Mark Buckley 3/21/21 Mark Buckley 3/21/21

What I Learned from the Kings

Well, good morning, Living Streams. It’s a joy for me to be with you guys today. I want to say a special hello to the Grand Canyon students, because it’s a big weekend, you guys having your team at the big dance. We’re proud of you. It was a little difficult yesterday but to get into the dance is one thing. But actually, dancing is a whole different ball game, right?

Series: A Kingdom Divided
March 21, 2021 - Mark Buckley

I also want to say hi to the online community. I’ve been part of the online community for the past year. My wife had a heart transplant and we had to keep a big social distance. But there’s nothing like being back in live church! It’s a whole different ball game.

I was literally weeping this morning as we prayed before the first service. The Holy Spirit was ministering in a powerful way. We’ve got an awesome team of people in this church. If you don’t know the pastors personally, Veronica Morrison, Faith Cummings, Kurt Cotter, Arthur Le, some of these guys and gals are wonderful. And our elders are wonderful men of God. If you have a chance to get to know them, you’re going to find even more of God’s kingdom in this place than you’ve ever experienced before.

I’m going to be talking today about What I Learned from the Kings. At the end of the service we’re going to have communion. If you’re online, go get your bread, go get your cup. If it’s too early for wine, get some juice, whatever. We’re going to take communion. It’ll be good.

I’m going to give you lessons from three different righteous kings—things that have stuck with me over the years. Even the righteous kings were flawed. The first part of this message is going to be a little bit dark at times, a little bit politically incorrect at times; but if you stick with it, it’ll be worth it in the end,

First lesson from the kings:

1. Immorality has consequences for everyone.

Looking at the life of Solomon. Solomon was a king who pleased God from the time he began. He was a young guy. He knew that he needed wisdom. He asked God for wisdom and the Lord said, “I’m going to give you wisdom. And because you weren’t asking for much more than that, I’m going to give you wealth, I’m going to give you power, I’m going to give you more than you ever anticipated.”

Then it says in 1 Kings 11,

King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh’s daughter…

which was his first wife.

Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites. They were from nations about which the Lord had told the Israelites, “You must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.” Nevertheless, Solomon held fast to them in love. He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray. As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God, as the heart of David his father had been.

Let’s pray:

Father, I ask that you’d help me speak this word with clarity and power and that your grace will minister and that your kingdom will come more fully in our lives than ever before. In Jesus’ name.

So Solomon went from being this wonderful young guy with a heart for God, who gained wisdom, who gained understanding, who understand how flowers worked and plants grew, and how cities should be built, and aqueducts, and how an army should be formed, and his palace had such great order that people came and were amazed at what God did through Solomon. He built this magnificent temple and overlaid it with gold. It was a phenomenal place.

But as he wanted, in the lust of his heart, more and more women—it wasn’t just one wife that was beautiful, it wasn’t just two, it became seven hundred wives, three hundred concubines, which were basically sex slaves. There’s no other way to put it. It occupied his heart. His heart became dark. And his latter years he did not leave the legacy of blessing. The kingdom got divided because his heart was dark, and his son followed his dark ways and took unwise counsel.

I have a deep concern for our society today. I watched my own dad’s life turn dark because of immorality. I watched my pastor’s life become dark because of immorality. I saw the consequences in our family. I saw the consequences in the ministry I was part of when I was a young guy. It grieved my heart.

And today we’re having an explosion of immorality that is like none other. Now, in the sixties, we had free love, sex, peace, rock ’n roll and partying, basically. But the media, for the most part, was trying to warn people that it wasn’t going to end well. If you go to Height Ashbury and see the fruit of the hippie movement, you’ll see the burned out skeletons of people, those who are still alive. You see the bad fruit of that lifestyle.

But today, Kristina and I were watching Netflix the other day. And, a quick aside, thank you for those who have prayed for my dear wife. She’s doing much better. She’s getting stronger. Her transplant is working really good and we really appreciate your love.

So we were watching Netflix and it says in the upper corner “Language and Smoking,” you know, so keep your eyes out. If somebody smokes, that could really infiltrate your heart and make you want to go smoke or something like that, or you might say a bad word too. It says absolutely nothing about the fact that one guy after another in this show is sleeping with whatever woman he can get his hands on. And women are in bed with other women. The whole thing is rampant immorality. That’s normal. It’s being promoted in our society.

And then people act shocked when a guy down in Atlanta goes and kills eight people. Now that is tragic. And you know, if you do the back story on the guy, he was part of a bible-believing church. And he took a very Old Testament approach to try to get rid of his sin. You know? He was enslaved by his sin. He called himself a sex addict. Well, Jesus said that those who sin become slaves to sin. There is an addiction factor, because it doesn’t provide fulfillment. It provides degradation. So he took an Old Testament approach, kills eight people, which spreads fear and grief and pain.

Whether you try to gain a political solution through violence, a moral solution through violence, or you’re just being an angry person, that does not produce the righteousness of God. We’re here to proclaim the kingdom and to invite people into the kingdom. And we all have urges. We all have temptations. We all have desires that we have to say no to. The New Testament is about saying no to that which corrupts so you can say yes to the kingdom. There is something better that God has for each and every one of us that we don’t want to miss out on.

In 2 Kings 18, another king that you might not know as well as Solomon, his name is Hezekiah:

In the third year of Hoshea son of Elah king of Israel, Hezekiah son of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign. He was twenty-five years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem twenty-nine years. 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. … Hezekiah trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel. There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him.

He was pleasing to God. He did what was right. He believed God. Yet we’re going to see in a moment that Hezekiah had all kinds of trials. Some people erroneously believe that, if you love God, if you do everything right, then you’re going to have a shield of protection, a hedge of protection, some kind of invisible bubble that’s going to prevent any bad news from actually affecting you, either from the outside or any kind of personal crisis. But that’s not the story of the Bible. That’s not the truth, folks.

What I would really urge you all to do is study, not just the New Testament, but the Old Testament, because you’ll get a more full picture of who God really is. So let’s look at what happens.

2. Even the righteous face crises.

In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah’s reign, Sennacherib king of Assyria attacked all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them. So Hezekiah king of Judah sent this message to the king of Assyria at Lachish: “I have done wrong. Withdraw from me, and I will pay whatever you demand of me.”

So here is this righteous king and he still gets attacked. Major army of Assyria. Hundreds of thousands of people marching against Judah, capturing the outlying cities. And it says:

…the king of Assyria exacted from Hezekiah king of Judah three hundred talents[c] of silver and thirty talents[d] of gold. So Hezekiah gave him all the silver that was found in the temple of the Lord and in the treasuries of the royal palace. At this time Hezekiah king of Judah stripped off the gold with which he had covered the doors and doorposts of the temple of the Lord, and gave it to the king of Assyria.

He made two false assumptions. One assumption was that it was because he did something wrong that he got attacked. He didn’t get attacked because he had done something wrong. He got attacked because there is evil in the world, and evil has a tendency to want to destroy those who are trying to do right. It says in the New Testament that all who live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. It goes with the territory. Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers. They will be sons of God.” We need peacemakers because there’s conflict. There’s conflict because men have fallen.

So another false assumption he made is that, if he goes into a treaty with the king of Assyria, that the king of Assyria is going to honor his word. It’s like trying to make a pact with the devil. You try and make a pact with the devil for your success or for your protection or whatever, and it’s a temporary deception that leads to further bondage.

