Faith Presbyterian Church - Birmingham
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Faith Presbyterian Church - Birmingham
Ezra 9:1-15; A Foundation of Repentance
Jason Sterling September 7, 2025 Faith Presbyterian Church Birmingham, AL Bulletin
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If you have a copy of God's Word, turn with me to the book of Ezra. Remember, you can go to your table of contents. Hopefully you've got it by now. If you've been here through the series but you go to the book of Psalms, the middle of your Bible, start flipping backwards, you'll find Ezra, a couple of books before the book of Psalms. We've been in the series in the last few weeks, starting in the fall, and this morning we're jumping ahead to Ezra, chapter 9. Why are we jumping ahead to Ezra 9? Well, because many of the themes covered in Ezra are also going to be covered in the book of Nehemiah. Those books go together and so we're going to be spending the majority of our time this fall in Nehemiah and so we'll cover those themes there. But if you wanted to summarize Ezra 4 through 8, here's one word opposition. Starting in chapter 3, local enemies stepped in and started running all sorts of political interference and they were successful for a while. They actually stopped the building of the temple for 15 years. But God moved, god moved. We've seen that in Ezra already, in the king's heart, king Darius, and Darius ends up funding the temple project. It's finally completed.
Speaker 1:Now we get to Ezra 9. Ezra is coming to Jerusalem with another wave of returnees, but when he arrives, he discovers a new problem, and this is a problem that no one saw coming. And so let's read and let's find out what it is. This is a longer passage. This morning, I want to ask you to engage in the reading of God's Word. This is a really strong passage, and so follow along with me as I read God's Word this morning, and then we'll look at it together. This is the Word of the Lord.
Speaker 1:After these things had been done, the officials approached me and said the people of Israel and the priests and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the land with their abominations, from the Canaanites, the Hittites and the Perizzites, the Jebusites and the Ammonites and the Moabites, the Egyptians and the Amorites, for they have taken some of their daughters to be wives for themselves and for their sons, so that the holy race mixed itself with the peoples of the lands, and in this faithlessness, the hand of the officials and chief men has been foremost. As soon as I heard this, I tore my garment, my cloak, and pulled hair from my head and beard and said, appalled Then all who trembled at the words of the God of Israel, because of the faithlessness of the returned exiles gathered around me while I sat appalled until the evening sacrifice. And at the evening sacrifice I rose from my fasting with my garment and my cloak torn and fell upon my knees and spread out my hands to the Lord, my God, saying O, my God, I am ashamed and blessed to lift my face to you, my God, for our iniquities has risen higher than our heads and our guilt has mounted up to the heavens. From the days of our fathers to this day, we have been in great guilt, and for our iniquities we, our kings and our priests have been given into the hand of the kings of the lands, to the sword, to captivity, to plundering, to utter shame, as it is today. For now, for a brief moment, favor has been shown by the Lord, our God, to leave us a remnant and to give us a secure hold within this holy place. That our God may brighten our eyes and grant us a little reviving in our slavery, for we are slaves and yet God has forsaken us in our slavery, but has extended to us his steadfast love before the kings of Persia, to grant us some reviving, to set up the house of our God, to repair its ruins and to give us protection in Judea and Jerusalem.
