D.A. Carson - The Christian Life: Fighting Temptation - The Temptation of Hezekiah

so far we have Adam and Eve then last night the ten of Joseph and this morning the temptation of hezekiah if you want to read the full account of hezekiah which is really what is ideal to understand the passage before us then you really need to read 2nd Kings 18 to 20 and then the parallel account and second chronicles 29 to 32 and a further parallel account in the prophecy of Isaiah chapters 36 to 39 the story of Hezekiah shows up in three places in Holy Scripture and each contributes a little bit of something we won't have time to explore Isaiah at all I will draw your attention in a few moments to one or two details in second chronicles for the moment however let me begin with two kings chapter 20 I shall read the entire chapter in those days Hezekiah became ill and was at the point of death the prophet Isaiah son of amos went to him and said this is what the Lord says put your house in order because you are going to die you will not recover Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord remember Lord how I have walked before you faithfully and with wholehearted devotion and have done what is good in your eyes and Hezekiah wept bitterly before Isaiah had left the middle court the word of the Lord came to him go back and tell Hezekiah the ruler of my people this is what the Lord the God of your father David says I have heard your prayer and seen your tears I will heal you on the third day from now you will go up to the temple of the Lord I will add 15 years to your life and I will deliver you in this city from the hand of the king of Assyria I will defend this for my sake and for the sake of my servants David then Isaiah said prepare a poultice of figs they did so and applied it to the boil and he recovered Hezekiah had asked Isaiah what will be the sign that the Lord will heal me and that I will go up to the temple of the Lord on the third day from now Isiah answered this is the Lord signed to you that the Lord will do what he is a promised shall the shadow go forward 10 steps or shall it go back 10 steps it is a simple matter for the shadow to go forward 10 steps said Hezekiah rather have it go back 10 steps then the prophet Isaiah called on the Lord and the Lord made the shadow go back the 10 steps that had gone down on the stairway of Ahaz at that time Mothe duke balidaan son of balidaan king of babylon sent Hezekiah letters and a gift because he had heard of Hezekiah illness Hezekiah received the envoy's and showed them all that was in his storehouses the silver the gold the spices and the fine olive oil his armory and everything found among his treasures there was nothing in his palace or in all his kingdom that Hezekiah did not show them then Isaiah the prophet went to King Hezekiah and asked what did those men say and where did they come from from a distant land Hezekiah replied they came from Babylon the Prophet asked what did they see in your Palace they saw everything in my palace Hezekiah said there is nothing among my treasures that I did not show them then Isaiah said to Hezekiah hear the word of the Lord the time will surely come when everything in your palace and all that your predecessors have stored up until this day will be carried off to babble on nothing will be left says the Lord and some of your descendants your own flesh and blood who will be born to you will be taken away and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon the word of the Lord you have spoken is good as a kind of my lifetime as for the other events of Hezekiah reign all his achievements and how he made the pool and the tunnel by which he brought water into the city are they not written in the book of the annals of the kings of Judah Hezekiah rested with his ancestors and Manasseh his son succeeded him as king this is the word of the Lord it is possible to have a good beginning but a bad end ask Judas Iscariot he'll tell you or think of Dimas apostolic associate yet he loves this present evil world and turns aside it is possible to have a bad beginning but a good end ask saul of tarsus arch persecutor of the church yet nevertheless apostolic missionary writer of one quarter of the New Testament Christian martyr asked Manasseh king of Judah Hezekiah son mentioned in the last verse of the passage we read he reigned a long time and was a wretched King for almost 50 years but toward the end of the life he repented during the time of Manasseh he reintroduced idolatry to the nation again external tradition says almost certainly correct that he had Hezekiah that had Isiah killed when he was a very old man Isiah ran into the forest away from the troops that were following him and he hid in a hollow tree the troops found him and wrapped a rope around the opening and then cut down the tree you recall how Hebrews 11 says some were sawed asunder almost certainly referring to that event of whom the world is not worthy yet nevertheless even Manasi for all his cruelty and idolatry ended well he repented and the last period of time in his reign he was an excellent King so it's possible I have a good beginning and a bad end it's possible to have a bad beginning and a good end it's also possible to have a decidedly mixed race where there may be excellent features in your life full of signs of grace and yet sadly in some domains make a lot of mistakes and that brings us to the first point it is possible to be basically a faithful and fruitful servant of the Lord in many domains and yet fail miserably on more than one occasion along a certain kind of line one thinks of Abraham for example father of the faithful patriarch the one who is of only two who are called in old testament scriptures friend of God yet the man lied more than once and