Neville Chamberlain, in the late 1930’s, tried to make a pact with Adolph Hitler. The pact was this: we will let you have Austria, we will let you have part of Czechoslovakia, but that’s as far as you go. And Hitler goes, “Yeah. That’s as far as I want to go. We just want to reclaim the German-held territories from these other places and we’ll be good to go.”

Well, Chamberlain comes back to Great Britain, claims to the world, “We have a peace treaty. Hitler’s going to be fine.” And what happens? Within months Hitler’s invading Poland and then he goes after Russia and the whole world is inflamed in war. Why? Because he had an intent from the beginning to dominate and control and make the Aryan race the predominate force on the world.

So, what happens to Hezekiah if you get into the story is that, after he gives the gold, after he gives the silver, the king of Assyria still attacks. He’s got the gold but now he wants complete and utter control. He’s a picture of Satan in the Old Testament.

Now, by the grace of God, Hezekiah and the people of the Lord are delivered from that. But that’s not the end of Hezekiah’s challenges. In 2 Kings 20, it says this:

In those days Hezekiah became ill and was at the point of death. The prophet Isaiah son of Amoz 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.”

Now we don’t know what his problem was. We don’t know if it was some kind of cancer, some kind of an infection. All we know is that sickness was a sickness unto death and Isaiah the prophet recognized it and said, “Buddy, make sure your will is good. Make sure you kiss your wife goodbye and say what you want to your kids, because this is the end.”

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.

I know a little bit of what this feels like. In 1979 I was a young pastor. I had a wife and two kids and a growing church in Northern California. We had a day of fasting and prayer. I’m fasting on my own, in my office, kneeling before the couch in my office, and I heard a voice in my heart. The voice said, “I’m going to take you home.”

It totally caught me off guard. You’re going to take me home? This is God speaking? I’m going to die? What the heck is going on?

I literally got up off my knees, sat down on my couch, a few minutes later I left my office. I’m walking around, I’m jumpy. I’m irritated. Am I going to die? Was that God? Was that the devil? What happened,

Well, four days later my wife, Kristina, and I left on a trip. We borrowed a Volkswagen camper van. We left our boys with my brother and his wife. We were up in Northern California to go trout fishing, The Volkswagen camper dies and we have to push-start it. I had to gather a bunch of campers together to help me push-start it. Kristina’s in the driver’s seat. We push it to get it going and and it doesn’t start. Then it turns out she had the key off, which was a little embarrassing. So we push it again. There were about five of us. We push it as hard as we can. She pops the clutch and it doesn’t start, because she had it in reverse.

Now, my wife is usually very mechanical and very responsible. It was very irritating. And four of the guys helping me push the van walked away in disgust. So they leave and it’s just me and one other guy. Now we’re pushing with all our might. We push and she pops the clutch. It starts. And I’m hit with this massive headache. I mean, massive. And within a moment or two I’m literally laying in the dirt, throwing up. It was a bad scene. Kristina gets out of the van, says, “What’s happening?” I said, “I think I’m going to die, and you’d better get me to a hospital.”

She takes me to the hospital, where they do a spinal tap when they see the mess I’m in. They say, “You’ve got a brain bleed” They fly me in a private air evac down to Marin County, and basically said, “We don’t know if you’re going to live or die, but 90% of people that have this kind of brain bleed die.” Obviously, you know how that part of the story ends. I don’t die, by the grace of God.

But I had been in my office praying, I had been in my office crying after hearing that word that I was going to die. What comforted me is what happened to Hezekiah. This is what I want to say in my third point:

3. The mercy of God is amazing.

Isaiah said in verse 4:

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 fifteen years to your life. And I will deliver you and this city from the hand of the king of Assyria. I will defend this city for my sake and for the sake of my servant David.’”

In other words, what God is saying is, “I have a plan bigger than you, Hezekiah. The way you were living your life, you might have ended in death. But I have heard your plea for mercy and I’m adding fifteen years to your life.”

So when I had remembered that story, it really encouraged me. And when you’re twenty-nine years old, fifteen years sounds like a long, long time.

Let’s go to our final king. In 2 Kings 22, it says this:

Josiah was eight years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem thirty-one years. His mother’s name was Jedidah daughter of Adaiah; she was from Bozkath. 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 right or to the left.

So Josiah, at eight years old he becomes king. As he grows up, turns a teenager and into his twenties, he is the most dedicated king in the history of Israel. He tells them to rebuild the temple. The temple had fallen into disrepair. He finds the law of God in the temple and they begin to practice the law of God. They have it read to all the people. They begin to humble themselves. They reinstitute the Passover. They reinstitute the festivals. They reinstitute obedience to God. They finally rebuild the army. They rebuild the cities around Judah. And he has done a phenomenal job. Great guy. There’s about four pages of the Old Testament written about him. Then something happens.

4. Getting overextended has serious consequences.

2 Kings 23:

While Josiah was king, Pharaoh Necho king of Egypt went up to the Euphrates River to help the king of Assyria. King Josiah marched out to meet him in battle, but Necho faced him and killed him at Megiddo.

What’s happening? Josiah finds out that the arch enemy of Israel, which is Assyria, is going to be helped by Necho, King of Egypt. Josiah says, “I don’t want anybody helping Assyria. We hate those guys. They took the gold out of our temple years ago and we hate those guys.”

So he marches out in battle. He gets into a battle that God had not called him into. He gets overextended. I deal all the time with guys who are believers who get overextended and it’s not pretty.

So, 1994, Kristina and I are in a cabin in northern Washington. Kurt Cotter and I had flown up there because a young man in our church was in a coma. He had rolled his car over at a Christian camp. It had settled to the bottom of a pond. He was almost brain dead. He had been in a coma for several days. We went up there to pray for him, to ask God to heal him.

Two years before that, our oldest son had drown. Now, this kid, Daniel Murrow, we had helped raise for three and half years while his dad was in prison. So he was really close to our family. He was the oldest of six kids who lived next door to us. They were in and out of our house all the time. We loved these guys. We were praying over Daniel, asking God to heal him.

On the way up there, I had told Kurt, “I’m in trouble.” I had been in Alaska, trying to minister to some pastors whose kids were killed in a car wreck. I had been in California at a missions conference, where the churches were having a battle with each other. I had been on a bunch of trips that left me very drained, one right after another. I had nothing left in the tank. Now I had an emergency. I was living my life right on the edge, trying to please God by serving him with all my strength all the time, every day, and leaving nothing behind. Now an emergency comes and I’ve got nothing to give. I’m so wound up I couldn’t even sleep.

When the elders found out about that, they literally had me sent to a mental hospital for two weeks. Then to a treatment for another two weeks. I want to just tell you, if you’re the senior pastor of a church and you get sent to a mental hospital, it does not look good on a resume. Do you know what I mean? It’s not something you want to brag about to your friends or put in your newsletter. You’re hoping nobody’s going to find out. Yeah. Good luck with that.

“Where’s Mark? I haven’t seen him for a few weeks.”

“Well, you know how those things go, don’t you?”

Nobody ever gossips or anything. Nevertheless, I was out of the pulpit for four months. And our church held together. Living Streams held together because of love and because of mercy. They loved us. We loved them. And the fruit of the church has been better than ever. But I had to learn a really painful lesson.

