Good afternoon, brothers and sisters.
Can we please start in the book of Galatians? We will start in Galatians 2, with the verse that we read together yesterday.
I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.
And the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, Who loved me and delivered Himself up for me.
Please turn also to Colossians 2. We will read verse 6 and the first half of verse 7.
As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith.
Before we turn to the Old Testament, please turn to 2 Corinthians 11, verse 3.
But I am afraid, lest as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds should be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.
Then turn to 2 Chronicles 32, verse 32.
Now the rest of the acts of Hezekiah and his deeds of devotion, behold, they are written in the vision of Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz, in the book of the kings of Judah and Israel.
And then 2 Chronicles 35, verse 26.
Now the rest of the acts of Josiah, and his deeds of devotion, as written in the law of the Lord, and his acts, first to last, behold, they are written in the book of the kings of Israel and Judah.
Let us bow for prayer.
Lord, we thank You this afternoon that we have the chance again to gather together with You. Thank You, Lord, for being able to share in this precious life that was implanted in our hearts because of the wonderful things that You have done.
Lord, we pray this afternoon that You might be exalted in the speaking and in the listening. If there is something that we need to hear—one small phrase, perhaps, to remember—we pray that You would plant that into our hearts.
Thank You, Lord. Please guard Your word. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Yesterday afternoon, brothers and sisters, we spoke about Christ’s life. We shared on the first half of our theme verse: when we received Christ, His life came into our hearts.
We then proceeded to try to squeeze four messages into one, on the four topics that the Lord had put on my heart. The first was that the life is a victorious life—not simply when we die, but that the life of victory can be part of our lives even today as we live.
We shared that this life is a spiritual life. The spiritual life permits us to communicate with God and permits the Holy Spirit to commune with us. In so doing, we begin to know Him, fellowship with Him, share our life with Him, and begin to love Him.
The third theme—and I failed to say this yesterday—was one of four themes from Romans 6 through 8. The third theme was that the life grows in Christ. That growth is driven by the cross in our lives.
Sometimes we feel that the cross can be painful. But without the work of the cross to declutter what has been in our hearts—our flesh and our soul—the Lord’s increase is limited and hindered by our flesh life.
Then we shared that the life in us will be revealed. It will reveal Christ to us, and Christ will be revealed in us.
We finished by concluding that, in the end, the testimony of the church is still that light of the fire of the life of God in our hearts. It is not in our giftings. It is not in our revelation. It is not in how many we have or how blessed we have been. In the end, the testimony always is, and only is, the life of Christ.
These four points that the Lord had put on my heart—and there are so many more that we could have shared about—are true regardless of whether we go along for the ride. They are true regardless of the state of our condition, or our sense of how well we are doing in Christ. These things are always true.
We can be thankful for these things because so many times these truths have, at one point, become real to us and opened up our life again.
Today, we would like to shift gears briefly. We would like to share about the second half of the theme verse: having accepted the life of Christ into our hearts, how then do we walk?
It is such a simple matter to take that life and walk by that life. Yet so many times we have made it complicated and burdened it with do’s and don’ts, with thoughts about what we should do, or with this person’s thoughts or that book’s recommendation.
We have had a hard time listening to the voice of the Lord’s life in our hearts to help us know how we should move forward. By the Lord’s grace, today may He make that very real to us, because, to be honest, we all need this. We all need to know how we should walk every day.
We have been sharing on the topic of Christ our life, and at points it feels like an immense topic. But in the Lord’s wisdom, He gave it to the brothers with these words: Christ our life.
As we have been sharing, I am beginning to notice that there is a focus that the Lord is bringing into view among all the brothers:
There is a conflict that exists in us at times because of the influence of the world. The world tempts us to depart from the spirit and to live by our feelings, our flesh, our carnality, or our soul. How is it that we might be able to walk by the Spirit?
Yesterday, we briefly mentioned the Garden of Eden. I would like to start today by taking us back for a moment to that garden.
We remember the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When Eve came to that tree and the enemy began to tempt her, he was so cunning in what he said. He took advantage of the fact that Eve’s eyes looked on the fruit, and the fruit called to her soul.
She looked at it, and it was appealing. Her eyes looked at it, and it looked good. Then she began to think, “You know what? It will help me increase.”
Satan used how the fruit made her feel and how it enticed her heart. Then he began to twist what the Lord had said. The Lord had said, “You will die if you eat this fruit,” and, of course, He was referring to the spirit.
