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We are in Ezekiel chapter 3, verses 16 through 21, if you have your Bibles with you. I'm going to be reading from the New King James Version. I believe that Ryan just read from the Christian Standard Version. Not really any difference of significance between the two. Before we begin our study, let's go to the Lord in prayer. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day and this time that you've given us together. Thank you for this meal, for the fellowship that we enjoy with each other. Lord, as we have read your word and we now go into a time of meditation and study of your word, prepare our minds, our hearts, our spirits to hear from you, to receive the challenge that these words have for us, and to be obedient to act on that challenge. Lord, we pray a prayer of thanksgiving that you have preserved and inspired your word down through the generations. May the Holy Spirit that resides within us, if we are saved by the power of Jesus Christ, may that Holy Spirit interact with these inspired words, and may the work that occurs be of honor and glory to you. We pray this in the matchless name of the King of kings and the Lord of Lords, Jesus Christ. And God's people said, Amen. Amen. Ezekiel chapter 3. You know, I was really tempted to go into Ezekiel chapter 1 or Ezekiel chapter 2, but as you will discover when you read those chapters, they are filled with very strange, unusual, some might even say bizarre visions. Instead, since I kept you guys here very late last week, I decided that I would focus on something a little more down-to-earth, a little easier to understand, and get you guys out maybe a couple of minutes early today to make up for keeping you here late last week. In Ezekiel chapter 3, the story today that we're looking at, I've entitled Either The Watchman or Ezekiel and the Final Fates of the Faithless. Either title applies. As we look at chapter 3, Ezekiel had received a very challenging command from the Lord. Ezekiel was basically told that he had to preach the word of God to both the wicked and to those people that considered themselves to be the righteous. And God told Ezekiel that he would be responsible for the lives of people that he neglected to share the Word of God with. The phrase that is used is you will be accountable for their blood. In chapters 1 through 3, God, in one of those strange visions, Ezekiel the prophet sees a scroll, and the scroll has writing on both sides of it. And God gives Ezekiel the very unusual command. He says, take that scroll and eat it. And Ezekiel obeys what God says, and Ezekiel says that the scroll was sweet, it tastes like honey. I don't know what kind of paper that was, but it makes for a very interesting meal. And it's less important the strangeness of the vision. But what we receive in that is that God's word was being internalized into the man Ezekiel. Ezekiel referring to himself and God talking to Ezekiel will often use the phrase son of man. Now we remember from the New Testament that Jesus also referred to himself as Son of Man. And Son of Man is used on Ezekiel. It's also used in great detail in the book of Daniel to talk about the coming Messiah. But in Ezekiel, Son of Man seems to be more the idea of a human being who has the words of God within him, and he is sharing those words with everyone. So Ezekiel finds himself in chapter 3. He receives a message from the Lord, and he's called to call all of the people, the wicked people and the people that consider themselves righteous, to repentance. Let's break down what Ryan read into some smaller bite-sized portions. First off, in verse 16, it came to pass at the end of seven days that the word of the Lord came to Ezekiel, saying, Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel. Therefore, hear a word from my mouth and give them warning from me. We'll pause right here. So Ezekiel is appointed to be a watchman. Now, to be a watchman during the days of Jewish antiquity in which Ezekiel lived, most often we would see someone standing on the wall surrounding the city, and their job was to keep a watch for any unusual activity near the city, and also to keep a watch far away from the city to see if there were any dust clouds that might represent an invading army or a group of people trying to come into town to cause trouble. We have some military gentlemen here in the room. Some of you have served a watch, and your watch was probably very boring if the stories I hear from military people are true. You are told to stand in a place and look in a certain direction, and your job is to report anything unusual that happens. Am I right on that, Brad? Okay. Now in Ezekiel's day, many of the people who would be assigned to be watchmen would also be given a ram's horn, often called a shofar kind of horn. And these are the horns you see in drawings of ancient Israel, and they're the spiraling kind of horn that they would take and blow into and make a very, very loud noise. I think I've shared with you before that my worship minister at my previous church in Tennessee had one of these horns. And every New Year's Day during the service, it was a tradition at the church that he would take that horn and he would blow into the horn. It made a very unique sound. Now, the older he got, the harder it was to make that sound. All right. You really had to be able to summon quite a bit of power into your lungs to blow and make a good noise out of that horn. But boy, the times when he hit it, it was unlike any other instrument that I've ever heard. And in Ezekiel's time, if you were a watchman on the wall, it was expected that you would have one of these horns at your side so that if you saw dust clouds of an invading army, or if you saw a group of a small group of raiders on horseback charging the city gate, you would grab that horn and you would blow into it with all your might to alert everybody that something was up. Something was threatening the city, something was not right and needed to be addressed. And Ezekiel is told, Ezekiel, you have my words in you. You are being made a watchman for the house of Israel. He's being made a watchman over the entire country. But he's not going to go stand on the wall and see if anybody's coming. Instead, instead, he has to give the people a warning from the Lord. Verse 16, God says, When I say to the wicked, you will surely die, and you give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked of his wicked way, that wicked man will die in his iniquity. But his blood I will require at your hand. Verse 19, yet if you warn the wicked, and he does not turn from his wickedness, nor his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity, but you have delivered your soul. What's going on here? Well, the Lord is telling Ezekiel, your job is just to share my word. Whether or not they choose to respond to it, is on them. But if you choose not to share my word, it's on you. That's what's going on here. But he doesn't stop there. He doesn't stop there. The Lord also says, beginning in verse 20, again, when a righteous man turns from his righteousness and commits