I want to tell you how I ended up in that mental institution. I ended up there because, one night when we were at that Christian camp after we had prayed for Daniel all day long, I was trying to go to sleep. David Stockton’s parents were sharing this bungalow with us They were asleep. Kristina was asleep. My son, Phil, was in there. He was asleep. And I feel like my heart is starting to race and beat so fast that I’m having a heart attack. I’m thinking maybe I’m dying or something like that. I hear fireworks going off in the distance and I realize it’s Fourth of July and there’s fireworks. It’s 1994. And, oh, by the way, 1994, the last time I thought I was going to die was 1979, that’s fifteen years ago, and that happened to have been on the Fourth of July weekend. My fifteen years is up! I’m not paranoid. I’m about to die. Literally, that’s what I thought. That’s what flipped me out.

So the mercy of God is amazing. I did not die. But…but the reason I had the mercy of God is because I am part of a really loving, supportive community. Not everybody has that benefit. A lot of people, when they have a breakdown, which is what I had, it takes years and years to recover from. And some people have a hard time ever recovering.

The Body of Christ is a healing place. Don’t ever let people tell you, “I don’t really need church because I’ve got all I need from God.” Well, you’ve got all you need from God until you have a crisis. And if you’re a believer, you’re going to have a crisis, believe me. You’re going to get attacked. There’s going to be health issues. There’s going to be stuff happen. There is no magic protection that’s going to guarantee that your family is always going to escape through the trials of life. You’re going to need your brothers and sisters, and they’re going to need you, too.

Now I want to close this message by talking about the King of kings and the Lord of lords, and a little contrast between the limitations of the righteous king and what Jesus does in our life.

In Revelation 19:11 & 16, it says:

I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war. On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: king of kings and lord of lords.

King of kings and Lord of lords. Heaven was open and the apostle saw Jesus, the Word of God, alive and well and true. The Eternal Word through which all things are formed, all things are made, that which established the universe, literally became flesh and dwelt among us, he said, “And I got to touch him. I got to feel him.”

A couple of weeks ago, maybe a little less than that, I was over at a golf course, and I run into a guy who is a judge, who I’ve known for a long time, who was part of our church. And I said, “How’s it going?” And he said, “Well, did you know my golf clubs got stolen?” And I said, “No, I didn’t know that. Did you get any new ones?” And he goes, “No, no, as a matter of fact, one of the detectives caught the guy. He was fencing my golf clubs. And because he was fencing my golf clubs and they’re worth so much money, he’s got a class 4 felony. He’s going to prison.”

And then I’m like, “Oh, really?”

And he goes, “Yeah, but my driver, he gave away to somebody. So he’s making restitution. He’s paying me $17 a month for my driver.”

Now under normal circumstances, I’d say, “Yeah, they got the bad guy!” You know what I mean? We can’t let people steal golf clubs. What would become of people like me that like to play golf, if you just let them take golf clubs? You’ve got to send them to prison.

But that very day, I had heard about a lady taking a very different approach. We had a memorial service for Celia Clifton, the mom of Adriana Gruber, who is part of our staff. Celia Clifton heard from Adriana, when Adriana was a teenager, that when Adriana went on a particular day to get her car washed, somebody at the car wash stole a bunch of stuff out of her car. So she goes home and tells her mom right away, “Mom, I realized that somebody stole my stuff.”

Her mom says, “Which car wash?” She goes right down there. She marches down there. She’s this fiery little Mexican lady who loves Jesus. She tells the manager of the car wash, “I want to talk to all of your guys!”

“All of my guys/]?”

“Yeah. Someobody stole stuff out of my daughter’s car. I want to talk to all your guys.”

The guy literally shuts down the car wash, gathers twenty employees all together. And Celia begins to preach the gospel. She tells them that she knows that they’re sinners because we’re all sinners. She knows somebody’s a thief, but Jesus Christ came to die on the cross so thieves could be forgiven, so immoral people can be transformed, so people can enter the kingdom of God.

During the course of her message, one of the guys starts weeping and he confesses that he had stolen the stuff out of the car. And she leads him to the Lord and twenty of those guys pray to receive Christ. Then she goes to the manager of the car wash and says, “I do not want you to fire him. I want you promote him. You hear me? I do not want you to fire him. I want you to promote him because he’s honest and he’s going to be a man of God.”

So I wanted to say to my friend, the judge, “Hold on a second. There’s a better way than just sending the bad guys who steal your golf clubs to prison. There’s a better way. There’s a more powerful way.”

He can take those of us who have fallen and make us new. Jesus said, “there’s somebody more powerful than Solomon here.”

Solomon had people come from all over the world to hear his wisdom. And Jesus said what he could do was better. You know why? Because Solomon in his wisdom could find out which of the women is lying. But Jesus, in his power, can turn the liar into a truth teller.

Moses with his authority could have the adulterer put to death. But Jesus, with his authority, can turn the adulterer into a covenant keeper. There’s somebody more powerful than Moses here.

And here’s what Jesus had to say. Last point here.

5. The King of kings makes simple great.

Matthew 11:11

Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

Greater than John the Baptist. Greater than Moses. Greater than Solomon. Who? Whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven. You may be least in the kingdom of heaven. You are aware that you don’t think right sometimes. You don’t act right sometimes. But you’re not to be disqualified because you weren’t qualified. None of us are qualified because we’re always thinking right we’re always acting right. We’re qualified by what Jesus has done for us, by his gift for us. And if you’re least in the kingdom, you’ve got an awesome gift. An awesome gift.

My sister is visiting from California this weekend. The last time she came here was over thirty years ago. Living Streams had about fifteen people. I was going door to door. I was doing everything I could to try and reach people. I was going to the parks. I reached a few people and brought them to church.

She came when she was having trouble. She stayed in our house with our four kids. She invited a friend to our church. And her friend brought her boyfriend, Ben. Robin brought Ben. Ben brought J.B.. J.B. brought his parents, Ewell and Betsy. Ewell and Betsy brought George and Mary Ellen. George was the head of surgery at Good Sam Hospital. Ewell was the head of the Shearson Leemon Hutton brokerage. Ben brought Steve Ontiveros, a pitcher for the Oakland A’s.

I had been exhausting myself, trying to do whatever I could. Katey shows up, starts inviting somebody and the whole church starts to grow. She had a gift from God. I don’t even know if she knew she had a gift from God.

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David Stockton 3/7/21 David Stockton 3/7/21

A Divided Heart

Series: A Kingdom Divided
March 7, 2021 - David Stockton

Good morning. It’s very, very, very encouraging to see people here after the last two weeks of messages. Uneasy laughter. It makes sense. It’s been a bit dicey the last couple of weeks. We’ve been going through First Kings. We’re getting a heavy dose of something. And I really am thankful that people are coming to hear God’s word. I’m thankful for the people who are encouraging me. Because you know that I’m just kind of trying to do my best. I’m not perfect in any way and don’t have all this stuff figured out. But I’m trying to really dissect what our cultural moment is describing to us as a vision for God’s righteousness; and trying to get into the biblical narrative and find out what is really a vision for God’s righteousness—against what is popular in our culture, and maybe what is against what’s going on in our own souls and minds.

I don’t claim to be good at it or perfect at it in any way. But I’m doing my best. And thankfully, we have the word of God. I have some people that I’m able to process with. I really do feel like the messages that I’ve been preaching really do represent our elder team and our leadership team here, our staff, all of those things. So I feel good about all of that. But I also know that words can go different ways and they can hit people in different ways. So I’m also thankful for all the people who have been engaging in some dialogue with me through email, saying, “I heard you say this. I want to unpack that a little bit and make sure I’m hearing what you’re saying.”