But Satan twisted it to focus her eyes on herself. He said, in effect, “You—soul and flesh—surely will not die. In fact, this fruit, which is so enticing to your soul and so enticing to your flesh, will, in the end, augment you. It will make you better.”
So Eve took of the fruit. In Satan’s terminology, diction, and point of view, she was enhanced. Her eyes were opened. She realized that she was naked.
It is so interesting that Satan had to tempt her with his cunning, and then she turned to her husband and said, “Hey, take this fruit.” “Okay.” He took the fruit, and the same happened with her husband.
What we see here, brothers and sisters, is that so little is needed for us to fall on the side of the soul and the flesh. To walk in the spirit takes the Lord’s intervention in our lives, even though it is so simple.
Somehow, in our flesh, it is so easy to default to that level: “It looks good to my eyes. It is going to be good for me as I perceive myself. Satan says I am going to do better—the world says I am going to do better—and so I take of it.”
When I used to read this verse, I always felt that Satan’s temptation came primarily from the appeal of the fruit: “This fruit looks so good.” He called out to Eve’s soul and her flesh.
But when we come to 2 Corinthians 11:3, we realize that Satan’s temptation was actually different. As Satan deceived Eve, his tactic was to cause Eve to depart from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.
On the one hand, the fruit was calling out to the flesh and the soul. It looked so good. Yet Satan was doing something in the background too. He was not simply enticing the soul and the flesh. He was causing her to depart, for just a moment, from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.
When he gets us off that ground for just a moment, the soul and the flesh are so easily raised up.
Brothers and sisters, when I was in college and read this passage, somehow the Lord put it on my heart that it was so important. On my Macintosh, I typed these words:
In all things, simplicity and sincerity before the Lord.
I meant to bring it with me because I still have it. I found it the other day. I printed it on an eight-by-ten page, folded it in half, put it in a little frame, and placed it on my desk.
The reason I did this was that I knew how easy it was for me to drift away from that—to become complicated and insincere about my walk with the Lord. I wanted to do something, or, I hate to say it, impress someone, or do something that would look good in the eyes of the church.
These things are so easily used by the enemy to draw us away from the Lord. Before we know it, our soul and flesh have risen up and eaten us alive.
To be sincere and pure, to be uncontaminated by ambition—even our Christian ambitions—or by the sense that I can earn God’s love: these complicated things creep in, and before we know it, we have departed from the Lord just a little bit.
That little crack gives Satan an entrance into our heart. He begins to say, “Oh, that fruit looks pretty good. It is going to make you better in this way or that.” Before we know it, he has us.
So, brothers and sisters, I made that little thing and put it on my desk. I do not know how many times I looked at it. It reminded me of these simple things, and many times it brought me back.
When I found it, I looked on the back and found all my combination-lock stickers. I had thrown away all my combination locks, so I had lost all the combinations. But there they were. I knew it was important, so I put my combination-lock information on the back of it. I looked at it, and I truly cherished it.
I think, brothers and sisters, that in devotion there is a protection for us against all these complicated things.
What is devotion? Devotion is very simple. It is that we act based upon loyalty.
That is to say, we have a loyalty in our heart to Someone. We may not feel that we love Him. We may not be in a state where He is everything to us. But even in our times of difficulty, there is still a loyalty in our heart to something.
The act of devotion is simply to say, “I will do something because of a loyalty to Christ.” Not because I am great. Not because I feel that I have a risen, resurrected life, because I may not feel that way. Not because times are great. But because I know that He is worthy.
This simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ is a protection for us against the enemy’s temptation to go to the soul and to the flesh.
It is easy to say, but sometimes it is very hard to live out. Sometimes the world around us is devastating, and normal life is devastating. It is so easy to begin to trust in our souls and in what makes us feel good—in those things that make us feel affirmed.
I remember in college, when the movement of psychology had come into the campus fellowships, that if someone said something truthful, someone would often say, “I do not feel affirmed by what you said.”
Whenever truth came to us, affirmation was so important. If it was not felt, then what might have been truth and what might have been so helpful to us was cast aside.
Sometimes, when our hearts feel like the weight of the world has fallen on us, devotion becomes so important to lead us in the right way, because our feelings are driving us left and right.
Paul gives us this hint: it was not only that Eve’s soul and flesh were so large in her; it was that the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ was lost—that dedication to the spirit.