Speaker 1:And now, o our God, what shall we say after this? For we have forsaken your commandments, which you commanded by your servants, the prophets, by saying the land you are entering to take possession of it is a land impure with the impurity of the peoples of the land, with their abominations that have filled it from end to end with their uncleanness. Therefore, do not give your daughters to their sons and neither take their daughters for your sons, and never seek their peace or prosperity. That you may be strong and eat the good of the land and leave it for an inheritance to your children forever. And after all that had come upon us for our evil deeds and for our great guilt, seeing that you, our God, have punished us less than our iniquities deserved and have given us such a remnant as this, shall we break your commandments again and intermarry with peoples who practice these abominations? Would you not be angry with us until you consumed us, so that there should be no remnant, nor any to escape? Oh Lord, the God of Israel, you are just for we are left a remnant that has escaped as it is today. Behold, we are before you in our guilt, for none can stand before you because of this. This is the word of God. Let's pray, let's ask for the Spirit to help us. Please pray with me. Oh, father, you brought us here this morning and I pray that you would be with the one who preaches. As I read this passage, I see so much of my own heart here, and so, as I preach, you've called me to preach this word this morning. I pray that I would do it with humility but also great boldness. I pray that you would lead all of us in our church, that we would build foundations of repentance and that it would start today through the preaching of your word. Through this passage would you convict and challenge and change, but also show us mercy and grace that we see in the Lord Jesus Christ. Do this in his name, amen.
Speaker 1:I read this week in my study. A commentator by the name of Ralph Davis shared this story. It's a Civil War story. It's from 1865, at the end of the Civil War. It was near over and the Union soldiers were down south. They were in a prison camp down in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and they were released. The war was over. They were free to go back north to Ohio, illinois and Indiana, back to their homes.
Speaker 1:And when they were in Vicksburg, there was this boat, this sidewheel steamer called the Sutana, and it was headed up the Mississippi River to Illinois. And so they were like, yes, this is our lucky day, we have a ride home, we get to eat good meals, we're going to look forward to seeing our family. All looked fine, but the sun stopped shining because the sutana was loaded with mules and troops six times its authorized capacity and somewhere north of Memphis the boilers blew and the ship sank and 1,500 people lost their lives. All seemed fine and then disaster struck. Everything looked perfect, they were going home and then catastrophe when they least expected it. That's exactly where God's people find themselves in Ezra, chapter 9. Things are in good order and then all comes unglued. Disaster strikes God's people, and it's not a boiler explosion, it's spiritual compromise that threatened to undo and destroy everything that God had restored.
Speaker 1:Remember, one of the things we've been doing the last couple of weeks in this series is saying, yes, we're building a physical building and ministry space and sanctuary, but this is just as much, and perhaps more importantly, a spiritual thing for our church. We are building spiritual foundations, and this passage teaches us the importance of building a foundation we desperately need as we move forward, and that is a foundation of repentance. This morning, ezra shows us three things, three essential things that we need in order to build in our lives and in our church a foundation of repentance. Number one, if you're a note taker, we need to admit our complacency. Secondly, confess our sin honestly. And lastly, trust God's character. And so let's dig in. And again, when I come to a passage like this, this is we, this is not you I'm the chief among them when we look at this passage. Okay, so let's dig in. Look at our first point admit our complacency. Look at this first verse. After these things we're just going to walk through the passage After these things had been done, what things?
Speaker 1:Well, it's talking about the completion and dedication of the temple, the rebuilding of the temple, and it says the officials approached Ezra and the people of Israel and the priest and the Levites had not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands with their abominations. If you have a New International Version, it says detestable practices. And so here's the scene Temple rebuilt, worship restored, celebrating God's goodness and restoration. And then bombshell moment hits the very people who had just been restored and brought back to Jerusalem start engaging and compromising with the pagan nations around them, doing the exact same thing that got them in exile in the first place. Verse 2, god's people were intermarrying with foreign women who worshiped other gods. And who was leading the way? The preachers, the pastors, the priests and the Levites, the spiritual leaders who should have known better, were actually leading the people into sin, the sin that had gotten them in exile in the first place.
Speaker 1:Let me be clear, very clear, right here. The issue is not ethnicity. Here, the issue is not ethnicity, it's obedience and covenant faithfulness. That's the issue here. Let me say it another way it's not racial, it's religious. God's people had not separated themselves from the abominations and detestable practices of the surrounding people.
