Morning.
Good morning.
Morning. Let’s look to the Lord.
Lord, I want to thank You for the times that You have helped me in my life. I am grateful. And now, Lord, is another time that I need Your help.
How thankful I am that You are the Helper, and that You have given us a Helper. So, Lord, we come to You this morning in the name of Jesus Christ, freed from our sins and before You as loved ones.
We ask only that You would be pleased to speak to us and encourage us in what You are doing in our lives. Open the Word to us by the Holy Spirit, and speak to our spirits through Your Word. We ask this in Jesus’ name.
You guys have figured out by now that I have been talking about the exile of the Jews from Judah to Babylon. That has been on my heart for quite a while, and I have been able to share some things that the Lord has let me observe and let me see.
Today, I want to bring this to a culmination. I started out by talking about why they were exiled. Why did the Lord exile this people? Why did He allow His people to go into exile? Last time, we talked about what happened to them during the exile. Today, I want to look at the outcome of the exile: what fruit came out of their exile?
I want to begin by reading from Hosea, because I think these verses give us an idea of what the Lord was doing during this time of exile for His people. Beginning in Hosea 2:14, the Lord is speaking through Hosea. As Kenny was saying, it is not Hosea speaking; it is the Lord speaking.
Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak comfort to her.
And I will give her her vineyards from thence,
and the valley of Achor for a door of hope;
and she shall answer there, as in the days of her youth,
and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt.
And it shall be at that day, saith the Lord,
that thou shalt call me Ishi;
and shalt call me no more Baali.
—Hosea 2:14-16
And I will betroth thee unto me for ever;
yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness,
and in justice, and in lovingkindness, and in mercies.
I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness;
and thou shalt know the Lord.
And it shall come to pass in that day,
I will answer, saith the Lord,
I will answer the heavens, and they shall answer the earth;
and the earth shall answer the grain, and the new wine, and the oil;
and they shall answer Jezreel.
And I will sow her unto me in the earth;
and I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy;
and I will say to them that were not my people, Thou art my people;
and they shall say, Thou art my God.
—Hosea 2:19-23
When you think of that, there was a time before the exile when the Lord was saying, “You are not My people anymore. You do not act like I am your God. Since you have given Me up for another, I will give you up to another.”
But through this whole time, what He was saying was, “Now I am coming back, having dealt with you in love and discipline.” Punishment means, “I am going to harm you.” But discipline means, “I am going to correct you.”
Having corrected them, He says, “Now I am calling you My people again.” You who had not been shown mercy—I let you go into exile—I am now showing you mercy by bringing you back out and saying that you are My people.
It is almost like a reclamation project. He is reclaiming them for Himself. All His dealing through those seventy years was to reclaim His people for Himself.
We talked last time about how, in this, they realized that God was more than just their God: He was God over all. He was much bigger than they thought. He was not just the One who delivered them from Egypt and said, “Okay, you are My people, and I am just going to watch over you.” No, He is God of the whole earth and the heavens.
Out of this whole thing, they came to the place where God was not only saying, “You are My people,” but the people were responding, “You are my God.” There has been a transaction. Something has happened that caused them to own God for their own again.
In the first message, I brought up Hebrews 12:11:
All chastening seemeth for the present to be not joyous but grievous;
yet afterward it yieldeth peaceable fruit unto them that have been exercised thereby,
even the fruit of righteousness.
—Hebrews 12:11
Really, in the return of the exiles, we are looking at the fruit yielded out of this whole experience. God lets us go through experience, and He yields fruit.
There are all sorts of fruits. But what physical fruits are talked about most in the Bible? Pomegranates, figs, grapes, and olives. I want to turn to the vine, because Israel is called the vine.
When you think of a vine, an olive tree may have an olive here and an olive there. A pomegranate tree has a pomegranate, with all those little seeds inside. But on a vine, you get a cluster. It is not one grape here and one grape there; it is all clustered together.
When we look at the fruit the Lord brought about, remember that it is the Lord who brought it about. It is not that they said, “Oh, we need to correct things.” He brought them there, showed them something, and they responded.