It came into my heart: how can we walk in this life, and how can the Spirit lead us? I searched for people who were devoted, and I came upon these two verses in 2 Chronicles about two kings: Hezekiah and Josiah.
The Bible tells us that they had acts in their lives, and it calls them their deeds of devotion. That means that even when times were not good—and, as we will review their stories, they were not good times—in their hearts they had a devotion to God, and in our words, a devotion to Christ.
They were deeds of devotion. It was not simply something they talked about or something theoretical to them. Their devotion manifested itself in what they did.
Perhaps in these deeds of devotion, there is something that we can learn about the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.
Let us turn to Hezekiah. We will start in 2 Kings 18. As you know, there are parallels in 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles.
To give some background about Hezekiah, his father Ahaz was not a good man. To give you an example of who he was: he took one of his sons and had him walk through the fire of the false god Moloch.
He put up idols to Baal and Asherah. All the worship of these pagan gods was founded on the soul and on how it made people feel, not just in their hearts, but also in their flesh.
Then Ahaz sold the kingdom to Assyria. He had no regard for the things of God. Ahaz created a world full of darkness, and into this darkness a son, Hezekiah, was born.
Hezekiah had a mother whose name was Abi. Hezekiah was far from perfect; in fact, he stumbled many times. But I am thankful, because it shows that you do not need to be perfect to have a life where our actions can be deeds of devotion.
Somehow, along the early part of his life, Hezekiah came to know God. Then we come to 2 Kings 18, beginning with verse 2.
He was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned twenty-nine years in Jerusalem; and his mother’s name was Abi, the daughter of Zechariah.
And he did right in the sight of the Lord, according to all that his father David had done.
He removed the high places and broke down the sacred pillars and cut down the Asherah.
He also broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the sons of Israel burned incense to it; and it was called Nehushtan.
Hezekiah was a young man. At twenty-five years old, he became king in a world where everyone had been lost, and the message of the world was soul and flesh—feelings and emotions.
Yet somehow, in his heart, the spirit of something greater had been born. He began to work. He began to tear down idols. He tore down the idols in the world and encouraged a life without idols.
This, in and of itself, is a wonderful thing. As we all know, the soul and flesh are linked directly to idols. It is the idols in the world that speak to our soul and flesh.
As long as our soul and flesh do not fall in submission to the spirit, they are continuously being enticed and bound to idols. These idols are all around us.
In those days, people had to go to the idol. These days, idols are push notifications that come to our phones. They are all around us. They are hidden idols, and they are dangerous to us.
They are our evaluations from our bosses. They are the promotions we are getting in the world. They are the cars we drive, our stature in the organization of the house of God, or in Christendom. Brothers and sisters, they are everywhere, and they reach out to our soul and flesh.
Yet Hezekiah saw that the people needed to return to God, and in order to return to God, they would tear down the idols.
But there was something tricky, brothers and sisters, and this speaks directly to us sometimes. There was one idol of particular craftiness from the enemy. It was called Nehushtan.
Nehushtan, this bronze thing or bronze idol, was the original bronze serpent from Numbers that Moses had created when the Israelites were leaving Mount Hor and walking toward the Promised Land.
The Israelites complained, and serpents came to bite them. They were dying. They cried out to the Lord, and the Lord told Moses to make a bronze serpent and raise it up. When people were bitten and going to die, they looked at the bronze serpent and had life.
Hundreds of years earlier, Nehushtan had been a blessing. This bronze thing was actually of the spirit. It was a direct contact between God and His people. It was life, and it was real.
When they were in trouble and knew it was of their own doing, they would look to this bronze serpent and find life. At that time, it was so real.
They kept it, like I kept that little plaque that said, “In all things, simplicity and purity before God.” They kept it because it was real at one time. Perhaps in the first century it still carried something real.
But as time passed, and people moved toward tradition and legend, this bronze thing began to take up a different life. It began to reach out to a different part of the people.
What had been life became a very subtle idol.
It was real and alive, but at some point in the history of the people, it had changed.
We have been very blessed in the things that we have heard and in the things that have been seen in brothers and sisters who came before us—how we have been taught and raised.
I have to tell you quite honestly that I am extremely reverent of the brothers who took care of me. I know that it is very easy in the human heart to replace the living God with something that we can see or something that makes us feel good.
