God's Land Established: Promised Land

Preached by Jaren Singh on 10/13/24

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the Kalamazoo church of Christ podcast. Thank you so much for listening. We're startup church. We just planted in September, 2020 and at the Kalamazoo church, we believe that Christianity is done best when it is done together. And so if you live in the Kalamazoo area, we would love to connect, be it coming to a Sunday service, one of our small groups, or even just grabbing coffee with a member to learn more. You can visit kalamazoo.church in order to do that. We pray that you are inspired by what you hear today. Have you ever had an aha moment as you've studied the Bible? Like has there ever been a time in your life when you've read the Bible and something that you never just never connected the dots? It connects and your eyes are open and you're like, Oh my goodness, I didn't know that. Certainly that, that happens when somebody teaches you as well. I think more than probably more than that, or maybe more meaningful is when it happens as we're just studying the Bible or you're just learning about it and you read it for the first time and it's you and it's God and it's God's word and something just hits you and then your whole paradigm is shifted. I was, I was just, I was trying to jog my memory of, there's been many times where this has happened. Probably the most recent was as kind of preparing this study about a generous giving in and looking at the parable of the sower and seeing that Jesus calls a wealth deceitful, which I knew that, but then he connects it to the fruit. He's saying you can't bear fruit if you are occupied by the deceit of the sower. Deceitfulness of wealth. And I remember reading it and just connecting that, Oh my goodness, there's these fruits of the spirit, there's goodness, there's joy, there's patience that for whatever reason I'm doing the right things, but it's not taking root in my character, perhaps it's because of my lack of generosity. And that was like, my eyes are open now. Something can change now. Now, imagine discovering a whole lost book of the Bible. This is not going to be a, you know, this isn't a television show, but imagine there's a book in the Bible that we didn't know about and then we find. Now, this is what happens in hundreds of years after we're, we're, we're kind of going forward in time for a little bit, and then we're going to go back in time. And as we, we're going to read in Deuteronomy, but we're going to look in second Kings 22, what scholars will agree that this, this King Josiah says that he lives a very righteous life. He became King when he was young. He, this book gets discovered. It's lost for, for many years. And then it gets discovered in his time as King. And he, he can, you know, we're going to, we're going to make sense of what that could mean for him, what that would have meant being heard for the first time as Moses is, is communicating it. And then we'll make sense of it for our lives as well. But it's second Kings 22 and we're starting in verse one. The title of the lesson this morning is Rediscovered Blessing. It says, Josiah was eight years old in second Kings 22 verse one. Josiah was eight years old when he became King and he reigned in Jerusalem 31 years. His mother's name was Jedediah. I thought that was a boy name. Daughter of Adiah. She was from Bozkoth. And now I knew that was a boy name. No, I'm just kidding. He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and followed completely the ways of his father David, not turning aside to the left or to the right. In the 18th year of his reign, King Josiah sent the secretary Shapin son of Azaliah, the son of Meshuzalam to the temple of the Lord. He said, go up to Hilkiah, the high priest, and have him get ready the money that has been brought into the temple of the Lord, which the doorkeepers have collected from the people, have them entrusted to the men appointed to supervise the work on the temple and have these men pay the workers who repair the temple of the Lord, the carpenters, the builders and the masons, and also have them purchase timber and dress stone to repair the temple. But they need not account for the money entrusted to them because they are honest in their dealings. Hilkiah, the high priest, said to Shapin, the secretary, I have found the book of the law in the temple of the Lord. He gave it to Shapin, who read it. Then Shapin, the secretary, went to the king and reported to him, your officials have paid out the money that was in the temple of the Lord and have entrusted it to the workers and supervisors of the temple. Then Shapin, the secretary, informed the king, Hilkiah, the priest, has given me a book. And Shapin read from it in the presence of the king. When the king heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his robes. So stop here. Scholars agree that this book is Deuteronomy. When they're talking about what did they find, what did they find? This is the book that he finds. And Josiah reads the book, or he has the book read to him, and he tears his robes. And he's in this time of mourning because he realizes that his people, the people that he's leading, are totally removed from so much of what the Bible is teaching. And you can read later on. We're not