Speaker 1:What are those abomination and detestable practices that God's people were engaging in? Idolatry, child sacrifice and sexual perversion things that God abhors, judges and hates. All throughout the Scriptures you'll see this all through, especially the Old Testament. God always traces our moral failures to their root, and the root is divided worship and idolatry. God cares deeply about our personal holiness. God cares deeply about our personal holiness, but he always connects our personal holiness to our heart. The question isn't just are you sinning? The question is what are you worshiping? Who are you worshiping, who and what are you serving?
Speaker 1:And Ezra hears this news and it is an immediate and a visceral response. Look at verses three and four. Tears his clothes, pulls his hair out, pulls his hair from his beard. This was an ancient Near Eastern expression of extreme shock. This was an ancient Near Eastern expression of extreme shock, extreme grief and mourning about what's going on. He sits appalled. This is not just disappointment, this is heartbreak over the spiritual compromise of God's people.
Speaker 1:And it's not just Ezra and I. It's not saying that the God's people, they, don't have sin in their life. This is not. No, of course they do.
Speaker 1:The problem in Ezra, chapter 9, is that they were comfortable with it. They had made peace with their sin, they had stopped fighting against their sin. And so the issue and the warning here is a warning against complacency. You see, israel had an allergy to distinctiveness. They didn't want to be different. Instead, they wanted to blend in with the culture around them. And we do that too, don't we? Don't? We try to get as close to the culture as we possibly can without standing out and what God is calling us to. And what Ezra is calling the people to is to be distinct. Ezra is calling the people back so that they would be a people that have an edge, that stand over and against the surrounding culture rather than merging with it.
Speaker 1:We face the exact same thing, don't we in our culture? Does not our culture whisper? Why are you so serious about your faith? Chill out, god just wants you to be happy. And so we compromise in business, we say stay silent about issues that we know are wrong and they're happening in our companies. And we look the other way and we say things like well, that's just the way it is around here and it's been that way for years. Or we compromise in our relationships and we lower our biblical standards for dating and marriage and we reason and we say God just wants me to be happy and besides, this person is really close to coming to faith, to faith or with our families. We don't lean in spiritually and to the church and those sorts of things because we don't want to come across as being weird or strange to the neighbors and our friends around us.
Speaker 1:J Gresham Machen was a New Testament scholar. For years he was at Princeton and then at Westminster. He was single for most of his life, but there was one time in his life that he had a serious relationship with a woman in Boston, and he describes her as intelligent, intelligent, exquisite and beautiful. But the relationship never took off or went any further into engagement or marriage, because she was a Unitarian. He had given her papers and books to read and tried to share his faith, and she could never bring herself to share his faith, and so he ended the relationship Costly. Absolutely Sad, yes, but faithful to God's call for distinctiveness, unlike Israel, machen chose the harder path, the path to obedience and faithfulness over blending in with the culture.
Speaker 1:And so here's our question. Again, it's for me Do we have an allergy to distinctiveness, distinctiveness? Where in your life are you tempted to blend in rather than have a little bit of an edge and stand distinctively for Jesus? Where are you tempted to minimize your sin with phrases like it's not that big a deal, everyone's doing it. Or maybe the deeper question in those moments, what are you really worshiping? Maybe it's approval? Whatever it is, those are hard questions that aren't comfortable. They're not comfortable for me to ask, but they're necessary. I think they're necessary if we're going to move from complacency to genuine repentance. Secondly, a foundation of repentance involves not only admitting our complacency but secondly, confessing our sin honestly.
Speaker 1:Look at verse 5. At the evening sacrifice, I rose from my fasting, garments were torn, fell on his knees Think about Spreads out his hands to the Lord God. Why this timing? That the evening sacrifice? He waited until then? Here's why Because that was the time when the entire community would have been gathered together for forgiveness of sins.
Speaker 1:The point is, this wasn't a private confession. Ezra didn't go off into a corner somewhere and individually confess. No, this was public and this was corporate confession at the most sacred moment of the day. This is one of the reasons why we can corporately confess our sins together as a church. Saying this is us. But what's remarkable is not just when the prayer is offered, but how it is offered.