It is very easy for us to put all our hope in a man, in a servant, or in a woman. Brothers and sisters, it is part of our nature.
Through the years, the Lord gave us life, and He really did. So many times I have heard things that I genuinely thought we should not be able to hear. I went home, prayed, and thought about them, and realized how true some of these things were, even though sometimes I truthfully did not want them to be true.
When I first began to follow after the Lord, I had a twin bed in my room and a bookshelf beside it that served as my desk. I began to write things down on the side of it—things I did not quite understand from a retreat or conference, things that tugged at my heart that I knew were true.
They did not necessarily stir up my soul or flesh, but I knew they were true. I wrote them down, kept reading them, and prayed about them. Those things ended up becoming true to me.
Not once did it cause some stirring or a moment of great revelation. But slowly I began to realize that they were true. The Lord has sent His servants to bring life in the spirit.
At one point in my life, I went for the first time to a charismatic meeting. I sang these songs, had fellowship, and met all these people my age. You know, I felt great.
I came home, and I really felt great. I was thankful to the Lord that I met brothers and sisters, engaged in fellowship, and saw the life of Christ in them.
But every day I looked to that bookshelf, and there were these truths. They did not make me feel good, and I certainly had not heard many of those things spoken when we were singing some of those songs.
Certainly, these truths were hidden in many hymns that we sing. But I began to realize that there are truths we can hold onto that are of life, even when things are not good.
The Lord sent those truths to us, and we heard them. Sometimes they came in the form of teaching. Sometimes I thought, “You are thirty minutes late, and you are still going,” but something in the twenty-ninth minute came into my heart.
Sometimes there were messages that were difficult to listen to in translation. I know very little Mandarin—only what my grandmother would say when she told me to clean up my room.
I would sit there listening to the translation. The Mandarin speaker was animated, and the translator was stone-faced, saying something. I thought, “What?” But hidden in the preparation of the Spirit are many truths that are of life.
They stand the test of time. Beyond all the Baals, all the Asherahs of the world, and all the enticements of our soul and flesh, these truths were always there.
When I failed and when my soul and flesh were down, the truths were there. Brothers and sisters, the Lord sent these to us. In my life, at least, I never did anything. I just came.
But I will say this: the Lord needs for this life to be new.
In Romans 6:4, there is a newness of life. We are at a time when the Lord is taking our fathers home. They have been faithful.
We are at a time in our history where there must be a newness of life. That cannot be imitated. We cannot simply come up and start to entice the soul and flesh and hope that this will somehow replace what the Lord has been doing.
It requires that there be those among us willing to go with Him through thick and thin—those who have sought Him when things are well and sought Him when things have been difficult.
It requires brothers and sisters who have bound ourselves together in fellowship, meeting together even when we are so different. We speak different languages and have different cultures, both of which are of the flesh and soul, because our culture is of our soul and the color of our skin is of our flesh.
When we bind ourselves together, seeing the Spirit’s headship over these things, and desire to go on no matter how challenging it may be, life begins to grow.
At some point, if we have created a new Nehushtan in our hearts, the Lord will require that we take it down.
I am not saying that we should not treasure the inheritance that has been given to us, nor the saints who have come before us—the cloud of witnesses. These are our great blessing.
What I am saying is that we cannot always be dependent on the blessings of the past. There must be a newness of life.
The Bible tells us in Romans 6 and in Corinthians that we must die daily. We must be willing to go with the Lord and have the cross fall into our life, so that He might resurrect us and give us something real and new to go on with.
This is not easy, in any way. But there must be something of the testimony of life that comes firsthand in our lives.
There is no time left, brothers and sisters, to live our lives by soul and flesh, come together twice a year, and hear someone else tell us what it is to follow the Spirit.
For all of us who are the children of what has happened—the next generation, we have called it—we are not the next generation anymore. The generation is now.
Even though we are unwilling, unable, or feeble, coming to serve is life manifested. We should not think about ourselves. We have to fight the temptation to ask, “What do others think of me?” We must go forward.
Hezekiah tore down Nehushtan—what had been alive but had become an idol. The scariest idols are the ones right under our nose, the ones that have crept in, that we have glorified, and that we have raised up to be equal with God.
We need to grow, and we need to have a newness of life. This was the first thing that Hezekiah did, and it is a lesson to us about the reality of this life and newness.
The second lesson is found in 2 Kings 18:5:
He trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel; so that after him there was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor among those who were before him.