got his wife in trouble under real danger because he was afraid this was the father of the faithful and then of course the quintessential man along these lines is David himself called a man after God's own heart yet an adulterer and a murder and a really wretched father a really stupid father then there's Eli a faithful godly pious priest in the days of Israel yet not only is he a bad father he doesn't have the wisdom to discipline his own sons who when they become priests they're actually fleecing the people of money they they are corrupt and actually sleeping with some of the women who come to the assembly and he has no courage to draw the line there is family nepotism rules so although he is himself in many ways a godly man and a fine priest he's a danger to the community because he succumbs to nepotism and amongst these people we could add Hezekiah Hezekiah was in many ways a great King we should not minimize his God graced accomplishments look at the opening lines of chapter 18 in the third year of Hoshea a son of Elah king of Israel Hezekiah son of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign he was 25 years old when he became King a young man and he reigned in Jerusalem 29 years so he died at the age of 49 his mother's name was Abijah daughter of Zechariah he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord just as his father David had done he removed the high places smashed the Sacred Stones and cut down the ash atop polls in other words he reformed the nation by getting rid of the idolatry and to which many people were increasingly sinking he even were told broke into pieces the bronze snake Moses had made for up to that time the Israelites had been burning incense to it you recall the account in the Book of Numbers Moses had ordained that this bronze snake be made by God's own instruction to counteract the poisonous snakes that were biting the people they were biting the people because the people that slunk once again into idolatry there were whining and complaining and ungrateful snakes arose that bit the people and then as they cried for help God ordained that Moses build this bronze snake and put it on a pole and those who looked at his snake were healed not because the snake the bronze snake had some intrinsic power but as a sign of God's grace but now this bronze figure in storage somewhere has now been taken out and is treated as a kind of talisman a good-luck charm a little piece of magic spiritual power then people are actually offering incense to it and Hezekiah is smart enough to realize that although this is an historical artifact of some significance and once it has become an idol it has to be destroyed so he grinds it to power and powder and destroys it he was a great and theologically smart man indeed were told verse 5 Hezekiah trusted in the Lord the God of Israel there was no one like him among all the kings of Judea there before him or after him he held fast to the Lord and did not stop following him he kept the commands the Lord had given Moses and the Lord was with him he was successful in whatever he undertook he rebelled against the king of a Syrian did not serve him from Watchtower to fortified City he defeated the Volition's as far as Gaza and its territory and then the account goes on to talk about how he withstands the regional superpower of the day namely mighty Assyria barbarous cruel Assyria first under shall Manisa and then under Sennacherib and in both cases God gives him grace with spectacular display of miraculous power to - to endure the Assyrians came in and captured the northern 10 tribes Samaria and north in 721 BC and transported the leaders into their country but when they attack Judah and German Jerusalem and so on then under Hezekiah they were turned back they were turned back eventually 185 thousand Assyrians died of the plague or something else that God sent along but in one of the threatening letters that they sent there you have the account of how Hezekiah takes the letter goes to the temple and spreads it before the Lord and says the Lord God I can't handle this this is too big for me but this is a slight on your name will you not take action he was a man of faith and resting in the Lord God and turning to him again and again and again you must realize this the men were talking about a great leader of the Old Testament and yet and yet as we'll soon see there is another side to this man it turns out that on more than one occasion he demonstrates the same pattern of sins of arrogance of pride of foolishness of short-term thinking he does not really persevere consistently across the whole set of the domains of life and he does not end very well my father was a pastor small-town pastor church planter in French Canada when it was quite difficult to plant churches in that part of the country there was a lot of opposition Baptist pastors alone in French Canada between the year 1950 and the year 1952 spent a total of eight years in jail we kids were sometimes beaten up because we were Moody Protestant Dan Protestants during most of his lifetime dad preached a vast crowds of 10 15 on a good Sunday 3035 toward the end of his life when there was more growth in the church he finally had crowds of 60 or 65 he faced discouragement and then when he was an old man his wife my mother succumbed to Alzheimer's and from for nine years he looked after her during much of his life he sporadically kept a journal this was not meant for publication it was a journal that was addressed to God it was it was the summary of his own wrestling's with God and his thinking and his prayers and so on and of course all of those papers came to me as the eldest son after my father died and eventually the most important of that material I put together in a small book called mom