Speaker 1:Look at verse six with me again. Oh my God, I am ashamed and blushed to lift my face because of your iniquities that's not what he says Our iniquities and our guilt. Ezra, he was not guilty of these sins, but he takes full ownership of these sins, of the community's failures. No finger pointing. No, these people are terrible. No superiority no, thank God, I'm not like them. Instead, he identifies completely in their guilt. Look at verses seven through nine Again, let's just keep walking through it.
Speaker 1:He's brutally honest about their track record. He said we're like a broken record. Basically we just keep doing the same things over and over and over again. We have this pattern of disobedience, he says. But he doesn't stop there, and this is critical to get. He also rehearses. Did you notice that God's undeserved mercy, bringing them back, rebuilding the temple, offering protection. He doesn't minimize, it's both ends. He doesn't minimize failure. They're failures. He doesn't make excuses, but he also doesn't forget God's grace. The message is clear. He's saying we've been rebels for generations, but yet, god, you have still been so incredibly gracious and kind to us.
Speaker 1:He gives us a model for confession in this chapter, of what genuine confession looks like, and here's why that matters is because confession leads to repentance or is the doorway to repentance. Repentance is the pathway to life and to change and to transformation, and you cannot change and be transformed without first acknowledging the problem, and that is why confession involves being brutally honest about the depth of our problem. We tend to think we're basically good people who occasionally mess up every now and then. The Bible says that in our nature we are born and we have this bent in our hearts away from God, towards rebellion. Ezra understood something that we often miss, and that is that the real problem isn't just our behavior, it's our heart that keeps wanting to gravitate towards the same patterns of rebellion and disobedience. That is why surface-level confession is never going to work. We must go deeper.
Speaker 1:Think about, maybe, with your grass, or if you have a garden. Do you ever take the weed eater and just think I'll get these weeds out of here? And you just take the weed eater and top off the weeds. What happens? You don't go to the root. The weeds are still growing underground. They come back stronger than ever. Why? Because you've got to dig up the roots or you'll be fighting the weeds forever. It's the same with our sin. Real confession requires going to the root system. It's hard work and it's messy, but it is what leads to change, because it gets you below the surface.
Speaker 1:The hardest thing about honest confession isn't admitting that we did something wrong. It is admitting that we are the kinds of people that keep doing things wrong. And that's hard to admit, and that is why, if you're going to have genuine confession of sin, it requires humility. You need God's help. It requires taking responsibility without excuses. And I don't know about you, but I am an expert at confession. That sounds like explanation. You know what I mean by that. I lost my temper, no-transcript. Or I know I shouldn't have said that and that was really mean, but you keep pushing my buttons. Or yeah, I know I don't prioritize the family and I feel bad about that, but you don't know how crazy work's been lately, friends. That's not confession, that is justification, with an apology attached. And so the question is when you confess your sin, are you confessing or are you explaining? Are you taking responsibility or are we just making a case for why it happened?
Speaker 1:Real confession is what we see here with Ezra God. No excuses, we've done this before. Forgive us, change us. No minimizing or explaining it away, throwing yourself on the mercy of God. True confession, remember Ezra, here you don't just beat yourself up. It also marvels at God's undeserved mercy. That's why confession can be hopeful rather than crushing. And that leads to our last point trust God's character. Please follow along with me, man.
Speaker 1:These are some amazing verses here. Let's walk through them together. Look at verses 10 through 12. And now, o our God. What shall we say after this? For we have forsaken your commandments. Notice the word. And now it's a shift. And so it shifts the entire prayer. And what Ezra is doing here is he's basically saying God has not been unclear about his expectations, that the Israelites knew exactly what was required, and yet they chose to disobey anyway.