In their response, they yielded to Him. Out of that yielding, He brought about something in them. That is what we want to look at: what He brought out in these people. That is what God was after all the time, even from the beginning, when He brought them out of Egypt.
I want to look at this as a cluster. I have six grapes in this cluster. It may not be a very big cluster, but it is enough.
I am not here simply to talk about how they rebuilt the temple. I want to talk about something that happened personally in these people. Something changed in them because of God’s dealing with them.
Brothers and sisters, when God deals with us, something changes. It does not change our outward appearance, but it changes us inwardly. There is an inward change that is manifested in our outward life. It can be seen, and it can be tasted by those around us.
First of all, let us turn to Ezra. The post-exilic books are Ezra and Nehemiah. I would not say Esther, because Esther is still during the exile; they were still in Babylon, or Persia. Then there are the prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.
In Ezra 1:5, after the edict of Cyrus, which said that God had told him to build a house and that whoever wished could return, we read:
Then rose up the heads of fathers’ houses of Judah and Benjamin,
and the priests, and the Levites,
even all whose spirit God had stirred to go up
to build the house of the Lord which is in Jerusalem.
—Ezra 1:5
The first thing that happened was that they were awakened in their spirits. This was not in their minds. It was a spiritual thing; it was in the spirit.
This is not a nebulous thing. God has made us with a spirit, and that spirit, before we become Christians, is dead—or, as Brother Kong said, comatose. We can say the same thing of these people of Israel. When they went into captivity, their spirits were comatose. But through this experience, their spirits were awakened.
It was not merely that they sensed something in their spirits. We can always sense something in our spirits. The question is: when we sense that thing in our spirits, what do we do?
I used to have a poster in my classroom, and I cannot believe that I put it up as a teacher. It showed a polar bear just lying back, and it said, “Whenever I have the urge to do homework, I lie down till it goes away.” I cannot believe I put that up in my room. What was I telling my students?
But brothers and sisters, what about us? Sometimes we sense the moving of the Spirit in us, and we just let it go away. It is like Brother Lenny’s talk on abiding: the Spirit told him, “Go over and talk to that lady,” and he had a fight within himself. “Oh, let me do something spiritual instead.”
That is a way of saying, “I know You are moving me, but I do not want to move with You. Let me do something spiritual instead. I will pray.” But when the Spirit moved and awakened him to what the Lord wanted him to do, he moved with the Spirit.
That is what happened here. They did not just hear Him; they moved with Him. Sometimes we get too spiritual.
When I got my first public-school job, I had two or three interviews. I had just received my credential, and finally I interviewed at Washington Middle School. They called me back, had me write responses to some scenarios, and then called me back again to offer me the job.
I thought, “Well, maybe I need to pray about it.” Barb came running down the stairs and said, “This is an answer to prayer. This is the Lord moving. He is moving for us.” I was trying to be spiritual about it, but Barb sensed the Spirit and said, “This is it. We have to move.” I had a wonderful experience at that school.
The whole idea is that there was an awakening to the Spirit moving, an awakening to God leading. When the edict came out and they were told to go, they must have said, “This is God. This is God opening a door for us. We need to go.”
Not a lot went, but there were those who went—those who moved. That does not mean the others were not saved, but when God was doing something, there were people who said, “Let us go with Him. We want to go with what He is doing. We want to be in His perfect will.”
They moved and began to cooperate with the Spirit. This is one of the fruits: being awakened to the Spirit—awakened to the Spirit living in our lives, dwelling within us, moving within us, and stirring us into the will of God.
Second, Ezra 3:2. When they got back to the land, we read:
And when the seventh month was come, and the children of Israel were in the cities,
the people gathered themselves together as one man to Jerusalem.
Then stood up Jeshua the son of Jozadak, and his brethren the priests,
and Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, and his brethren,
and builded the altar of the God of Israel,
to offer burnt-offerings thereon,
as it is written in the law of Moses the man of God.
—Ezra 3:1-2
They rebuilt the altar. This was before they rebuilt the temple. It was the precursor to the building of the temple; this was what came first.
The altar is a sign of consecration. Here were people who had been away from God, and now that they had been awakened, they wanted to say, “Lord, I want to dedicate myself afresh to You. I want to give myself afresh to You.”