I know there are people who are deciding whether they really want to stick with Living Streams or not. Because we’re really kind of drawing some lines that are not super popular in society today. So some people are deciding to move on. And I don’t blame them, you know, if that’s what they feel; because we’re not going to adjust or budge or try and let the culture dictate what we preach or what the word of God says. We’re going to let the word of God interpret our culture for us. It’s interesting. I do feel a lot of encouragement. The most encouragement I feel is when someone is actually willing to dialogue. So if you’re thinking about leaving or thinking about saying, “I can’t be here anymore,” I totally understand. But I would like to be able to have a conversation before you go, just to make sure we are dividing over what we are actually dividing over, and not just that you heard something strange or weird that I was saying. Because I know I can mess up too.

That being said, thanks for being here. Hopefully we’ll see you next week. We’re still in First Kings. We’re going to be going through First Kings again, we’ve been looking at this super, super ancient, near-eastern document that’s been preserved for all this time. It’s very old. It’s very outdated. It’s a very different cultur. All of these things. And yet, we think it’s the inspired word of God and has a lot to say to us, because people really aren’t that different from the way they’ve always been. We have the same problems and challenges.

We’ve seen lots of connections from First Kings. There are uneasy transfers of power, which is something we’ve experienced in America. There are debates and divisions over taxes. Again, America. There’s lots of division over political issues. They’re building a wall, which is fun. And it’s a time in Israel’s history where there is tons of prosperity. Prominence, prosperity, world power, all of that is going on. And that’s what we’re experiencing.

At the same time this is going on, the writer, who most likely is Jeremiah, is recording for us a lot of the idolatry that was taking place in the midst of the prosperity. So I think we’re experiencing right now in America, that all of our prosperity has led us to some forms of idolatry in our nation, that displeases God.

So this prophet was writing to his people in his day to try to warn them to not fall into these traps. I’m using this book and we’re trying to warn ourselves from the same traps, so we don’t fall into some of those things. There was a continuous redefining God and what worship is to be. We’ve described that in our context, we have a cross up here. In their day, they had the worship of Yahweh, the God that brought them out of Egypt and made them into a nation, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and on and on. So they would worship Yahweh.

But over time they decided that they didn’t just want to worship Yahweh. All the other nations around them had other gods, as well. So they decided, “Maybe if we worship Yahweh and the other gods, we’ll get like double, triple love. We’ll get triple the blessings. We’ll get it all.” So they began to bring in things like Baal worship. They began to bring in things like Asherah poles. They never took down the cross, so to speak. They just started adding other things to their worship.

What they didn’t realize is that the God of the Bible, Yahweh, is a very jealous God. Not in the petty, junior high type jealousy. But in the idea of a woman who’s married to a man and all of a sudden he decides he wants to bring in other women to the relationship. The jealousy that she would feel for her husband would be righteous and right. Saying, “This is not right.” And God himself is the source of that righteous jealousy. God says, “No. I’m not going to stand here and let you add other gods to the worship of Me. You get Me or you get nothing.”

That’s ultimately what happened in Israel’s history. Jeremiah, as he was prophesying, he was called The Weeping Prophet because people kept going, “Eh, you’re annoying.” He kept prophesying and they were like, “Hey, throw him in prison.” He kept prophesy and they’d say, “Hey, put him in a pit. That way we can’t hear him anymore. Just leave him in a pit for a while.”

He was the weeping prophet because he was prophesying as he watched this unfold before his eyes, as people continued to practice idolatry and, ultimately the nation of Israel was completely destroyed, in just a few hundred years.

America, where are you? America, are you willing to listen? We’re coming up on a few hundred years. And where are we going to be?

I don’t know how to change America. I can pray for it, we can reach out, we can do all of those things. But what we really want to do is make sure none of those things show up inside our church, inside our fellowship and our family. So we’re going to preach about it.

Tim Keller wrote a book called Counterfeit Gods, as he was trying to help the church in America understand culturally what the idolatry of today is. Some of the things that he said is:

An idol is something we cannot live without. We must have it, therefore it drives us to break rules we once honored to harm others, even ourselves, in order to get it…

So it’s basically these things we used to hold as true and right, we now want these other things and these things are standing in our way, so we just kind of put those to the side. Maybe something like this right here (bible). It’s happening today. Sorry if that freaked you out super bad. Just trying to make a point. But it came out a little bit abrupt.

…An idol is anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give, anything that is so central and essential to your life, that should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living.

The first thing that came to my mind was the song “Driver’s License.” Sorry. If you don’t know what that is, good. You’re good.

…If I have that, then I will feel like my life has meaning, then I’ll know I have value, and I’ll feel significant and secure.

The “that,” which he is referring to are the idols in our lives. Some people that I’ve been asking recently, “What are you seeing as the idols of our day,”:

“Comfort, convenience, safety and security.” Tyler Johnson, who’s a pastor here in Phoenix. He says, “Those are the idols of our day.”
Tim Keller, in his book Counterfeit Gods, talks bout “Money, sex and power,” being the idols of our day.
Dan Riccio says, “Self,” (uh-oh, that one gets to the point), “Self is an idol in our day. Sex, money, power, acclaim, security,” are the idols of our day. We want those things even more than we want God.We’re willing to compromise even what God has asked of us in order to get those things.

Then one of the things that I feel has been important for me to bring out, and this is just me, I only came up with one, those other guys had a bunch of items, but our desires. I think that’s the idolatry of America today. But I think that’s the idolatry that’s sneaking into our churches. Somehow we’re allowing our desires to dictate what is right and wrong.

You hear it in society. “You do you.” You know, whatever you want, that’s what you should be, that’s who you should be. But our desires do not belong on the throne of our lives. That’s one of the reasons why we keep this cross up here. Yes, to remind us of what Jesus did for us, the sacrifice that he paid so that we never have to fear God ever again. We never have to fear death ever again. But also as a reminder to us that ninety-nine, (I’ve been saying ninety, I’m going up to ninety-nine now)—ninety-nine percent of following Jesus is denying ourselves, taking up our cross, and following him. Denying ourselves means: Do not give in to disordered desires. We are constantly battling between what is a desire that is within us that is of God, and what is a desire within us that is not of God. And we deny the ones that are disordered. And we live into the ones that are not. This is very hard stuff. It’s very hard stuff. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying, “Oh, just go do it.” It’s very hard stuff. And that’s why he was a weeping prophet.

So 1 Kings 11. Let’s jump in here:

11 King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh’s daughter—Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites. 2 They were from nations about which the Lord had told the Israelites, “You must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.” Nevertheless, Solomon held fast to them in love.
Idolatry. He called it love.
3 He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray. 4 As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God, as the heart of David his father had been. 5 He followed Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molek the detestable god of the Ammonites. 6 So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord; he did not follow the Lord completely, as David his father had done.
7 On a hill east of Jerusalem, Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the detestable god of Moab, and for Molek the detestable god of the Ammonites. 8 He did the same for all his foreign wives, who burned incense and offered sacrifices to their gods.

Wow. We’re in a different place here. Last week we were reading 1 Kings 3, where Solomon prays this beautiful prayer. God is asking Solomon, “I’ll give you anything. What do you want?” And instead of asking for all the idolatry-type things, Solomon says, “God, can you give me a heart that listens to you? I don’t want to even have a heart that knows the truth, so to speak, because then I might put myself on the throne and decide what is true and right.” He said, “Could you just give me a heart that listens to you, that can hear you? Because you’re the only one that sees clearly. You’re the only one that should be on the throne.”

Hallelujah! It’s a beautiful, beautiful prayer. We should be praying it every day because we live in a crazy world.