Waris I'm an ordinary pastor you see the fact of the matter is we sometimes hold up well-known pastors who are gurus and so on but 95 97 98 percent of the ministry today is actually undertaken by pastors of small churches in small corners who are not known to sometimes face discouragement my dad was one of them Lamar's of an ordinary pastor but one of the cherished bits in that journal was his prayer as he got to be an old man his wife by this time had died and he was on his own now with mum gone he could take up preaching again and visiting that's what he did he was at this point 78 and he wrote in his journal Heavenly Father saved me from the sins of old men saved me from the sins of old men and he listed them jealousy of young men who are coming along behind who are more fruitful and I laziness insufficient prayer for my children and grandchildren and understand my father was a man of Prayer a willingness to quickly to turn on the television in order to meet my loneliness bitterness save me from the sins of men for you see what you must understand is this fight will be with us until the end when you're young you might think I guess I'm being so heavily tempted now because I'm young but when I'm middle-aged I'll finally be stable and when I'm an old man I'll be a godly Saint listen I'm old enough to tell you something the fight does not get any easier there's a possibility of being tempted and falling astray at any age of your life the only thing that's going to fix that permanently is resurrection existence in the new heaven and the new earth the home of righteousness and until then we still live under the constraint described by the Apostle Paul the flesh wars against the spirit and the spirit wars against the flesh and we are therefore exhorted to walk in step with the spirit Paul understands this perfectly well after he has been a fruitful apostle a missionary apostle for a solid 20 years he nevertheless writes 1st Corinthians 9 therefore I do not run like someone running aimlessly I do not fight like a boxer beating the air no I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others i myself will not be disqualified for the prize listen I know ministers of the gospel who served faithfully and fruitfully decade after decade after decade after decade and then in their 60s or 70s committed adultery and were removed from the ministry this side of glory we will never be so stalwart that we can afford to think we are above temptation this man of God Hezekiah has some domains in his life that he never truly comes to grip with number two God's people not least his successful people quotation marks his fruitful leaders face peculiar temptations in four areas God's people not least those widely regarded as successful face peculiar temptations in four areas number one false priorities especially in relation to death false priorities especially in relation to death we read in those days Hezekiah became ill and was at the point of death the prophet Isaiah son of Amos went to him and said this is what the Lord says put your house in order because you are going to die you will see you will not recover now if you do the mathematics the Lord gives them out of this event 15 extra years of life that means that instead of reigning 29 years if he had died earlier he would have reigned only 14 years so this is 14 years into his reign he takes the throne when he's 25 so this happens when he's 39 he's a pretty young man and he gets the news it's time to put your house in order Hezekiah and Hezekiah is a bitter man what do you do when you get news of this order his response is very different to the response of the Apostle Paul who says whether it's better to die or to live I'm not quite sure it's better for you I guess he says if I live because then I can minister to you the Word of God but quite frankly it's better for me and if I go to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord he says in Philippians chapter 1 in other words it's a very different different view of life and death one of my friends in Britain not too long ago was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer he was told he had about six months to live in fact he lived a little longer than that but not much and the first thing he did was write a letter to the congregation where he was the senior minister and he said I want to tell you what a great blessing this is most people don't know when they're going to die I do and as a result I have the opportunity to prepare and to prepare well and prepare well he did he made sure that he gathered his family around him took his kids on holidays together while he still had any strength built up memories charge them again and again with the gospel made sure there were no bad relations ships did as much as he could to make sure his wife was looked after do you see I know when I'm going to die you don't and therefore I will prepare what what a different attitude from Ezek aya do you see three times in my life I've had diseases that could have killed me well transparently they didn't as far as I as far as I can tell and in one of them when I was really quite ill I I had some Christians come to me and say they were they were praying very diligently that I would survive and I was needed in the kingdom and yada yada yada I couldn't bring myself to pray that because I remembered Hezekiah would be better to live longer I was in my early 40s at the time would it be better to live longer but who could tell what the future might be I remembered the line of an old hymn Oh let me never never outlive my love for thee so I prayed instead now for my wife and children it's really better if I stay but I'd rather die now Lord than live longer and bring disgrace to the gospel if by living longer I end up falling