iniquity, and I lay a stumbling block before him, he shall die because you did not give him warning. He'll die in his sin, and his righteousness which he's done shall not be remembered, but his blood I will require at your hand. What's happening here? Well, in similar fashion, the Lord is telling Ezekiel, even if a person appears righteous by all of the good works that they do and the things that they do obey, you still need to warn that person when they start going off the path of righteousness and on to sin. And if you don't warn them, then they're gonna die in their sins and be condemned. But, Ezekiel, since you didn't warn them, I'm gonna require their blood at your hand. And then the flip side of that, the next verse, nevertheless, if you do warn the righteous man that the righteous should not sin, and he does not sin, he'll live. Because he took your warning, also you will have delivered your soul. Pause here for a minute. So Ezekiel is called to preach warning and repentance to those who are obviously wicked. Ezekiel is told you need to preach repentance to the people that seem to be doing things well, but nonetheless, they're straying from the Lord. And as long as you warn them, Ezekiel, everything will be fine. But if you don't warn them, it's on your head. All right. Let's continue. What are some of our takeaways from this? Well, first off, the idea of being a watchman is a serious calling. We have relentless and ruthless enemies if we are born-again believers in Jesus Christ. We have our own personal sin that we struggle with. We have this lost world that we struggle with, and we do have supernatural opposition. We do have Satan and demons that would love nothing more than for us to get off the path of following Jesus and instead fall into sin. Now, as a watchman, Ezekiel would have understood what the charge was. If you were a watchman on the wall and you had that horn there and you saw a group of people about to attack the city, and you just decided, well, I guess I'm just gonna, you know, I don't want to cause a fuss. I think I'll just stay here and watch them come in. I'll let somebody else blow the horn and warn the city. I'm just kind of tired. I've put in a full day. I don't want to blow the horn. I know the army's coming, but you know, I've been doing this job forever and I deserve a break. I don't want to have to fill out all that paperwork for blowing the horn and warning the city that we're about to be invaded. Well, if you did that as a watchman, if you decided I'm not going to warn the city, and the city was attacked, you could be put to death as a traitor to the city, a traitor to the kingdom. You would be seen as aiding and abetting the enemy. And so to be a watchman and not live up to the call that had been placed upon you was a very serious offense and could in fact even cost you your life as a traitor. What does God tell Ezekiel? God tells Ezekiel, I'm making you a watchman. I am putting responsibility upon you. I am your responsibility is just as the watchman warns the people, you as a watchman, Ezekiel, have to warn the people that they're getting away from God and that they're falling into sin. And you need to do that with the wicked people as well as the people that are respectable because they're seen as righteous and upstanding people. The watchman is the first line of defense for the people in any given situation. Now, what's Ezekiel's call have to do with us? Well, first, Ezekiel had that word of God put in him by the vision of eating that scroll. And you know something? As Christians, we should have the word of God within us. Now don't go home and take a Bible and pour honey on it and take a fork and start eating it. Don't do that. Don't say Pastor Dave told you to do that. No, no, no. No. When we have the word of God within us, it's not about something we digest with our mouths, but rather it's something we digest with our spirits and with our minds. How we think should be shaped by God's word. And just as Ezekiel had a calling to share God's warning with people, we have a duty to share God's word with people. If you don't think we do, reread the end of the book of Matthew where we have the Great Commission. And Jesus says, go and tell people the good news and make disciples and spread the good news. I mean, our job as Christians is to share the Word of God with people. Both people that obviously need it, people that we would say are wicked, and also to share the Word of God with people that in any other respect we would say that they're good and proper citizens, and they have a degree of cultural righteousness about them. We're to share the Word of God with everyone. We are watchmen on the wall when it comes to sharing the good news with a world that needs it. Now, some of us are called to a place of being a watchman that's a little more obvious. Those of us that are in ministry, for example. Hebrews chapter 13, the writer of Hebrews tells the church, the Hebrew people, he says, obey those who rule over you, be submissive, for they watch out for your souls as those who must give account. He doesn't want your sin to be put upon his shoulders when he has to give an accounting to Almighty God. Let them do so with joy and not with grief, for that would be unprofitable for you. So our final takeaways today. First, share the word of God with people who clearly need to repent. If you see someone and you say, you know, that man, that woman, they're just terrible, they're awful, they're, you know, they're not a credit to the family that raised them. Maybe they need to hear the word of the Lord. Maybe they need to hear the good news of Jesus Christ. You know, sometimes those are the easier conversations to have because most people that live in wickedness know that they're living in wickedness. The second ones, though, are a little bit harder sometimes. Share the word of God with righteous people or respectable people who have lost their way. Share the word of God with them. And then finally, let's make sure that if we have the word of God within ourselves, that we're watching over ourselves. Take a look in the mirror and say, is there some area where I'm coming up short? And I know I'm coming up short, and I need to be a watchman over the life that God has given me, and I need to make corrections. I need to practice obedience in this area. I need to start doing this and stop doing that. Let's practice spiritual watchmanship over our own lives. I told you I'd get you out of here early today, and I'm living up to that promise. Let's close in prayer. Lord, we love you. Lord, this short passage from Ezekiel reminds us of the importance of sharing the word of God that has been placed in us. Lord, your word says that when we are saved by the power of Jesus Christ, that the Holy Spirit comes and dwells within us. Let us be obedient to the Spirit's calling of sharing the good news with a lost and dying world, not for our glory, not so that we can pat ourselves on the back, but rather so we can give you the honor and the credit. We love you, Lord Jesus. It's in your mighty name that we pray, and God's people said, Amen. And we are dismissed.