And then we get to see the display of that, where Solomon was able to bring absolute justice, beautiful, righteous justice into a very troubling, street-level justice issue between two prostitutes and one baby. And it was just awesome. And everyone who got to see it was so refreshed that justice and truth could happen in our day. And it was just awesome.

Then, that’s chapter 3. Chapter 3 through 10 you just get to see that Solomon’s bringing out the wisdom. He’s executing justice. He’s ordering Israel in such a way that is causing the most flourishing and freedom for everybody there. The nations around them, instead of warring with them, they send delegations to sit at the feet of Solomon, just to listen to what he might have to say, so that they could experience a little bit of the freedom and flourishing that came through the Judeo ethic.

Solomon builds the temple for the Lord. Solomon builds a palace for himself. Solomon built a wall around Jerusalem. And it starts to describe all of the grain that was brought to Solomon every day because of all the fruitfulness of all the fields. Then it describes all of the flour that was brought in for his table as they made all the food for all the people. Then he talks bout all the gold that was brought in as tribute from other nations, and the wealth and the prominence and the prosperity. It was amazing. Actually, the title of the last chunk of scripture in chapter 10 is “Solomon’s Splendor.” It’s beautiful what the Lord had done, and what Solomon and the people of Israel were experiencing.

And then the weeping prophet, who’s recording for us a little bit of what happened, he says, “However, Solomon loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh’s daughter.” There was a disordered desire within Solomon that was not in line with decrees and statutes and commands of God. And Solomon went for it.

Maybe he thought: I’m doing everything else the Lord is asking me to do. What’s the problem with this one little one? He wasn’t willing to deal with the “little foxes” like we talked about two weeks ago.

And I don’t think that when Solomon married Pharaoh’s daughter, the first one, I don’t think he thought, All right. One down and 999 to go. I don’t think that was the vision that he had. I don’t think he thought, I’ll marry Pharaoh’s daughter and then I’ll marry a whole bunch of others. Just like those who get married don’t come to the altar and profess their vows to each other thinking, Maybe. Even though half of them, so to speak, end in divorce. I don’t think half of them are going, Yeah, we’ll see how this goes.

But little foxes come in and then other little foxes, other little foxes. So Solomon basically made one decision of compromise, sexually. And it led to another and another and another and another and another and another and another. Because sin is never satisfied. Sex is never satisfied. And many of us sitting in this room or listening online can think about the one time we made a compromise and how many more compromises it led to, until, ultimately, you’re in bondage.

Solomon, the wisest person of all—he fell in this way. And he ended up with a thousand wives. Well, seven hundred of royal birth wives, and then three hundred concubines, which are basically illegitimate wives. Because he decided to go for one.

Not only that, but then he decided to keep those wives happy. He started building high places of worship. He built the temple for Yahweh and then he started building temples for all the other gods. Just in case you don’t quite understand historically what it means to build a high place of worship for another god, the gods that were described in here—basically what was happening was Solomon built the correct form of Yahweh and a temple for that. Then he built these other temples.

These other temples, a lot of them had to do with fertility, these gods. It was an agrerian society. So if you wanted your lands to be fertile, if you wanted your family to be fertile, your wives to be fertile, then you would pray to these gods and they would cause your lands to be fertile, which was a really important deal when you’re trying to grow stuff. And your wives to be fertile was really important if you want to survive—have people to work the fields, maybe.

So a lot of these gods had this kind of concept. “If you worship me then you will be prosperous. You’ll be fertile.” But what they required as worship was for you to give up your sexuality, to give up your virginity. Practicing worship for these gods, had oftentimes going and linking yourself with a temple prostitute of some sort. Or giving up your virginity to one of these priests or priestesses. And if you offer that sacrifice, then this god will bless you with fertility. Sex became rampant.

Then, sad to say, others of these gods were gods that actually required human sacrifice. One tradition talks about the god Molek described here as this statue of iron that had a head of an ox of some sort. He would have his arms out and then inside the belly was this hollowed out thing where they would build a fire. That fire would warm up the iron and warm up the hands until it was red hot. Then they would come and lay their babies on his hands and watch their babies burn up as a sacrifice so that they could be fertile.

This is what Solomon produced in Israel. And Israel never recovered until it was destroyed. And if we don’t think we have a sex problem in America, if we don’t think we’ve created an idol out of sex and the compromise and the giving of ourselves in all these different sexual ways, we’re so blind. And, sad to say, what Solomon probably didn’t even know until he saw it was the sexual kind of reality of all this idolatry ultimately led to the killing of babies. If we don’t think we have that problem in our society, we’re blind as well. Our lust, our giving over to sexual desires that are disordered and outside the context of scriptures, has not led to a little, it’s led to a lot of damage for our society. Sad to say, it’s led to a lot of damage for a generation of unborn.

And we get to see it in Solomon’s day and you get to hear the weeping prophet Jeremiah say, “Please wake up.” We get to read the scriptures and there’s so much detail about sex in the Bible. And whenever sex is done outside the context of one man and one woman, it does not lead to anything good. It leads to destruction. And most often it’s not even the destruction of the person, it’s the destruction of the people that come after them.

The scariest thing about sin is you get to choose your sin, but you don’t get to choose the consequence. And even scarier than that is you don’t get to choose who gets the consequence. Most often it’s the ones that go after you. It’s the ones who you love the most that suffer. That’s true in Solomon’s day, as well.

Now you see why I’m thankful that people keep showing up. I’m just saying things and…yeah.

This is our reality. This is us. We read about Solomon and you’re like, “Yeah, that’s me, except for all the rich and smart stuff.” The way Paul describes it in the New Testament, is he actually describes a war going on inside of us. He uses the word war when he describes the battle between our spirit and our flesh. Our ordered desires and our disordered desires. It’s a war. It’s a challenge. It’s a difficulty. It’s something that causes pain and frustration and agony and sleepless nights and prayers and groanings within us.

If we’re honest, we all know that war. We have a nature inside of us that was given to us from Adam that wants to go against the things of God. And those of us who have given our life to Christ, we now have the Spirit inside of us who is compelling us to go toward the things of Christ. But it’s a war. It’s a battle.

Just the other day I was with a family, and one of their daughters who is young, it was so funny because she wanted to say something that was going to be like gossipy. She wanted to say something about what everyone was saying about this person; and the mom was like, “No.” And she was like, “Well, let me just…” “No!” “But, what…” “No!” It was just like, what is happening here? She could not keep it in. It was like she needed to say this juicy morsel of gossip so bad. And her mom was just cutting it off. And I was like, This is so interesting. Then it was funny because she finally stopped and the mom was like, “As soon as we go inside later she’s going to still say it.” Like she can’t help it. It’s the way it is within us. It’s alive in us. It was alive in Solomon.

That is truth. All that we’ve been saying these last few weeks, this is the truth we need to hear. God is setting before us a blessing and a curse. If you walk in this way you will be free. You will flourish in the things of God, and you will be setting up your children and the generations to come for prosperity and goodness in the Lord.

This is true. We have to hear this. We have to know this. But, thanks be to God that there’s more to the story to who our God is. He’s full of truth and he’s full of grace. And as I was reading, I stumbled across something that I want us all to hear. It’s so important. I’m so excited about this.