away and bringing disgrace to the gospel take me home now I don't want to live Hezekiah live longer and he made a mess false priorities about the most fundamental realities of life life and death second self-righteousness verses two and three Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord remember Lord how I have walked before you faithfully and with wholehearted devotion and have done what is good in your eyes and Hezekiah wept bitterly do you hear what he's saying he's saying God you owe me I'm one of the good guys doesn't the text say after all that he was a heroic King a good manager secured the frontiers he was a godly man he was a man who even during the following 15 years was courageous with respect to the Assyrians at that time the regional superpower was the Assyrians the Babylonians were still on the horizon they were far off but scripture itself says that he was a man like David a good man and now Hezekiah says if all of that is true don't you owe me a little more than 47 49 years of an event than 39 years of life don't you owe me a little more than that in other words he's beginning to think of the relationship between himself and God as a kind of tit for tat a relationship you scratch my back I scratch your back I'm pretty faithful to the Covenant therefore you're generous with me because I've been a good King therefore you owe me long life and as soon as you start thinking in those terms you've changed the entire nature of biblical religion what does Paul say in first Corinthians 4 what have you but what you received and if you've received it then why do you boast as if you hadn't so even his ability to be a good King and to be faithful and courageous and so on all of that given my grades it's not something that he could borrow with before God what do we have to barter with before God when all that we have is from God in the first place do you see the root of self-righteousness is the wretched suspicion that we are actually offering something to God as if we bring something to the table that we don't have from God in the first place what we are overlooking is the very nature of God's gracious sovereign providential rule in our lives number three pride pride especially verses 12 to 18 I'm sure you remember the account of these emissaries from Babylon now at the time as I said after the fall of the northern tribe 721 BC the regional superpower that was really dangerous was the Assyrians to the north but over to the Northeast there was the rising power of Babylon still not all that strong on the Tigris Euphrates River system eventually Babylon would smash Jerusalem in 587 586 BC about a hundred and forty years later so it's not around the corner at this point nobody saw Babylon as a threat Assyria was the threat it was Assyria that destroyed the northern tribes Babylon was not a threat but these Babylonians were shrewd people they were thinking ahead they were sending emissaries around to all the little petty nations around getting to know them pretending they were friends but quietly taking notes of the wealth and the strength and the fortifications and the nature of their armies and how much money they had and so forth they were taking notes so they come to Jerusalem under the guise of being concerned for Hezekiah ill-health and Sakaya decides to show off that's what we're told indeed second chronicles makes it even stronger we read in second chronicles chapter 32 beginning at verse 24 and those days Hezekiah became ill and was at the point of death he prayed to the Lord who answered him and gave him a miraculous sign but Hezekiah heart was proud and he did not respond to the kindness shown him therefore the Lord's wrath was on him and on Judah and Jerusalem he was a proud man then has a Kai repented of the pride in his heart as did the people of Jerusalem therefore the Lord's wrath did not come on them during the days of Hezekiah so this has a chi in other words turned out to be a proud man not only self righteous but we're told that Hezekiah received the invoice to Kings 20 verse 13 showed them all that was in his storehouses the silver the gold the spices the fine olive oil his armory everything found among his treasures there was nothing in his palace or in all his kingdom that Hezekiah did not show them in other words he was acting as if he were a mini Emperor he was beginning to sound like Nebuchadnezzar would a century and a half later is this not mighty Babylon which I have built he's saying in effect is this not mighty Jerusalem which I reign over he's strutting like a peacock Isaiah the prophet is not deceived he challenges him who were those chaps what did you say to them and eventually he declares verse 16 hear the word of the Lord Isaiah says to Hezekiah the time will surely come when everything in your palace and all that your predecessors have stored up until this day will be carried off to Babylon which didn't even appear as a threat not gonna happen anytime soon it's not yet the regional superpower nothing will be left says the Lord and some of your descendants that is your own children or children's children or children's children's children your own line some of them your own flesh and blood born to you eyes eyes really rubbing it in will be taken away and they will become eunuchs they'll be castrated and service eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon pride simply pride do you know this is a particular problem for Christian leaders who are successful you get to a certain point and you think I know how to do this I've got a track record this is the 24th year of this conference starting from 60 people now 1200 give or take growing steadily do you know what one of your greatest dangers is that you start thinking we know how to do this because you see in