Remember, during the exile there were no sacrifices and no offerings. Now the altar became the place of offering again. This was the beginning afresh of the daily offering. They were starting over: “Lord, I am coming back again, day by day, to give You the daily offering.”
There was a sin offering, because that is how we come to God first. But then we offer what He wants. He wants life. He wants your life laid down.
Abraham built altars. He built one when he first came out and was between Ai and Bethel. His altar of consecration was between destruction and the house of God—the purpose of God. Ai was behind him, and Bethel was before him. In other words, there was a turning on the path.
Brothers and sisters, we are never really asked to go back and look at the path except for two reasons. First, we look back to remember the offering of the Lord Jesus for us. Our sins are forgiven and forgotten. We are never asked to remember our sins, because they are forgiven—not just forgiven, but judged. They are behind us.
The only other time we look back is to see how God has been faithful. When our brother opened today and talked about how the Lord had helped him, we consider how the Lord has helped us—in spiritual things and in worldly things. He has been our help.
That is what we look back to see: His faithfulness and His lovingkindness toward us. We do not look back and say, “I blew it here.” We say, “Lord, when I blew it, You helped me. When I was there, You were there.” We see His faithfulness. As we sang, “Great is Thy faithfulness, O Lord, unto me.”
Then Abraham went to Hebron and made an altar there. Hebron means fellowship. We consecrate ourselves by giving ourselves to Him in fellowship.
Fellowship is not merely receiving, receiving, receiving. It is also giving. When Abraham met the Lord before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, he ran out and greeted the Lord. He brought Him into his tent, washed His feet, and refreshed Him.
It is a wonderful ministry when we come to the Lord in our quiet times and refresh Him. We refresh Him first of all simply by being there. Then, when we look up to Him and look unto Him—when we look to Him—it refreshes Him. That is what He wants. That is what He desires.
The last altar Abraham built was on Mount Moriah. Consecration costs us something. It may cost us something that we never get back. But it is worth it.
These people came back saying, “Lord, I want to give myself to You afresh. Forgetting what is behind, I want to go forward.” This is fruit that comes from being disciplined by the Lord: “Lord, I want to go forward. I just want to go on.”
The third thing that happened was that the Law and the Prophets were brought to bear on their lives. We have the prophets, and we also have Ezra bringing the Law.
Ezra 7:10 says that Ezra set his heart to seek the Law of the Lord, to do it, and to teach it. Then, in Nehemiah 8, we see him actually doing that. The Law was brought to bear on them.
The difference was this: from this point on, there was an openness to the prophets and an openness to the Law. They were open to it.
You do not hear the people complaining as you do in some of the earlier prophets: “Jeremiah, quit talking like this. Amos, quit talking like this. You need to go.” You do not see that in Haggai and Zechariah. Although there is complaining in Malachi, there is still an openness.
Not only was there openness, but they had become entreatable. The prophets entreated them, and they were entreated. They were responding positively. They were no longer the stiff-necked people they had been before the exile. Something had happened.
Two prophets were sent during the first group’s return to Jerusalem, and they were sent at a critical time. What the Lord was doing had been stopped. The people were in a quandary; they did not know what to do, so they did nothing. Well, actually, they kind of fed themselves.
The Lord sent Haggai, an older man—perhaps one who had seen the original temple. Then there was Zechariah, a young man, perhaps in his twenties, from a priestly family. They began their ministries during that time.
Look at the variety God uses. He does not just use the old people; He uses the young people too. He does not just use the young people; He uses the old people too.
Both men spoke into the situation of the returned exiles, but they spoke from God’s view. God was saying, “This is what I see. This is what I am observing, and I want you to know.”
Haggai addressed the practical side of what God had to say, and Zechariah addressed the spiritual side. You might think it would be the opposite—the young man practical and the older man spiritual—but God is wonderful in the way He works things out.
Haggai spoke from his experience of dealing with God and being dealt with by God. He spoke as a father—not as a father speaking down to children, but as in 1 John 2: fathers know Him who is from the beginning. Haggai knew Him who was from the beginning. He knew the background; he knew all the way back to the old temple.
