wow, I am such a strong Christian. I could watch that R-rated movie. It did not affect me.”
No. It is a weakened Christian who can watch that, and we should grieve when it does not affect us. We need the Holy Spirit to make our spirit and conscience tender, so that we are repulsed by sin.
There is so much homosexuality portrayed in the world that it seems like every show has a couple of them. We are not even repulsed these days by homosexuality.
Now, we do need to love the sinner, but we need to hate the sin. The world says, “You need to be tolerant. You need to be broad-minded.” No, we do not.
We need to be a people of God who return to hating evil and doing good. We need to be the people of God who can stand up for His name when it is used in a cursing and defaming way.
We are only fooling ourselves. The Lord says, “Holiness befits My house.” We need to be those who return to the spirit of holiness and godliness unto Him.
Thank the Lord that Ezra brought in the living Word, and it sanctified them. Through this confrontation with the Word of God, the people repented.
Ezra 10:1 says:
Now while Ezra was praying and making confession, weeping and prostrating himself before the house of God, a very large assembly, men, women and children, gathered to him from Israel; for the people wept bitterly.
They continued on and said, “We have sinned against the Word of God, and we need to return to Him.”
Thank the Lord, the people came and returned. They put aside their foreign wives. They actually separated from them.
Now, in the day and time we are living in, nobody with a foreign wife should separate. But the principle concerns our hearts. We need to separate from that stuff. We need to divorce it.
Depending upon the intimacy we have with it, it will be painful. But we need to see the joy set before us so that we can put these things aside.
In my Bible, beginning in Verse 18, the heading is “The List of the Offenders.” These are the ones who had foreign wives, came back to the Lord, repented, and went on with the Lord.
Actually, I think that is a misnomer. God does not remember these ones as the offenders. To me, God remembers these ones as the overcomers.
They overcame the sin in which they were entangled, and they were restored to a right relationship. We do not go through life with this tag, “the offenders.” No. That is under the blood.
They came back, went on, and returned. This is how the house is beautified. These are what we could call the beautiful ones, because before they had defamed the house of God, but now, as they repented, they were beautifying the house of God through their lives.
They overcame that sin. May we respond in that same spirit today, that the Holy Spirit can search us and we can be those who beautify the house of God.
I need to close here in a minute. The third aspect we wanted to look at today was this: how could the people of Israel have helped each other avoid this?
As I was thinking about this, going back into Ezra, for the ones who married their foreign wives, more than likely there was one person who did it first. This is speculation, but probably there was one person who did it first.
What did the other people do?
If we see the house of God and our relationship with one another, we do not just sit by and let someone destroy their lives.
We do not just say, “Oh, you are going to marry that foreign wife? Well, you should not,” and let them go self-destruct, let their family be destroyed, and let their children suffer.
No, we need to be those—again, the peacemakers—who come alongside one another. If we really see our relationship with one another, it will be manifested in our caring for one another.
We have a million excuses for why not to do it: “Who am I? My life is such a mess. They will never listen to me anyway. If I said something, they would not listen. They do not really want my help. They do not like me.”
We can go on and on. “They are set in their ways. I will let someone else do it. I might offend them if I confront them with their sin. I do not want to break the peace that we have—the truce that we have.”
One of the cop-outs that we can use is, “Well, I will just pray for them.” Now, do not misunderstand this. The first thing we need to do is pray.
But if we are honest, we can use prayer as a cop-out for action. We do need to pray, but when the Lord answers the prayer and says for us to take a step, we do it.
We do not just keep saying, “Oh, Lord, help them, help them.” Yes, we pray, but we do not use prayer as a cop-out. There is a way of stepping into the situation, and Ezra stepped in.
One of the beauties of the house of God that is missing in our days is accountability—accountability to one another.
Me being accountable to you and you being accountable to me. The Lord has called us to be accountable to one another under His headship.
This does not mean meddling in every little thing in each other’s lives. It means that principle of caring for and loving one another, the principle of coming alongside.
If we see somebody entering into something and self-destructing, do we just sit down and let them walk off the edge of the cliff? Do we let their family be destroyed and their children go out into the world?
Or do we try to find the Lord’s way to come into the situation, walk with them through that, and help them through it?
Now, it is hard. I am not saying this is easy. It is hard because it will take a commitment on our part to be involved in other people’s lives.
We might get rejected. We might get misunderstood. All sorts of things might happen to us. What do we have to lose?
All we have to lose is our self-image and our reputation. It comes back to what Paul was writing: are we willing to be fools for Christ?
What is more important—our self-image or our brothers’ and sisters’ welfare? As we see one self-destructing, Proverbs says that an open rebuke is better than love concealed.