the sense you do you know how to preach the word to focus on expository ministry genuine Christian confessionalism and so on you do know how to do it you're gaining expertise and how to run a conference and so on so and so on do you see but now you can become so good at it that the Holy Spirit could get up walk out you never miss him because you know how to do it that's one of the reasons why sometimes old men begin to destroy what they built up because they start succumbing to pride it's a bit like the pride and the Gibeonites Fair recorded in Joshua chapter 9 the Israelites are successfully invading the country protected by God and then when the Gibeonites show up and and they flatter the Israelites and say you know we've heard that God is with you when we heard that you're so strong and you're powerful so we've come a long long way look at our moldy bread we've come a long long way we're no threat to you but we'd like to have a covenant of peace with you a treaty and the Israelites feeling preen dand puffed up they say sounds like a good idea to us and they know they they sign a treaty but they did not consult the Lord they were no longer self-consciously dependent on God they thought they knew how to do it pride fourth complacency and love of personal comfort complacency and love of personal comfort one of the saddest verses in the entire book of 2 Kings indeed one of the saddest verses in the whole Bible is verse 19 Isaiah tells Hezekiah that Jerusalem will be destroyed and that the nation will fall and some of his own descendants will be castrated and serve as slaves in the court of Babylon and what Hezekiah says by way of response is the word of the Lord you have spoken the word of the Lord you have spoken is good he even casts what he says as an air of piety whatever God says should be it is a good word but the text says for he thought will there not be peace and security in my lifetime what should he have said after all when earlier he had been told there was a word from the Lord saying he was going to die then he interceded with God and turned his face to the wall and cried why don't you have mercy on me we may I not have more life and God gave him 15 more years shouldn't he have cried here Lord if this is a threat on my children and my nation and my city this covenant city because of the sins that I have fallen into have mercy on the city have mercy on my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren have mercy on your covenant people Oh God and bring forgiveness bring forgiveness I beg of you do not let my sins bring judgment on the nation but is that what he prays no he's quit fighting he's into a slow decline now he says the word of the Lord is good masks what he's really thinking with pious phrases what he really hears is it's gonna be the Babylonians do it that's for a later period it's not doesn't concern me I'll be dead by then I don't care grotesque do you see there are some people who as they get older begin to get really cranky we'll come back to this in a moment they begin to destroy what they built up because in old age they just want not to be bothered they're no longer thinking about the future they're not planning anymore they're not trusting God they're not wondering how to stabilize the next generation of Christians how very different for example is the heart of the Apostle Peter do you recall what he says in the first chapter of his second epistle to Peter chapter 1 he says verse 12 I will always remind you of these things even though you know them and are firmly established in the truth you now have I think it right to refresh your memory as long as I live in the tent of this body because I know that I will soon put it aside I know I'm going to die as our Lord Jesus has made clear to me and I will make every effort to see that after my departure that is after my death you will always be able to remember these things here is a man who is still thinking beyond his old death about how to institutionalize the teaching of Christian confessionalism teaching the scripture teaching the Word of God teaching the gospel he's institutionalizing it so that even after his death the church will still be Realty remember the the structure that the nature the the heart of the gospel itself he's not saying well you know it's really about time I slowed down just don't bother me anymore I'm just gonna spend the entire final span of my life until I get bumped off as a Christian martyr I know that's coming again duck that one jesus said it was coming but until then it's about time for me to slow down and just spend time with my grandchildren it's not as attitude but it's hezekiah attitude complacency love of personal comfort when we succumb to such temptations we may place ourselves in such desperate plight that God will simply leave us for a bit as we fumble along in our inconsistency finally I want to offer an essential element in godly perseverance you see the temptations that I've been talking about in this third address are the temptations that come to all Christians on the long haul they're Christians that their temptations that we face that that chip away at our desire to persevere temptations that particularly come to successful Christian leaders pride and arrogance and inconsistency and love of comfort and so on now in an essential element in godly perseverance is remembering remembering now that's already triggered by the passage I just read in 2 Peter I want you to remember what the heart of the gospel is so I'm doing everything in my power to enable you to remember but this is a big theme in scripture that has to do with ongoing stable sanctification for example Exodus 13 3 regarding the Passover commemorate this day the day you came out of Egypt out of the land of slavery because