For he clung to the Lord.
I am still on Pacific time. Five? Five-fifteen.
The second point was that Hezekiah clung to the Lord. Clinging is to say, “I will never let go.”
I might have given this example to some of the young people before. I remember when I taught my son, Nathan, how to swim. I would put him in the water and try to separate him from me, but he would never let go. It was like he was an octopus. I do not know how he did it, but he did it.
We remember Ruth and Naomi. Ruth said, in effect, “I am going to cling to you and never let go.” We remember Mary Magdalene, who, when the Lord was resurrected, clung to Him and would not let go until the Lord had to say, “Stop clinging to Me.”
Brothers and sisters, in these days He is our life raft. In the world around us—in the religious world and in the secular world—there are all these things reaching out to drag us down. We have to keep clinging to the Lord.
To cling to Him is to make a determination in our heart: “Lord, I am not letting go of You. I do not care what is going to happen.”
What happened with Eve was that she departed from the Lord. She stopped clinging. Might we take this lesson from Hezekiah: cling to Him and never let go.
It is interesting that in Colossians 2 there is another part of this clinging. We have to hold fast, or cling, to the Head. All of our growth comes through the Head.
Individually, we have to set it in our hearts: “I will never let go of the Lord.” It is a determination. It is a decision, brothers and sisters. It does not happen by happenstance. We have to decide.
May it be that even now we say in our hearts, “I will cling to the Lord.” When we go home, this clinging can become real to us, because so much of what we do now is simply letting go and going with the flow.
But Hezekiah determined, “I will not let go of Him.” Might the people of God determine in our hearts that we will not let go. This is so simple, brothers and sisters, but we make it so complicated. Just do not let go.
This was the second lesson of Hezekiah.
The third lesson, which I found very precious, happened when Hezekiah was thirty-nine years old. It was fourteen years later. He had determined that Judah would be free from the Assyrian Empire, to which his father had given them over.
The king of Assyria was Sennacherib. He came against the fortified cities of Judah with almost two hundred thousand soldiers.
They came to the wall of the city. Sennacherib was extremely crafty, just like the enemy. His general was a man named Rabshakeh, and Rabshakeh could speak the Judean language.
Hezekiah had been taking down idols and telling everyone that there was one true God. The soldiers standing on the wall had been told that there was one true God.
Rabshakeh came and said, “Everyone in every city before this one said the same thing: ‘Our gods will protect us,’ and they are all dead. They drank their own urine and ate their own dung. They all put their trust in god. Why are you any different, and why is your God any different?”
These new believers were on the wall. All the Baals had been torn down, the Asherahs had been torn down, and they had been told to believe in this one true God. Their faith was hanging on like a thread.
The generals asked the Assyrians, “Why do you not speak to us in Aramaic, so our soldiers will not hear what you are saying?” That was not a very good counter, right?
Rabshakeh said, “No, I am going to speak more in this language so they know that they have no hope.”
The report came back to Hezekiah. Hezekiah tore his clothes and asked Isaiah to give him a word.
What he said to Isaiah was so interesting. He said, “It is the moment of delivery, but there is no strength.” It is like a woman about to deliver, but with no strength to deliver the baby.
The people of God were at the point where there was a life in them about to be delivered, but they could not deliver it. “What are we going to do?” Hezekiah was being shaken.
Isaiah gave him encouragement, but Rabshakeh came back again. He said, “You will die, and God will not deliver you,” and he wrote a letter.
They brought the letter to Hezekiah. Hezekiah read it, and that letter was the embodiment of everything that he was worried about. It was all the worries of life.
What did he do? He went up to the house of God. He put the letter down in the presence of the Lord. He unrolled it, put it there, and prayed. He prayed with all his heart.
He said:
Lord, You alone are God of all the kingdoms. Only You.
The others are all wood and stone, and they are of man’s imagination.
Deliver us, Lord, so everyone will know that it is You alone.
He put the letter down and prayed his heart out.
There is a simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ in prayer. We must learn to come to the Lord every day, unroll Rabshakeh’s letter, put it in the presence of the Lord, and say, “Lord, this is my day. I am leaving it to You. You alone are my God.”
This is so critical, brothers and sisters, because the Lord gave us life in our hearts so that we might share our lives with Him and grow in daily living through all the things listed on the letter—to lay them down before the Lord and watch as He delivers us.