9 The Lord became angry with Solomon because his heart had turned away from the Lord, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice. 10 Although he had forbidden Solomon to follow other gods, Solomon did not keep the Lord’s command. 11 So the Lord said to Solomon, “Since this is your attitude and you have not kept my covenant and my decrees, which I commanded you, I will most certainly tear the kingdom away from you and give it to one of your subordinates. 12 Nevertheless, for the sake of David your father, I will not do it during your lifetime. I will tear it out of the hand of your son. 13 Yet I will not tear the whole kingdom from him, but will give him one tribe for the sake of David my servant and for the sake of Jerusalem, which I have chosen.”

So God visited Solomon again, finding him in all of this idolatry, going from a discerning heart to a divided heart, leading his people into all of this disgusting, detestable idolatry, paving the way for pain and agony for his children and the children of Israel. And God comes to him because he hates sin and what it does. He says, “Solomon, I’m going to have to punish you and I’m going to tear the kingdom away from you. Nevertheless, I’m not going to do it in your lifetime, for the sake of David. But I’m going to tear it from your son. Yet, I’m not going to tear it all from him, for the sake of David.”

If God was just all about truth, Solomon would be over. And to be honest, humanity would be over already, as well. But the God of the Bible is very peculiar. The God of the Bible is very scandalous, because there’s this razor’s edge to his character that’s described in Exodus 34. He is for sure not going to leave the guilty unpunished. But he is also abounding in mercy and kindness and faithfulness. And he loves to forgive.

In this chapter we get to see the nature of God. He’s disgusted and heartbroken over the idolatry and what it’s going to produce and what it’s going to cost—not just for Solomon, but for his children. And that stuff does play out. There are consequences to sin every single time. There is pleasure in sin for a season, but then it’s destruction. And sad to say, it’s not just destruction for you. It’s also for the ones you love. But, at the same time, God always is full of grace and mercy.

Here it is in the Old Testament. We see a little bit of a picture of a New Testament principle. When God says, “For the sake of David, Solomon you’re going to escape punishment. For the sake of David, Solomon, the promise that I made that David will always have someone sit on the throne will remain intact. And, sure enough, that promise did remain intact all the way until there was one born of the seed of David, or the line of David. His name was Jesus. He’s become King that reigns forevermore.

What the New Testament picks up right there is kind of bouncing off this. For the sake of David, Solomon escaped punishment and received the promise. And for the sake of Jesus Christ, everyone who believes in him escapes punishment and receives the full promise of God. This is the way Paul says it in Romans 5:

18 Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man…

Now, Paul’s talking about Adam, but you could also talk about Solomon—or you could put your own name in there.

For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous. 20 The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, 21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The Message translation (MSG) says it this way:

18-19 Here it is in a nutshell: Just as one person did it wrong and got us in all this trouble with sin and death, …

That’s you and me and Adam and Solomon.

…another person did it right and got us out of it….

That’s Jesus.

…But more than just getting us out of trouble, he got us into life! One man said no to God and put many people in the wrong; one man said yes to God and put many in the right.
20-21 All that passing laws against sin did was produce more lawbreakers. But sin didn’t, and doesn’t, have a chance in competition with the aggressive forgiveness we call grace. When it’s sin versus grace, grace wins hands down. All sin can do is threaten us with death, and that’s the end of it. Grace, because God is putting everything together again through the Messiah, invites us into life—a life that goes on and on and on, world without end.

For the sake of David, Solomon escaped punishment and the promise stayed intact. And for the sake of Jesus, you and I, who have the same heart as Solomon, you and I who have stories of divorce, you and I who have stories of sexual immorality, you and I who have story after story of compromise, of little foxes, you and I that can think of all the times we blew it, which led to all the times we blew it, you and I who have no right to escape the punishment for our sins, and you and I who have no right to the full promise of God, which is that we are co-heirs with Christ of everything.

The promise of God is that you and I get everything that God wants to give Jesus. You and I get to experience the full realization of the promise of God, which comes in “kingdom come.” You and I get to know the resurrection life that Jesus brought into our world. And you and I also get to know the redemption that God can do, where he even takes our most heinous and disgusting sins and produces something good through them.

This is the scandal. The more you sin, the more God’s grace comes to you. The more you sin, the more God’s forgiveness is for you. In fact, God, in some ways Paul is saying, go ahead and try him if you want. Go ahead and test it if you want. You cannot outdo God’s love, grace and forgiveness. Even the sins you haven’t committed yet God has already provided grace and forgiveness for that. Your unrighteousness, no matter how hard you try, or no matter how badly you fail because you’re trying to do right, will never be more powerful than the righteousness and forgiveness and grace of God.

The very next thing Paul is saying after this is: Should we sin that grace may abound? God forbid! But he has to say that because, basically, he was saying the more you sin the more grace will abound. But he said don’t go that way because you also need to understand that your righteousness can produce life just like your wickedness can produce death. So be about the righteousness.

But when you fall and when you fail, and all of us sitting in this room or sitting at home, we are right now before God sinners. We are right now before God facing the wrath that he has against sin because we’re sinners. Yet, if we link ourselves to Christ, then he will come and, instead of giving us the punishment, he’ll apply it to the cross where Jesus took it. Instead of disqualifying us from the promise, he’ll apply the blood of Jesus to us, which includes us into the promise. This is the scandalous mystery of God’s grace that is for you and me, no matter what we have done, and the truth is, no matter what we’re going to do.

Paul, in 1 Corinthians 6, says, Don’t you know that you are temples of the living God? His Spirit is inside of you. And if you were going to go join yourself to a prostitute, in some sick way you would be joining together God and the prostitute. You need to understand this is what you are doing.

As I was kind of unpacking that in my mind, and as we were singing that song about Egypt today, I just felt the Lord was saying, “David, the ones you’re praying for, the ones you know that are filled with my Spirit and yet they’re kind of going off,” he said, “I want you to know that I’m going with them.” It broke my heart. Not because of what these people are doing in their foolishness or deception, but because of how much God loves them. That he’s willing to even go into the sickness, into the depravity, into the detestable things in order to be one step away from them, so that the minute they turn around like that prodigal, he’s right there with open arms.

Basically, he was saying, “Hey, David, my holiness can handle whatever sin someone might throw at me.” There is a lot more to unpack there and we don’t have the time. But I just want you to know that God is with you, and he will go to the ends of the earth. He will go into whatever you take him into in order to be one step away from your salvation and your redemption, and to get you back into the promise that he so longs to give you and the generations after you.

Let’s pray. It’s always important for us to remember that when we say, “Let’s pray,” at Living Streams we don’t necessarily mean let’s say some more words. Prayer really is more about listening than talking. So I want to create this time of response right now where we can listen to the Spirit of God and see what he’s saying to the church today. His Spirit alone knows how to make correct application in each of our lives. The Spirit alone knows how to bring conviction instead of condemnation into our hearts. So please don’t hear anything I have to say. Just listen to what the Spirit is saying.

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David Stockton 2/28/21 David Stockton 2/28/21

A Discerning Heart

Well welcome to Living Streams. We’re going to be in First Kings. So if you want to grab a bible and turn there. First Kings is super old, so old. It’s like major old, old, old writings. So old that, if you’re cool, you would never even pay attention to them. But we’re not trying to be cool. We’re trying to be correct. We’re trying to find the Lord in it all. This is the Old Testament.

Series: A Kingdom Divided
February 28, 2021 - David Stockton

Well, welcome to Living Streams. We’re going to be in First Kings. So if you want to grab a bible and turn there. First Kings is super old, so old. It’s like major old, old, old writings. So old that, if you’re cool, you would never even pay attention to them. But we’re not trying to be cool. We’re trying to be correct. We’re trying to find the Lord in it all. This is the Old Testament. There are a lot of people in society who wouldn’t call it the Old Testament, they’d just call it the Tanakh. But in our testament structure of the Christian church, we have Old Testament and New Testament. This is old, Old Testament. It’s not even like new Old Testament.