the Lord brought you out of it with a mighty hand now God could have given them the Passover the initial Passover he could have seen to it that the Angel of Death passed over the land and the people were saved if they had the blood of the lamb on the two doorposts and the lintel and that would be all there was to it but instead God Himself says now that you've been through the Passover commemorate the day year after year after year after year remember because if you don't remember you'll turn away from the Lord the whole point of commemoration is to remember your utter reliance whether you recognize it or not your utter reliance on God's grace you would not be where you were today apart from the Passover and then when the Decalogue is given when the ten commandments are given both in Exodus 20 and in Deuteronomy 5 we've read words like these these from Deuteronomy 5 but similar things are found in Exodus 20 remember that you were slaves and the Lord brought you out with a mighty hand therefore and then the Decalogue is given do you see you remember the grace of God in the past moreover that is also well articulated by Moses in another remarkable passage Deuteronomy 17 this is at a time when there are yet no kings in Israel the kingship has not yet taken place it has not yet begun but Moses looks forward to the time when there will be a king and he says Deuteronomy chapter 17 verses 14 and following when you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you and have taken possession of it and settled in it and you say let us set a king over us like all the nations around us be sure to appoint over you a king the Lord your God chooses then he tells them several things that the king must not do then he says 1718 this is what you are to do when he takes the throne of his kingdom he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law taken from that of the Levitical priests so he comes to the throne first day in office what's he supposed to do a lot of the books of his predecessor nope not mentioned point his Secretary of State no hint of it make sure he puts his cabinet in order no mention of it what's the first thing he's supposed to do he's supposed to take out a quill pen and copy out longhand all the words of the book of the law which either means the book of Deuteronomy or the whole Pentateuch don't forget there were no photocopy machines nor could you download things from a CD and stick it on your hard drive without passing through anybody's brain nope he's to write it out for himself longhand and he is to write this Hebrew script line by line letter by letter so clearly that it becomes his own personal reading copy why why should that be his first obligation when he gets into office the text tells us this copy verse 19 is to be with him and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law of these decrees and not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites and turned from the law to the right or to the left then he and his descendants will reign a long time over his kingdom in Israel in other words by constantly rereading reading and rereading what God Himself has disclosed he remembers he remembers the book of the law he remembers the Word of God he remembers what God has done he remembers the Exodus he remembers who he is he remember this that he stands by grace and he will not puff himself up and start lording it over other people or turn aside from the to the laughter to the right he will remember do you see one of the reasons why we have church services why we meet together under the Word of God is to remember not every sermon will teach you something brand-new now a good expositor will constantly be bringing forth new things from the Word of God that's true that's true but there's an awful lot that goes on from Sunday to Sunday that is not meant to give you some tantalizingly fresh tidbit some insight that you haven't seen before so that the only reason you go to church is to find out something brand new part of the reason you go under the Word of God in the Assembly of God's people is to remember that's also the fundamental reason why you keep reading your Bible - did you say if you've read your Bible several times you might start saying as you read and powerful that you've read ten times twelve times 20 times before oh I know that one I don't have to read that one again but one of the reasons why you do it is one of the reasons why the kings of Israel were supposed to do it to revere the word of the Lord not turn aside to the left or to the right you see what stabilizes you is not your victories but remembering God's grace in the past and indeed that is the fundamental reason why we have the Lord's table in fact the fact that God has given us the right the are ite the right of the lord's table is in some ways shocking really shocking God saves us by the blood of his son he demonstrates his love for us and that while we were yet sinners Christ dies for us Christ bears our sin in his own body on the tree the wrath of God falls on him he is the propitiation for our sins and because of his stripes we are healed he was wounded for our transgressions you'd think that because of all of that our lives would be characterized by an endless array of praise think what we have received forgiveness from sin freedom from death resurrection existence still to come the gift of the Holy Spirit as the downpayment of the promised inheritance all secured by Christ's death and now we have to be given a right to be told to be thankful do this as often as you do it in remembrance of me because Christ knows that we his blood-bought people are still so sinful that we easily forget even in the context of our churches we can be so busy setting up committees and expounding on the nature of worship