Of course, the Lord heard, and He sent a single angel to take down all two hundred thousand soldiers of the enemy in one moment.
The story of Hezekiah’s life gives us these three simple things:
There are two things about Josiah that we would like to share, and they are extremely precious. Please turn to 2 Chronicles 34.
Josiah was eight years old when he became king. What can an eight-year-old do?
For several generations between Hezekiah and Josiah, two evil kings came forward. They redid all the evils before Hezekiah. They rebuilt the altars that Hezekiah had torn down. Generations fell away, and there was a void.
Into this gap came an eight-year-old. My daughter is eight years old. If I push her, she will fall down. She is so little. What can the Lord do with an eight-year-old?
When Josiah was sixteen, something happened to him. Let us turn to verse 3.
For in the eighth year of his reign, while he was still a youth, he began to seek the God of his father David.
Here we see another very simple truth about devotion: when we cannot see Him, we are still seeking Him.
What does it mean to seek? It is to say that there is something I have not found yet in my life—a mystery, something out there that I know I want, or at least I think I want. I am going to seek it out.
The activity of my life, day to day, is to go out and search for that thing which I do not have.
Brothers and sisters, in every person’s heart there is a hole, a sense that something is missing. No matter how hard our heart is, there is still that sense that there is something more.
Sometimes we fill it with all these different things—soul and flesh, and the manifestations of those things. But I often see this with some of my patients who have terminal cancer.
When they are at the end, it is amazing to see those who have known the Lord and found the Lord. I remember one patient in particular. At the end of our time together, I said, “I thought I was coming in to take care of you.”
We chuckled a little, because he was a believer, his wife was a believer, and I left there so full of life.
The hole in our heart is a wonderful blessing to us because it keeps us searching after Him. There is something to find.
We remember Saul of Tarsus. For all of his brilliance, training, and accomplishments, he always knew there was something missing. He was enraged when these common people seemed to have found something that he did not have.
We remember Nicodemus. When he came out at night, he came because he did not want his Pharisee friends to see him. He came to the Lord asking about life.
The Lord said to him, “You have to be born again.” Nicodemus said, “I am not following. I cannot fit into my mother’s womb anymore.” He was trying to find out what this life was all about, because he knew it was missing in his heart.
The searching and seeking keep our heart pure. The understanding that we have not seen all of Him—that we have so much more to find and so much more to discover of the joy of living with Christ and His life living in us—keeps us simple and pure as we move forward.
When Josiah was sixteen, he started seeking. I do not think that until the end of his life he stopped seeking.
If you ask the brothers among us who have been serving and following the Lord far longer than we have, they would tell you, “I have been following Him for sixty years, eighty years, eighty-five years, and I am still seeking after Him.”
There are more riches of wisdom and treasures to find.
This simple heart that says, “Lord, I still have this empty longing that I know You can fill,” keeps us humble and pure so that we can go forward.
The thing that was missing to Nicodemus was life. Brothers and sisters, might we find it, and might we go forward?
We remember the verse in Jeremiah 29:
You will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart, and I will be found by you.
If we have this simple heart, we can go on.
The last of these five deeds of devotion is in the second part of Josiah’s life, when he was twenty-six. He had been growing with the Lord after seeking Him for eight years.
They had done many wonderful things. They had taken down idols, the people had turned their hearts, and Josiah decided that they were going to rebuild the house of God.
A collection had been made for the house of God, and the treasury had been hidden in the house of God. Josiah sent them to get the money that had been collected.
Hilkiah the high priest went down with others to collect the treasury. When they came up, Hilkiah rushed over to find Shaphan the scribe. He said, “I found a book.”
This book, of course, was the law of the Lord. It had been long lost, probably covered with dust, with ritual long forgotten.
They brought it to Shaphan, and Shaphan opened it and began to read. Something in his heart said, “I have to go tell the king.”
So he went to the twenty-six-year-old king. He told him that Hilkiah had found the money in the treasury and that it had been allocated to the right people to begin restoring the house.
Then he said, “And Hilkiah found a book.” He began to read it.
Josiah tore his clothes. The word came into his heart and impacted his life. He asked for the Lord’s forgiveness, and he sent them to ask the prophetess and the prophets.
The prophetess said that the Lord had heard him because of two things: he had a tender heart, and he humbled himself.
As we seek the Lord in our lives and realize how much more there is of Him to find—and how wonderful the parts are that we have found—He softens our hearts.