going to read it, but it's a great Bible study. You can read how he responds afterwards, and it's super inspiring. As just a 26-year-old man reading it, and he has every opportunity to not choose righteousness, but he hears it, and he tears his robes, and he feels like we've got to change. And so he prompts the whole nation to repent. Deuteronomy did that, though, this book. It's special because many times in history, it's been used as a chance for people to recommit themselves to God. It's helped people in their parenting. It's helped people in that time get ready for the promised land without Moses. It helped King Josiah launch this religious reform. It helped Jesus when he was tempted in the wilderness for 40 days. He answered each of the temptations with a scripture from Deuteronomy. It's going to help us today. So we've got three points. We're going to go through them, and there's going to be too much for us to cover right now. And so as there's questions that you have, or what does it say, or how does it read in a different way, or I wonder what this means, write them down, please. Write them down, and that's your Bible study for the week. The first point is rediscovered presence. It's Deuteronomy 11. So now we're going to post up in Deuteronomy for the remainder of the lesson. So this is Moses. He's delivering a speech in this 40 years of wandering that we understand would have taken way less time, like significantly less than a year if they were on the right path. They had to build up everything that was going to be this nation. They're on the brink of it, and Moses is giving this speech to them after these 40 years. It says in verse 1, Remember today that your children were not the ones who saw and experienced the discipline of the Lord your God. His majesty, his mighty hand, his outstretched arm, the signs he performed, and the things he did in the heart of Egypt both to Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, and his whole country. What he did to the Egyptian army, to its horses and chariots, how he overwhelmed them with the waters of the Red Sea as they were pursuing you, and how the Lord brought lasting ruin on them. It was not your children who saw what he did for you in the wilderness until you arrived at this place. And what he did to Dathan and Abiram, son of Elieb the Reubenite, when the earth opened its mouth right in the middle of all Israel and swallowed them up with their households, their tents, and every living thing that belonged to them. But it was your eyes that saw all these great things the Lord has done. Moses begins this speech by saying your children, the ones who were born in the wilderness, they didn't see everything that you saw, but you saw it. You saw all of this. You saw God's great and mighty hand working for his people in the way that he disciplined his people, but you saw God's great and mighty hand working in the way in order to protect his people as well, and in order to give them hope and an opportunity. He says this isn't a story that we've just passed on. Certainly they would pass this story on, and you understand from generation to generation. That's in a lot of ways what we do with the Bible, or even how it was communicated for years and years and years was through oral speaking, and this is what happened, and this is what happened, and we have the opportunity to read now. But for years they didn't have that. But he's saying that's going to come, but you guys have experienced God, and you guys have experienced going from slavery to being free people. You know, if you think about it for us, if you have seen or when you have seen and experienced the presence of God, your faith is dependent on you continuing to remember that, and certainly building upon it. But if you would go back in your heart and you consider when did you feel closest to God, your faith is dependent on you going back to those times and remembering. You look back and you say what sin was it that prior to you being a committed follower that you were like I don't know how I can give this up. I can't see a life where I do not lust. I cannot see a life where I am not pursuing money. I cannot see a life where I don't want success. I just can't see a life like that. And then God transforms your life and your heart. This is the presence of God, and if you don't go back to those moments, your faith is going to stagnate and then decay. You think when did you see God move most powerfully? Now this is in your character. This is outside of your character that you were like I don't know how you can do this. God, I'm going to pray this big prayer. I'm going to ask you to do something amazing. We can go back to those times, and then it does beg the question for us all though, and we said when did you feel closest to God? The follow-up question is did he drift from you or did you drift from him? And you say when did you see God move most powerfully? And then we can ask ourselves, well, does he not move powerfully anymore in our lives or have our prayers been pacified? Say, well, where have you grown the most spiritually? And then it begs the question, did you, it begs the question, as you consider this massive growth spiritually, is there nothing else in your character where you need to grow or are you just not relying on God for that