Speaker 1:And then comes, I think, one of the most remarkable statements in all of the Bible. Look at verse 13. After all of that, after all we've done, our evil deeds and great guilt you, god, have punished us less than our iniquities deserve. Think about that. You have punished us less than our sins deserve. Ezra is not complaining that God has been too harsh. He is amazed at how gracious and kind God is. I mean, after punishment, they received mercy instead of getting what they actually deserved.
Speaker 1:One of the surest ways you know you're getting the gospel, one of the surest ways you know that you're starting to grasp grace in Christianity is your life starts to move from in all areas. You start to move from this entitlement to gratitude To where you see that all of life, from beginning to end, is a gift, that it is far more than you deserve. And Ezra understands this. I mean, that's what he's getting at. The very existence of the people of God shows God's grace and not their goodness. The fact that there is a remnant at all there was. Estimates. Scholars say it went from about 600,000 people out of Egypt to about 50,000 people returned. At this point they're rebuilding the temple. None of that they had earned. It was because God's faithfulness in the midst of their faithlessness. God remained faithful.
Speaker 1:And then Ezra asked the question that should stop us all dead in our tracks. Look at verse 14. Here's what he's saying God, if we keep this up, if we keep ignoring your commands and making the same mistakes, aren't you going to get fed up with us? Aren't you going to quit on us, be done with us and wipe us out completely and lose your patience with us? Ezra takes us right up to the edge and he suggests that if they go on in their rebellion, that God is going to be done with them. Notice verse 15. Notice, ezra doesn't end. He doesn't say God, we're going to do better next time, just give us one more chance. He does not do that. You know what he says. God, you're holy and we are guilty. You're holy and we are guilty. This is Ezra's way of saying that if the church survives, it'll be a miracle. That's what he's saying, but the church does survive because we're here and we're worshiping the living God in 2025. We are still here. Why? Because God himself would resolve the very tension that left Ezra speechless.
Speaker 1:The thread that runs all the way through the Old Testament is how can God be perfectly holy and just and perfectly merciful and gracious at the same time? You know how? One word Jesus, jesus. Because God, this God, would love his people so much he refused to let them go, and so he would take on flesh in the person of Jesus Christ and be exiled for us. He would live a perfect life of covenant faithfulness and he would go to a cross and have all the covenant curses of God for our unfaithfulness poured out on him. In our place, you have a God who was willing to let the severity of his own justice fall on himself to keep his promises and bring you back and be with you forever. You see, the tension's resolved at the cross, isn't it? Because that's where it's been said that justice and grace kiss. That's where it's been said that justice and grace kiss. It's also been said that God was so just that he had to die for you, but he was so gracious and loving that he was glad to die for you.
Speaker 1:Our hope is not in our record, it's in God's character. He forgives, not because he's overlooking sin, because he's already dealt with it through Christ on the cross. He's merciful. He's not lowering his standards. It's because those standards have been perfectly met in Jesus on our behalf. That is the gospel, and friends. That is the power that leads us to genuine repentance. The Apostle Paul in Romans 2, it is the kindness, the mercy and grace of God that leads to repentance. Grace does not make us careless with sin. Grace leads to repentance and repentance leads to life.
Speaker 1:As we prepare for this new ministry space and new sanctuary, let us not forget the most important construction project is not going on out there, it's going on in here.
Speaker 1:It's going on inside of our hearts, in the foundation that will last. It's not promises to do better. The foundation that will last is the foundation of repentance. And what does that look like? Admitting our complacency and pushing against it, confessing our sin honestly and trusting in the character of God. When we build on that foundation, we move forward in confidence, not in ourselves, but in God, who keeps his promises to his church and who will never let his church go. Amen, let's pray, father, thank you that you were so just that you had to die for us, but also so gracious that you were willing because of your deep love for us. I pray, forgive us for pretending, forgive us for our lack of honesty with our sin and owning our sin, and I pray that you would lead this church, and may the foundation here always be the foundation of repentance, because repentance leads to true life. We ask these things in Jesus' name, amen.