In summary, Haggai said to the people, “You do not understand that God is trying to get your attention. You do not see that the things happening to you are not merely circumstances. While you are stalled, the Lord is not blessing you with clothing and food. You have money bags with holes in them. This is not merely a bad economic downturn. The Lord is trying to get through to you.”
He was using their circumstances to say, “I am trying to talk to you.” They had turned away from what God originally called them to do. “Well, get back to it.” That is basically the book of Haggai.
Understand that the Lord is trying to get your attention because He wants you to get back to what you are doing, despite the obstacle. Go on. The obstacle is in place, but go on. A lot of us stall ourselves because we are trying to deal with an obstacle, and the Lord says, “Forget about the obstacle. Just follow Me. Just go forward, because I am going forward. The obstacle is not an obstacle to Me.”
There was no kicking against the goad—no saying, “Haggai, you are just old and blowing smoke. You are just a legalist.” There was a positive response. There was a new attitude.
In Hebrews 10, Psalm 40:6-8 is applied this way:
Lo, I am come to do Thy will.
—Hebrews 10:9
That was the attitude of the people: “I am here to do God’s will.” Why am I consecrating myself? Why am I giving myself to Him? So I can do His will. It is simple. God is not complex. “I brought you here to do My will. Let us get about doing it.”
Zechariah was a man of visions. He had about eight visions, and he answered some questions. But I want to deal with one vision, because it gives a picture of these people who had been hindered by obstacles and were not moving.
In Zechariah 3, we have the vision of Jeshua, or Joshua, the high priest. He is in the heavenlies, and Satan is accusing him.
First, the angel of the Lord says, “The Lord rebuke thee.” The Lord intervenes first. This is important. The Lord intervenes and says to the accuser, “Get out of here. I rebuke you. You have no place here.”
Second, Joshua was in filthy garments. The Lord said, “Change the clothes. Put good garments on him.” The Lord put good garments on him.
We may want to stop there and say, “Okay, I am in good garments, and that is all there is to it. The Lord has given me garments. I am acceptable to Him.” But there is a third thing. He says, “Put a clean turban upon his head.”
The high priest wore a turban, and on that turban was a plate of pure gold engraved deeply with the words:
HOLINESS TO THE LORD.
—Exodus 28:36
Engraved means it was pressed in deeply. It could not just be erased. The Lord is saying, “I want to show you what I think of you. I have clothed you in new clothes, but it is not just new clothes. I have separated you to Myself for My own purposes.”
It is a deep separation, because I have engraved it upon your forehead. Revelation speaks of His name being put upon our foreheads. It is the same thing.
This is spiritual. This is our spiritual standing. This is how we are to approach the Lord. This is to be our mindset. It is not, “Oh, I am looking at my filthy clothes. I am hearing the accuser tell me how bad I am, and I have to agree with him.”
In spite of all those things, I see the Lord saying to my accuser, “I rebuke you. You have no place here.” I see the Lord changing my garments and making me acceptable to Him. Then I see Him owning me for Himself.
This is our standing. It is put up here, in the mind. This is the transformation of our minds: “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2).
This is where we should start every morning: “I am holy to the Lord. You have made me holy to Yourself. I do not have to make myself holy to You; You have made me holy to Yourself. I come and stand on the ground that You have given me. This is where I begin my day. This is where I begin my consecration for this day.”
Again, the response was that they got on with the work. Obstacles? Yes, I can see my failures and everything like that. But I can also see that the Lord has overruled. The Lord has overruled.
Then there was the Law. With the Law came instruction. We like prophetic words in our fellowships. At our conferences, we want a prophetic word. I am not saying that is bad, but that is not all the Lord gave. He did not just give prophets; He gave teachers.
Ezra had a band of Levites. In Nehemiah 8:7-8, they read the Word and gave the sense of it. They applied it. There was instruction for living: “How do I live in this world?”
It is not so spiritual that it is not practical. This is how you live. That is why Psalm 119 is always saying, “Teach me Thy way. Show me Thy ways.” We are saying, “Open them up to me.” It is not just, “Show me what they are.” Open them up to me.