He reminds us of how much more there is to find of Him, and we see ourselves in the light of His magnificence. This impacted Josiah so that he had a tender heart and a humble heart.
When he read the words of the book, they came in.
Many times we read our Bible, and the word seems to bounce off a vault door. The image that came into my mind was a picture I once saw. My wife and kids were so taken with the crown jewels, but I was taken with the door guarding the crown jewels—a thick, impenetrable door.
Sometimes our heart becomes so hard that it is like a door that cannot be penetrated. The Lord is knocking, sending messages, sending messengers, and sending friends who are trying to speak to us, but our heart is so hard that nothing can come through.
Until one day, somehow, we are reminded that something is missing. For a brief moment, we begin to seek. We may not even know that this sense of need has come in.
Then the heart begins to melt and soften, and the word can come into our life.
When the word came into Josiah’s heart, it changed his life. I think for many of us, the word has saved us.
Sometimes when we read the word, it does not really come into our hearts. We go through the day and do not know how it has impacted us. But for sure, brothers and sisters, if we do not read the word, it will not impact us.
Reading the word sometimes brings a glancing blow to our heart. Our heart may be so hard, and the Lord may be trying to hit us while we dodge Him, moving left and right so that nothing hits us.
But if we read even a short paragraph every day, then someday, when we are in need, a glancing blow will strike us. A memory of a couple of words will come into our mind at the perfect time.
It is so hard for us to read this word, brothers and sisters. If we could raise our hands in our spirits, as to those of us who read the word every day, we would see how hard it is. The enemy is trying to close our heart to this precious word of life.
But after the word had been lost for so long, it came into Josiah’s heart and brought him life.
If you and I have a seeking heart, if we have some sense that something is missing, and if we would like Christ our life to be made real, it will not be easy.
It will be a sacrifice. It will be a loss in the allocation of the currency of time. But if we take a moment, come into the Lord’s presence, and open His word every day, there will be a glancing blow one day, and it will really impact our life.
At the end, the words came to Josiah. He came to the people, read on his own, and read and read and read. The word impacted them.
There is this wonderful phrase at the end of 2 Chronicles: the word impacted his life, so they lived for God. Something that was real to him was translated and transferred to all the people.
At the end of this, Josiah did something wonderful. It is in 2 Chronicles 34:31.
Then the king stood in his place, and made a covenant before the Lord, to walk after the Lord, to keep His commandments and His testimonies and His statutes with all his heart and with all his soul, to perform the words of the covenant written in this book.
We see that, in the end, there was a winning over of Josiah. He stood up as if to make a declaration, and he made a covenant—a promise—to God.
In this day, the enemy has convinced us that it is true: there is nothing good in us. But because there is nothing good in us, we think we can never tell the Lord, “I am going to do something for You,” because that would be the flesh.
But when the spirit rises up in our hearts, and the spirit has taken headship over our soul and flesh, we can stand up and make a covenant. We can say, “Lord, I am going to follow You. I am going to keep Your commandments. These things are going to be real in my heart.”
So, brothers and sisters, do not let the enemy strangle the spirit. Let the spirit fly. Listen and grow in the light of the Lord.
Once Josiah made this covenant to walk after the Lord—to keep His commandments, testimonies, and statutes—he said that he would do it with all his soul and with all his flesh, to perform the words of the covenant.
The things that he did, and what he had in his heart and soul, were submitted to the spirit that had touched God.
Brothers and sisters, for us in these days, this message must have been a struggle for the brothers when the Lord gave it to them. I certainly struggled with it because I did not know what to share.
But as we seek after the Lord, we realize how important it is that the life of Christ might take headship in our life, and that there might be a return to the simplicity and sincerity of devotion to Christ.
May we have these deeds of devotion: that what we do is because of loyalty to Christ, and that this devotion might grow, bear fruit, and be of life.
As we go on and as we go home, may the Lord show us grace. May we experience more and more of Christ our life in our daily lives:
May He have a people, a house, and a bride in a real way. So may the Lord guard us and keep us.
Let us pray.
Dear Lord, we worship and thank You. Lord, we pray that You would continue to make Your life real to us as we go home.
In our daily lives, in the things that we face, and in the burdens that we carry, Lord, we pray that we would find You in a real way.
Lord, we worship You. Be exalted and magnified. Find for Yourself, Lord, a people. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.