But these words, it’s so amazing how much truth and health they have for us today and what we’re dealing with in our super advanced, 2021 culture, where we know the answer to everything now, or at least can ask Siri what it is. But in this passage we talked about last week, that there’s lots of connections to today. There is uneasy transfer of power. There’s debates and divisions over taxes. Yeah. Political issues. There is building of walls, whether we should build the walls around Jerusalem and fortify them or not. And there’s a continuous redefining of who God is and what his role is in society.

We, as Americans, the framers of our nation said some phrases that still stand strong today. “One nation under God” is something that we claim. We also put “In God we trust” on our money. Which is just hilarious, right? Because, what do we really trust in, right? Sorry. I thought that was funny. You can laugh. It’s church, but you can laugh. But if it’s just a bad joke, you don’t have to laugh.

Anyway, the word God there, when the framers of our nation were using that word, yes, there’s some debate about how they felt about God, but there’s no debate about whether they were talking about the Judeo-Christian concept of who God is. But nowadays, when we say, “One nation under God,” or “in God we trust,” our politicians, our presidents, and our society as a whole, have done a lot of expansive work to that word, God.

And that was true of what was happening in Israel in that day. Israel was God’s nation. They were the nation of Yahweh. They were rescued by Yahweh from Egyptian slavery. Yahweh, the burning bush God that became a burning mountain God, that defeated all of the gods of Egypt. And it basically carved out a space in Israel, in the land of Canaan, for his people, and defeated all the gods of Canaanites. He had established himself as the God above all gods. And Israel knew that and believed that and accepted that.

But now, as we follow the history of First and Second Kings, what we’re seeing is that God is kind of being redefined. And, in fact, we mentioned last week that, like we have a cross in here that represents Jesus, that represents that Jesus Christ loved us and died for us. And if God was willing to send his own Son to die for us, how would he not be willing to give us every good thing so we can rest as sheep following the Shepherd and really say, “I shall not want.”

And we look at this cross and we’re reminded that Jesus told us that if we really want to follow him, 90% of the time, and maybe even more—I’m just too scared to say it—we’ll be dying to ourselves, taking up our cross, and following him. Denying yourself. Denying your desires. Putting those things secondary to the word of God. That is the life of a Christian. And this cross is here to remind us. But this cross represents something to us.

And in Israel’s day, in First King’s day, in their worship places, they never really took down Yahweh or the worship of Yahweh, but they started to add other things. They put a little something for Baal over there. A little something for Asherah over there. And basically, they just started to redefine the name of God and redefine what it meant to worship God. They thought, if we’re going to get the goodness of the Yahweh God, why don’t we get a little goodness of Baal god? A little goodness of Asherah? We’ll get a lot of goodness.

Not realizing that the God of the Bible, Yahweh, is a jealous God. That doesn’t mean he’s like that weird girlfriend or boyfriend you had in junior high. What that means is, he’s jealous like a wife would be if a husband decides he wants other wives also. It is right for that woman to not stand for that. It’s a righteous jealousy. And God is jealous for you. He doesn’t want to be one of your gods. He says, “I’m the whole thing, or I’m out.”

And what happened in Israel is, they continued to say, “We want more than just Yahweh.” And at one point God said, “I’m out.” And they fell into destruction and captivity and exile and lost everything.

That’s the story of First Kings. Jeremiah was the writer of First Kings. And Jeremiah is known as the weeping prophet. And the reason he’s known as the weeping prophet is because he was called by God to prophesy to Israel during all this time. And he was telling them, “Hey, don’t add other gods. Don’t do this. Don’t do this. Don’t do this.” And every time he did they would just take him and put him in prison, or stick him in a pit or something. Or just reject him or laugh at him or make fun of him. That was basically the history of his prophecy. He was speaking the words of truth, but they were not receiving it as a society.

And then Jeremiah sits down, now that they’ve all been destroyed or taken into exile, and he’s writing the books of First and Second Kings to remind the generations to come of what took place in Israel, God’s chosen, holy people,, and how they basically prostituted themselves to other gods.

I mentioned last week that image of the frog. If you take a frog and put it in boiling water it will just jump out because it’s hot and it doesn’t like it. But if you take a frog and put it in a cold pot of water and then bring it up to boil, the frog will stay in there and die. Again, I’ve never tried it. I’ve heard it’s true. But I do need to apologize to everybody. Because last week I talked about it. The whole time I was talking about a frog. I was talking about Jeremiah. And I never once mentioned that Jeremiah was a bullfrog. And I actually had people come up to me afterwards and said, “Dude. You could have just said it one time. I couldn’t get through the rest of the message because you didn’t say it.” So Jeremiah was a bullfrog. Got it. Everybody’s cool with that. Sorry. I should have seen it. I should have made a. joke. But I missed it. My bad.

Which, by the way, brings me to one other confession. For all those who came to the Christmas Eve service, I was wearing a sweatshirt that my wife got me. It’s a picture of Jesus and on it, it says, “YOLO, J/K, BRB.” So to translate, that means, “You only live one. Just kidding. Be right back.” So that’s what it said. But I was wearing a coat over it that basically was obscuring a lot of the letters. So you saw it. And I’d point over here and you’d get that part. Then I’d be like ‘over here’ and you’d get a little bit more. But you could never get the whole thing at once. And I mentioned in one of the services, but I didn’t in the others. So you never got it. Total mistake. Messed with everybody’s brain. I hoarded about that a, too, afterwards. Those are the people I love to hear from, honestly. It’s so fun. Because it’s like, “Did you hear anything I said?” No. It’s more fun that way.

Anyway, Jeremiah was a bullfrog. Weeping prophet. The two hundred to three hundred years of decline in Israel’s history as they were forsaking Yahweh by adding other gods. We mentioned last week some of the gods, some of the idolatry that’s trying to work its way into the church. Obviously we have to talk about greed and pride. Jesus himself talked about the weeds that choke out the good seed: the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of riches. We want to talk about that. I want to add to that list a couple of forms of idolatry trying to work its way into the church right now. One would be American nationalism. One would be American progressivism. If you don’t know what I mean by that, but those are two political agendas that are borrowing Christian language, that are trying to hijack Christianity and use it for their own gains. They are camouflaging as Christianity, but they are really evil, deceptive idolatries. And one is housed on the political left and one is housed on the political right. And many of us bit into that idolatry last year and we need to repent. We need to get back to what is true and what is right and watch out for those things. But I’m offending both sides, so…either everyone’s angry or everyone’s happy. I don’t know.

One last thing before we jump in. This is a little timeline. It’s one of the most helpful things that I’ve ever received in studying the Bible, getting these timelines. This is one for First Kings and Second Kings. It’s so important. United Kingdom. Divided Kingdom. At the beginning of First Kings, Solomon is king. In Israel, Saul was the first king. Then David, then Solomon. And all twelve tribes were united in one kingdom called Israel. And then, by Solomon’s day, Israel had really become world-power status. David had conquered everybody. They had peace all around. Solomon was wise. And then Solomon’s son was Rehoboam.

But Rehoboam thought it would be good to tax everybody and kind of be this really strong dictator presence, because that was what Solomon sort of was. But Rehoboam wasn’t able to cash the checks he was writing, so to speak, so the ten tribes of the north—it wasn’t really a civil war, it was more of a civil ‘peace out.' “We’re out. We don’t want to be part of you guys anymore.” So the ten tribes of the north made Jeroboam their king. They retained the name Israel. Then the two tribes in the south, Judah and Benjamin, they became the kingdom of Judah. So as you read through, you read about the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah.