There was a desire and a hunger for this. This is fruit. When we turn to Him, the fruit that comes is that He gives us a hunger: “Long for the spiritual milk which is without guile, that ye may grow thereby” (1 Peter 2:2).
We like the spiritual, but we are made to walk on the earth. That is our witness. Our witness is how we walk, not just our words. As the saying goes, “Look at what he does, not what he says.”
They read the Word clearly and gave the sense—not merely the letter of it, but the spirit of it—so that it could be understood and applied to their lives.
The fourth thing is in Nehemiah: the rebuilding of the wall. In Nehemiah 3, there is an enumeration of all the people who worked on the wall—great and small, sisters and brothers, slave and free.
The whole idea is that there is not just an individual walk now. We are called into a building, into this purpose of doing what God wants. Let us look at it this way: they were called to build up the body—the body of Christ, the brothers and sisters.
No matter how big or small they were, their bigness or smallness was integral to the building and repairing of the wall, and to the building up of the body. Every one of us has something of the life of Jesus that ministers to another and helps them.
When we are working together—when we are doing what the Lord wants us to do, living in His leading—Hebrews 10:24 says:
Let us consider one another
to provoke unto love and good works.
—Hebrews 10:24
That is the work at hand: to build up others, to consider others, and to build them up in love. Love is not merely sloppy agape—not simply hugging one another and giving one another a holy kiss. Love is sometimes discipline. Love is sometimes compassion. Love is sometimes correction.
Listen to Hebrews 12:12-13:
Wherefore lift up the hands that hang down, and the palsied knees;
and make straight paths for your feet,
that that which is lame be not turned out of the way,
but rather be healed.
—Hebrews 12:12-13
I always looked at this as speaking to me personally—as talking about my personal walk. But Hebrews was not a personal letter; it was a corporate letter.
“Strengthen the hands that hang down.” Well, the hands that hang down may not be my hands. The feet that are out of joint may not be my feet. It is talking about the body.
That is why it says, “Consider one another,” so that you can show love and do the works the Lord has for you to do for the body—in order to heal it and make it healthy. Then the whole body benefits.
Gunther said this morning, “I will help you.” Brothers and sisters, that is what the Lord wants to do for everybody in the body. But in order to do it, He uses members of the body.
Think about the anatomy of our bodies. How does a body minister to itself? It is incredible. If I get cut, my platelets come, the white blood cells come, and everything goes to work so that I am healed and can go on living.
What about the body of Christ? There should be that same activity. I am not saying we are all moving around, but we are attached to the Head. As the Head leads us, we receive the message and are stirred in the spirit to go and do what benefits the body and lifts up the body, so that Christ can be glorified.
What are the gifts God has given to His body? There is a plethora of gifts. But one that we do not talk about much is helps—the gift of helps.
It can be hospitality. It can be listening. It can be visiting. It can be inviting someone out to lunch to talk with them. There are all sorts of ways in which the body works to heal itself and strengthen itself.
Everybody on the wall had their place. One part did not say, “You are too small. I will do your part.” Some did more than others, and some said, “I am not doing it at all.” But when you read Nehemiah 3, you see that everyone’s part mattered.
This is fruit: our eyes are opened to see that it is not just about me. It is about God’s entire body—God’s people.
Fifth, joy. There are two feasts mentioned in Ezra and Nehemiah, and one is mentioned twice. I think that takes precedence: the Feast of Tabernacles.
The Feast of Tabernacles was the most joyous of all the feasts. What were they celebrating? A lot of people say they were celebrating their time in the wilderness. I do not know if they were celebrating, “Give us water. We do not have food. Give us this.”
The whole idea was not the wilderness itself, but the life together as they sojourned—as they went through times of trial. That was the joy: the life together.
It was also called the Feast of Ingathering. This was the time of harvest, when they brought everything in. It points forward to the Lord’s final gathering of His children. There will be great joy when He finally gathers us to Himself as His own and glorifies Himself in us.
But, brothers and sisters, I think it also speaks of the harvest of unsaved souls that is ours during our sojourn. There is a part for us to play in the harvest.
We have some brothers right now who are going down to Miami and doing that. But what about us? What is our part in this harvest?