and thinking through the book of Revelation and expounding the prophecy of Jeremiah and making sure we get the parables right that somehow somehow God help us we actually forget the cross we don't actually concretely abolish it we just no longer have it at the forefront of our minds and so Christ in His perfect gracious wisdom has given us an ordinance aright in the church whereby again and again and again we hear the words this is my body broken for you do this in remembrance of me this cup is the New Covenant in my blood shed for many for the remission of sins do this in remembrance of me isn't it shocking that Christ has to give us a right to remind us to be thankful for all that he has given us but one of the reasons why we celebrate the Lord's Supper not the only reason but one of the fundamental reasons is precisely to draw us back again and again and again to the grace of God especially the grace of God in the gospel in Christ Jesus the cross and the resurrection for thatís what stabilizes us what enables us to fight temptation this demand to remember in a right way comes up again and again in Scripture of course Matthew chapter 16 verse 9 as they're crossing the lake they realize they forgotten some bread Jesus talking about the false teaching of the Pharisees and the Sadducees he says beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and the Sadducees referring to their dangerous doctrine that can come and corrupt the entire dough but they don't get it they think is he saying something about bringing bread yeah we know we forgot it and Jesus says to them don't you remember the feeding of the 5000 you know in other words how can you really imagine that it's such a disaster to have forgotten a bit of bread I can provide bread I prove that already don't you remember we're not gonna starve to death if I can feed 5,000 I can feed 12 hmm don't you see don't you remember the feeding of the 5,000 or again Jesus in John 15 on the night that he was betrayed remember the words I spoke to you no servant is greater than his master remember remember small wonder Paul writes to Timothy in 2 Timothy chapter 2 remember the Lord Jesus descended from David raised from the dead in my corner of the world in North America two men that have had an outsized influence on Christian confessionalism in North America in the 20th century are Kenneth conser and Carl Henry both dead now but they were stalwart they were broadly within the reformed camp stalwart in their insistence on inerrancy they taught a whole generation to think and they had a great deal to do with much of what was good in evangelicalism in North America in the 20th century in the 1980s when they were both in their upper 70s they were both by this time old men we invited them a Trinity where I teach to give two hour-long lectures an hour each to our students we had six or seven hundred students at the time they packed out the chapel and what we asked them to do was to give their take on what the face of confessional evangelical Reformed Christianity looked like in North America in particular from their vantage point after decades more than half a century of Christian experience and Christian ministry their lectures were both interesting and scintillating and then the next day we met again and we had an hour-long interview I was the one charged with interviewing them to ask them some probing questions what do you think of this woman what do you think's going on here what's the future going to bring here just to ask them as aged wise men of law large experienced what they thought the future was I didn't tell them in advance what the questions were going to be but toward the end of the interview you can see it for yourself it's all online it's it's all videotaped and available toward the end of the interview I asked them tell me how have you two men turned out the way you have there are a lot of old men who become cranky controlling bitter they no longer they have the energy of the young men and they resent it they can become a bit jealous of the young men they constantly remember the old days but they're no longer thinking about the future they're no longer supporting and encouraging young men they expect to be honored more than they want to encourage and pass on the baton to others that they're not praying for the future anymore they begin to guard their preserve and as a result they begin to destroy what they started to build we see a lot of old men like that but neither of you is like that both of you are constantly encouraging a new generation coming along you're looking to the future you're full of joy and the Lord you're thanking God for your years of service and you're finding ways now in your diminishing years with diminishing strength still to serve honorably and in a godly way how are you managing to do that why aren't you too cranky old men don't tell me I said to them that it's the grace of God I know it's the grace of God I know it's the grace of God but how is the grace of God worked out in your life so that this is the way you've turned out to being cranky old man and they were both embarrassed and didn't know what to say and sputtered a little bit and then finally Carl Henry said it's the best quotation on the entire video he finally said how can anyone be arrogant when he stands beside the cross you see he remembered hezekiah forgot and was increasingly viewing things as his preserve and was in danger of bringing things down on his head and the head of the successors afternoon how can anyone be arrogant when he stands beside the cross let us pray

Channel: Bethesda Baptist

Views: 6,806

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Id: su1AiKVno50

Length: 52min 46sec (3166 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 29 2013