growth anymore? You know, it's great to hear stories from other people. I like it. I love hearing stories of great faith in other people's lives. I love hearing stories. I think that's why we love hearing people's testimony. God does amazing things in everybody's life, and we're all ears, and it's amazing, and we love it. But perhaps it's just me. I don't know that it's just me though. I would say that God has a way of making mundane situations and occurrences in our lives feel extraordinary. Like you can hear an extraordinary story, and that is great, but the way that God works in the mundane ways in our life is sometimes more powerful or it has a more lasting impact. You know, I've found in my life when I explain how God has been working, hey, how has God been working in your life, sometimes it feels like I'm explaining a dream to somebody. Have you ever tried to do that? Like you say, man, I had the craziest dream. I was in high school again, and somebody said something to me, so I beat up that person, and I felt guilty, and my sister was watching me, and she saw it and said, hey, you probably shouldn't do that. And then I realized I shouldn't do it, and then I was at Blaine and Asha Kurzman's house hiding from the school police officer. And then they say, and then what happened? And you might say, well, I don't know, actually. I just kind of woke up. It's not a crazy dream. We have those all the time. It's not a crazy dream, and explaining how God works in our lives, sometimes we're like, it was the most amazing thing. And then you start explaining, and you're like, well, I can explain that by, well, I just tried harder. I can explain that by, well, they were going to do that anyways. And I can explain that by, well, I didn't get accepted to the job because I had a bad interview. And you can go down the list of all of the ways in which it makes sense. It wasn't God's hand working. It was just kind of the mundane stuff. Let's not do that. When God moves, let's identify him moving. In the mundane, in the little things when God moves, let's identify him moving. It's not so much that God moved in this movie script type of way. Certainly, maybe you have an interesting life that's a movie script type of life. I know a lot of you. I don't know that any of you do. But perhaps you do. Perhaps you do. I don't, and that's okay. Maybe you do. Maybe it'd be an interesting documentary potentially. It'd be an episode. I don't know. My life's not super interesting, and that's okay, guys. I think we can be fired up. It's not a movie script. That's fine. Let's celebrate God moving in our lives, though. Amen? Consider, though, how it might feel for Josiah. He has spent his whole life trying to follow God, certainly. He had every opportunity not to. He had parents that were not very spiritual. And he decided at a young age, I'm going to lead this kingdom spiritually. Every opportunity not to, and he decided to do it anyways. So many of us have maybe been in that same spot where our parents are not spiritual, and we've still decided to follow God. He's in that spot, and he's not really seeing God move in the ways that it talks about. Consider the faith that it takes for him to say, okay, instead of me just relying on that happened and he doesn't do that anymore, there's faith that says that that happened, and I believe he's able to do it again. In our lives, potentially, you know, there's many of us who have, God has moved powerfully, and we've seen it. And there's some who you've heard people talk about it, and it sounds kind of like a dream that you kind of can explain. And you're like, that's not very crazy. You know, it's kind of, I can explain that one away. You have the opportunity to be like Josiah, that he hears the experience that God's people interacted with God in this way, in this presence, and he says, I'm going to pursue that same experience. You know, again, you read through in 2 Kings 22, it talks about him tearing down these different idols, and it talks about his pursuit of the purity of the religion, again, that's so powerful. You have the opportunity to do that. Maybe you've been in a spot for some time. You have the opportunity to turn to God and experience his presence. The second thing I want to look at is rediscovering the mission. It's in Deuteronomy 11. It says, observe, therefore, all the commands I'm giving you today so that you may have the strength to go in and take over the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess, and so that you may live long in the land the Lord swore to your ancestors to give to them and their descendants, a land flowing with milk and honey. The land you are entering to take over is not like the land of Egypt from which you have come, where you planted your seed and irrigated it by foot, as in a vegetable garden, but the land you are crossing the Jordan to take possession of is a land of mountains and valleys that drinks rain from heaven. It is a land the Lord your God cares for. The eyes of the Lord your God are continually on it from the beginning of the year to its end. So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today, to love the Lord your God, to serve him with all your heart, with all your soul, then I'll send rain on the land in its season, both autumn and spring rain, so that you