I am so thankful for those within my life who, when they saw character flaws, addressed those issues. They came, got with me, and rebuked me. They said, “Mac, that is not right.”
I am thankful for ones who love me that much. I am thankful for the Lord who loves me that much.
Now, how do we do this? Obviously, we are not talking about publicly attacking everyone. Love covers. We are talking about approaching discreetly and privately.
These ones responded to the Word and returned. They entered into accountability with Ezra. They said, “We will do it,” and Ezra held them to it, and they went through.
If we see the relationship that we have within the house of God, we will desire this accountability because it is a safety to us.
I am so thankful for brothers and sisters, because there is safety there. They can see things in my life and address them.
If we do not want accountability, what are we hiding? Is it just an independent life? Or do we pick and choose who we want to be accountable to?
I am not talking about the discipleship movement, with all its structure. I am talking about the principle of caring for one another and responding to one another.
When we see situations, how do we handle them? We come alongside. We do pray. We go to the Lord: “Lord, show us Your way to intervene in this situation.”
What did Ezra do? He brought the Lord into the situation, and he brought them to the Lord. So we pray for that.
Then we ask the Lord to search our hearts and get that log out of our eye. We make sure our motives are right.
Maybe there is some old thing where we have been hindered, and we have been waiting for a revengeful moment: “Oh, that one finally messed up. I am going to go get them now.” Get that log out of our eyes.
The whole purpose—what was Ezra’s purpose?—was restoration. It was not punishment. He was not trying to put them down or point out all their weaknesses. His burden in the end was to restore and reconcile them with God.
Then, as we are led by the Lord, we go in that proper spirit to one another: to restore them, walk with them, and go through this with them.
Would we be willing to risk our reputation, our image, and all that selfishly holds and hinders us, so that a brother or sister could be restored to that right relationship?
I am thankful that the Lord was willing to do this. He left the splendor of heaven and came down upon this earth as the peacemaker, as the restorer of our souls.
I wonder—again, speculating in Ezra—if someone had addressed that issue when that first person married that foreign one, what the outcome would have been.
May we be accountable. May we, in the Lord, learn this preciousness. May the Lord help us really to be accountable to one another and willing to be accountable to one another.
As I was thinking about this book yesterday, I was reminded that it is tough studying when it is eighty degrees outside. The weather is beautiful. The windows are open. It reminded me of spring cleaning.
In spring cleaning, everything has been closed up. The air is a little stale, and things are a little dusty. Then the windows are opened, fresh air comes in, and there is a return to the freshness of the home that you really enjoy.
Then we go through spring cleaning, beautifying the house.
Brothers and sisters, I think it is good for us within the house of God. Periodically, we need a spring cleaning. We need to allow the Holy Spirit to blow through in His way.
Open up the windows of our heart. Open up the windows of our assembly. Stop everything else and say, “Lord, would Your Spirit come in?”
Do that spring cleaning in my life. Show me where I am attached to these foreign wives, where I am harboring something, where things are distracting me, where I have an offense with a brother or sister.
Lord, would Your Spirit come in and show those things in our lives? Within our assembly, Lord, come in. We open these windows and let Your Holy Spirit come in and breathe afresh.
Expose things within our lives that, consciously or unconsciously, we have entered into and are enjoying, but they are not of You.
That is where the beauty of the Lord comes out. When we do that spring cleaning within our lives, the beauty of the house shows forth.
Could we, in the hour in which we are living, allow the Lord to do that spring cleaning so that the beauty of the Lord can show forth in a greater way?
Again, as we have touched on these matters in Ezra today, the Lord is working. He is looking for peacemakers. Would we be willing to be peacemakers within the house of God today?
Again, may the Holy Spirit search our hearts. If we find a hesitancy when we talk about this issue of accountability, would we say, “Lord, why am I hesitant? Why am I hesitant?”
Allow His Holy Spirit to shine His light. Ezra brought in the light of the Lord in a situation. In every situation that we are in, the Lord wants to bring that light in to shine upon us, so that we would be set free.
May we be set free from all the things in which we are entangled. May we enjoy the beauty of the Lord. May we enjoy all the riches of the Lord and allow Him to beautify His house in this hour.
As His house is being beautified, it will hasten His return. Let us pray.
Lord, we return to You again with really grateful hearts, again for Your longsuffering love with us.
Lord, we want to come and simply offer ourselves to You again. Lord, You could do a spring cleaning in our lives.
Lord, I see all the dust, the cobwebs, the things that I allow in. We pray that we would allow Your Holy Spirit to come in and remove these areas where we have been desensitized.
May our consciences be exercised in a greater way, to be sensitive to the things of You, Lord, and to the call that You have upon us in this hour.
In Jesus’ name, amen.