Maybe this is something we need to ask: “Lord, what is my part? What am I not doing, or what should I be doing? You need to show me, because I cannot see. I do not know. I am caught up with this. Show me.”
“Seek, and ye shall find” (Matthew 7:7). We have no problem asking. We have no problem knocking. But I have a lot of problem seeking. Seek after these things. Seek: “I want to find out.” Press in on the Lord. “Show me. Show me. Show me.”
Like that widow who was seeking justice, we need to seek.
The last thing is hope. I say hope because, especially in Zechariah and Malachi, you have pictures of Messiah.
All of a sudden, the king is gone. The king of Judah is gone, and he is never going to come back in that sense. But there is Messiah—the hope of Messiah, the hope of the kingdom of God.
Not the kingdom of Judah. Not the kingdom of Israel. The kingdom of God. No nation. The kingdom of God, and His King, Messiah.
Do we not pray, “Thy kingdom come” (Matthew 6:10)? We are taught to pray that.
Every generation since the book of Acts is to expect Him to come in its time. We should expect Him to come in our time, whether He comes or not. That should be our expectation. That should be our hope. I want Him to come.
We want Him to come because He is going to be glorified. That is our hope: glory in Him. Glory is a hard concept.
These people had no desire to go back to Babylon. None of them wanted to go back. When they came out of Egypt, they said, “We have to go back. This is not working out. We had leeks and onions.” But no one was saying, “Let us go back to Babylon. We had it much better there.”
Their eyes were forward. That is what the Lord wants of us. He wants our eyes forward. That is where we see Messiah. We see the coming of Messiah. That is where we see the harvest. That is where we see the completion of everything He wants to do.
For the exiles, it was a whole reacquainting with God. They were getting reacquainted with Him, with His calling, His purpose for them, and everything He wanted for them.
For God, He was looking for the peaceable fruit of righteousness. I looked that up because I was asking, “What is the fruit of righteousness?” Thayer said that righteousness is “the state of him who is such as he ought to be.”
That is what God is after. He is after the man who is what he was meant to be. That is behind all of God’s dealings with us. He is after the man who is after Christ—not merely running after Him, but like Him in nature.
Like Him in heart, like Him in spirit. That is what He desires.
May this cluster be manifested in us. That is God’s will. He wants this cluster. He is after this fruit.
The dealings and things that come into our lives are all about our being trained so that this fruit is produced. It is not produced by us, but as we yield to the Lord, it yields fruit.
As we yield to the Lord’s working in our lives and our hearts, the fruit is manifested. The fruit is not manifested for my sake; it is manifested for your sake, for my neighbor’s sake, and for the glory of God.
Remember, they were saying, “You have made My name to be hated.” Now it is, “You have made My name glorious.” This is what the Lord is after in us.
Is that not wonderful? He is not just trying to get you to toe the line. He has something for you, and He wants you to see that it is wonderful.
He wants you to get your eyes forward. You do not have to look back anymore, unless you are looking back to see what He has done. Once you have stood on what He has done for you, turn your eyes forward.
“I will be your help. I will be your life. I will be everything that you need, because I am God.” Is that not wonderful? Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, I want to thank You that all Your plans for us are good, that You have designed for us to manifest Your glory and to manifest Your likeness.
Lord, we are asking for a heart, a spirit, that yields, so that You can produce the very things that You want to produce—the very things that magnify You, build up the body, and harvest what You have sown.
Lord, we want to be those who do that. We want to respond to You. We want to be those who sense the moving of Your Spirit in us and then move with it.
We do not want to be those who say, “I am going to lie down until that feeling goes away.” We want to respond to You, because You are worth responding to.
How is it that You would bless us in that response, instead of merely saying it is Your due? Oh, Lord, You are so good.
We want to respond to Your Word. We do not want to kick against the goads. We want Your instruction. We want to know how to live, and, knowing how to live, we want to live in that way.
So, Lord, open Your Word to us by the Spirit. Help us, Lord, to understand. Make it known to us clearly, so that You can have Your people on the earth, and people can see and say, “Let us go up to Zion.”
We ask this in Jesus’ name.