may gather in your grain new wine and olive oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. Israel spent 40 years in the desert, where it says they were just scraping by to get some kind of vegetation to grow. And God is saying, you are going to be in a spot where you don't have to worry about that. If you trust me, if you rely on me, if you listen to what I'm saying, you're not going to have to rely on your might and your strength to be able to survive and even thrive. And this call is mission, and it's difficult, because when we read Matthew 28, 18 through 20, like this great commission, I'm sending you to go make disciples, that's a clear mission, that's the one that we were taught. As you open the Bible, you start studying the Bible, and somebody shows you these scriptures, that's when we're taught. However, this mission, it is still a mission. He says, I'm going to send you into the land, and if you follow what I'm teaching, you are going to be able to impact everything around you. Certainly it's not as clear as Matthew 28 to go into the world, but it's a mission, it's a scripture about conquest. I think maybe what becomes difficult is that it says that God is the central component on the success and failure of the land, and of this mission. Is it going to bear fruit? Is the land going to, you know, flowing with milk and honey, milk being, there's a lot of cattle or there's a lot of livestock that you get milk from, and then honey, like there's a lot of vegetation, so there's enough bees to pollinate and all this stuff. There's going to be enough of that. You won't know what hits you. Milk and honey together is a good combination. I don't know if you put it in your coffee at all, but if you haven't, I'd highly recommend it. Regarding weather, we understand that. In every culture that I'm familiar with, ancient cultures that do not practice Christianity, don't even serve one God, but they have a God for the weather. We have to call, because we understand that regarding weather, we don't have much control over it. There's people that get paid a livable wage that really, they're right like 50% of the time. You know what I'm saying? These weathermen, they're kind of right, but they really don't know an awful lot because it's unpredictable. God is in control of it, and we trust that, and we understand that. I think where it becomes more confusing is when we're thinking about our impact on other people to prompt them or to put God on their hearts, because that seems like it involves us a lot more than just the weather. The weather, we can't play any role in. It has to be God moving, but the way that we impact other people, that's a little bit on us. What the Bible is saying is if you follow what I'm teaching you, if you believe this and you follow this, I'm the one that's going to bring the growth. I'm the one that's going to, it's my mission, and I'm going to see it to the end. Just follow what I say. That should put a level of security that you and I have, that if you share your faith with somebody and they say yes, but then blow you off, that's okay, because it's God's mission. It's not your mission. What if you said it the wrong way? I just stumbled over my words. I didn't smile at them the right way. It's God's mission. Is there a good, better, best? Maybe at some point, potentially, but it's God's mission. He loves the people more than you love the people. He loves your family more than you love your family. He loves your siblings more than you love your siblings, certainly your coworkers and your boss. He loves them a lot more than you love them. You opening your mouth, you giving God an opportunity to work, a chance to move in the lives of other people, this is what he calls us to do. It's his mission. And if we allow him to lead us to his mission and to his mission field, then there's going to be this holistic response, I believe, from people, not just to show up to church, but to be those who actually desperately want what the Bible is providing and promising. Amen? The last point here is that there's this rediscovered holiness. We're in Deuteronomy 11, and I'm going to read more than just this, but I think I left this on purpose. It was a powerful start of the scripture. It's Deuteronomy 11 and 16. Be careful or you will be enticed to turn away and worship other gods and bow down to them. Then the Lord's anger will burn against you, and he will shut up the heavens so that it will not rain, and the ground will yield no produce, and you will soon perish from the good land the Lord is giving you. Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds. Tie them as symbols on your hands. Bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk down the road, when you lie down, when you get up. Write them on the doorframe of your house and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be in the land the Lord swore to give your ancestors as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth. If you carefully observe these commands I am giving you to follow, to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, to hold fast to him, then the Lord will drive out all these nations before you, and you will dispossess nations larger and stronger than you. Every place where you set your foot will be yours. Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon, from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean. No one will be able to stand against you. The Lord your God, as he promised you, will put the terror and fear of you on the whole land wherever you go. That's an exciting statement, that you're like, wow, we can do this, we can do this. There's this conquest that's bent on it, or that's the pursuit of this conquest. But before that he says, be careful or you're going to be enticed to turn away. This is a lesson for them, it's a lesson for us as well, that we ought to be careful or else we're going to turn away. We looked at the beginning, this experience thing, the presence of God, and you might look back at your time when you were younger, when you were studying the Bible, when you were fervent, when things just seemed to click, when life was simpler, and it was you and God, perhaps before you were married, or before you had children, it was just you and God, and it was just you two. It was simpler. You had more conviction potentially in the music you listened to, what you consumed. You were more devout in some ways, and you held to boundaries that now you might chuckle at. Some of it is maturity. I realize that. If we're holding to boundaries in an effort to make us feel more righteous, then we're missing it. If we're shunning people in our lives in an effort to create the distance that's necessary, they're doing the wrong thing. If we're looking down on them, that's not right. That's not how Jesus lived his life. But let's not throw everything out from maybe how we acted before, or maybe I'm speaking for myself now. There was some beauty in it. There was some beauty in being able to be okay with this distance and trust God is moving in this distance, and now in an effort potentially to be more relatable or to be more normal, or like, I kind of know my limits. I know where I can go. I know what line to toe. There's an allowance for the world to seep into our faith and our commitments to Jesus. That was true then. It's true for us today that we have the opportunity for that not to happen. He's warning against it. Maybe you look at your life and you say that I've done so many great things or I used to do this, and I remember this. It's always struck me as it just hasn't sat right with me. I was talking to a guy one time, and he just shared. He was talking in a way that was a little bit above his britches, or at least that was my perception, and he shared. He was like, yeah, back when I was in college, I'd read the Bible an hour a day, and I would pray for an hour a day, and I was listening. He was talking, and he's a 40-some-year-old guy, and I'm listening to him. I'm like, man, why are you resting on a 20-year-old laurel? That's not cool. Nobody's inspired by that. I think he was trying to say it in a way that, oh, you can do it, but I just felt like that is lame. That's old. I don't want to be that, and it's easy for me to be that. As I was writing down, when have you been inspired by the Word when you got this aha moment? I'm like, oh, all the time, and then you start thinking. You're like, when have I had a real moment like that? And I had to jog my brain a little bit. When did I connect with the Word? Not when I was 19, not when I was 16, not when I was 22, but when in the last year have I connected with the Bible in such a way that says, wow, I need to change the way that I'm living my life? We have the opportunity to do that, that wherever you look at your life, and if you say that you have let a lot of the world in, and, man, the idea of being holy or being set apart and being removed in a way that says, I don't have all the right things, but I'm going to try my best to live a life that is different than what the world teaches, maybe you have just let the world seep in and steal your joy and steal any fruit that the Holy Spirit has to work in your life. And if you've done that, there's hope. You can change. You don't have to live that way. In fact, please don't live that way. That's the worst way to live. It's not powerful for you. It's not powerful for us to see it. Man, it just hurts us. If you have been living a life that you're like, man, I'm making changes, I'm living holy, I'm devoted to God, keep doing it and help other people to do that as well. Amen? Amen. As we consider right now, we're going to follow this series through. There's at least three more. I think there's three more lessons in this series. We're going to get to see God's people as they went into this promised land, and we're going to see how they lived and behaved and acted. All of the while, though, keep in mind that there's always this promise that if you don't turn away, I'm going to bless you. We're going to see, unfortunately, them turn away all the time, and it's a warning for us that we do not have to be. We can follow the teachings of Jesus without being those who turn away. Amen? Amen. You guys are dismissed. Have a great Sunday. Please pick up your children. Thank you so much for listening to the Kalamazoo Church of Christ podcast. If you're in the Kalamazoo area, we'd love to get connected. Please go to kalamazoo.church and fill in your information to come to a Sunday service or any other event that we have going on. In any case, you'll be hearing from us next week.