They are actually kind of united in those twelve tribes, but they are divided as a nation now. And then Israel was in the north. They were conquered by Assyria around 722 and then in the south, Babylon came and exiled those in Judah in 586 B.C. and that’s where you pick up new prophets and new books in the Bible.

So anyway, that’s what’s going on. So 1 Kings 3, Solomon is now king. In chapter 2 he was firmly established, even though there was not a peaceful transfer of power. And this is what he does in his first acts as king, according to the writer of First Kings.

1 Solomon made an alliance with Pharaoh king of Egypt and married his daughter. He brought her to the City of David until he finished building his palace and the temple of the Lord, and the wall around Jerusalem. 2 The people, however, were still sacrificing at the high places, because a temple had not yet been built for the Name of the Lord. 3 Solomon showed his love for the Lord by walking according to the instructions given him by his father David, except that he offered sacrifices and burned incense on the high places.

So there’s tons of foreshadowing going on right here. Just so you know—you don’t have to pick it all up now—but when it talks about one of the very first things that Solomon did was marry a daughter from a foreign king, that is the beginning, that was one of the next thousand of these kind of relationships that Solomon would get involved in. And it didn’t end up being a good thing, just so you know.

And then the high places. People were sacrificing at high places. There wasn’t a really clear, consolidated idea of where and how to worship Yahweh. People were making up their own thing a little bit.

And then Solomon was actually doing what at the Lord asked him to do. He was following the commandments passed down by Moses and David adhered to, except one big thing. He was worshiping in the high places.

4 The king went to Gibeon to offer sacrifices, for that was the most important high place, and Solomon offered a thousand burnt offerings on that altar. 5 At Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon during the night in a dream, and God said, “Ask for whatever you want me to give you.”
6 Solomon answered, “You have shown great kindness to your servant, my father David, because he was faithful to you and righteous and upright in heart. You have continued this great kindness to him and have given him a son to sit on his throne this very day.
7 “Now, Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father David. But I am only a little child and do not know how to carry out my duties. 8 Your servant is here among the people you have chosen, a great people, too numerous to count or number. 9 So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong. For who is able to govern this great people of yours?”

So there’s this moment where Solomon is not doing everything quite right. But the Lord is still faithful to show up to him and he says, “Solomon, ask for anything and I’ll give it to you.” And Solomon decides that want he wants to ask for is he wants a listening heart, a discerning heart, a heart that can listen and hear, and find God’s perspective, find what is true and right, find what is true and false. And as you keep reading, the Lord is so pleased with what Solomon asks for, he kind of goes off for a little bit. He’s just pumped. He’s so pleased at what Solomon is doing, that he says, “Solomon, not only and I going to give you a heart of wisdom, I’m going to give you a heart of wisdom that is better than anyone that’s ever come before you, and better than anyone that ever comes after you. And in addition to that, I’m going to give you power and wealth and all these others things, because that’s what I thought you were going to ask for.” Not really. He’s God. He knows what he was going to ask for.

He was so pleased by what Solomon asked for. It meant so much to God that he was doing this. In some ways, I think it kind of made God feel like Solomon was also a man after his heart, just like David, his father. We talked bout what that meant last week. But I think, and Dan Riccio was helping me with all this—he’s a guy in our church that’s a scholar and he helps me a lot—but he kind of unpacked this for me.

Why was it so pleasing to God for Solomon to ask this? And what he drew out of there was, basically, what Solomon was doing was refusing to set himself up as the judge of what is right and wrong. He was basically in this thing saying, “God, I don ’t know what to do. I’m this little child. I need a heart that can listen. I need a heart that can hear you. I need a heart that is submitted to you. Because you alone can see things right and true. And you alone can know what is just and right.” And by refusing to do this, he was honoring God. He was worshiping God. He was giving God that highest place. Not only in his own life, but in the nation of Israel.

And for us, if we really want to follow the Lord, we will have to continually refuse to take the throne of our own lives. We will have to ask he Lord to help us be those who discern what is right and true, not determine what is right and true, if that makes sense. In our society, we don’t want to listen and learn. We want to yell and scream and say, “This is right and true.” We want to determine. We want to throw off the bondage of the oppressive, antiquated scriptures that God has given us, so that we can determine for ourselves what is right. And that was not Solomon’s heart at all, and it pleased the Lord so much.

And the second thing that pleased the Lord so much was his refusal to just be about what pleases him, or what is popular in society. He was saying, “God, I don’t just want to know how to please myself, or how to please the people. I want to know how to do what pleases you.” And, again, our society is totally given over at this point to “whatever pleases you must be the right thing. Whatever is most popular must be the right thing.” And that’s absolute idolatry. And the refusal of those things brings honor to God. It’s worship to God. It pleases his heart.

And then the writer goes on and tells us a story to show and demonstrate how Solomon received this gift, that it wasn’t just kind of ethereal, like, “Oh, Solomon. You’re so smart now.” But he gives us a story of how this worked out in practical life. He talks about these two prostitutes.

They were sleeping one night. It sounds like they might have been int he same home. Maybe the same brothel or something. And they’re in there. They both have newborn babies, which again, brings all kinds of things to mind. Challenges, difficulties. But even worse than that is, they go to bed one night, and one of the moms rolls over and smothers her child to death, and wakes up in the middle of the night and realizes she has killed her own child. And in that moment of heartbreak and despair, she decides to do something. She takes the dead child and lays it next to this other woman and takes her living child and comes and puts it next to her without anyone knowing.

And so, in the morning, when they wake up, this woman finds out that there’s this child that she was sleeping with is dead. But as she looks at the child, she knows, as only a mother can know, “This is not my child.” And as she looks across, she sees her child with this other woman. The woman is saying, “No, no no. This is my child. You’re just saying that because you’re upset because you killed your baby.”

And whatever happens, this very street-level, small town kind of situation spreads out into other people who hear about it. No one can tell what’s going on. Ultimately, these two prostitutes have this situation that’s so hard to know what to do, and so heart-wrenching, it spreads across all Israel to finally make it into King Solomon’s courts. It basically makes it to the Supreme Court. No one knows what to do about this heart-wrenching, difficult situation.

And this is what Solomon begins as a king to deal with and decide upon. And so, in this moment the whole court is gathered together and Solomon is presented with the case. He’s got to decide what to do. And some of you know the story, so you’re cheaters. Stop cheating for just a second. And just catch how intense this moment must have been.

In some ways it seems like a moment that maybe we’re dealing with right now. When we have people with genuine gender dysphoria or challenging sexual desires that ago against so much of biology and society. And they don’t know what to do. And it’s very difficult. It’s been difficult since the desires or the confusion first showed up. And now we’re living in a society that is saying all kinds of different messages about what is right and true. And in a society that basically is saying the word of God is old and oppressive and should be done away with, or just interpreted to serve whatever you think is right.

It’s a tough situation. It’s challenging because it’s real and painful, and it’s hard. Do we stick with what the word of God says very clearly from beginning to end? Do we take what God wrote into the fabric of humanity about gender and marriage and family? Or do we allow something within us to go, “No. Maybe that’s not true.” Or, “Maybe that’s not true for me.” It’s very, very difficult.

Or think about what’s going on in the black community, as they experience all this confusion and hardship, some of what Michael described. That’s just one story among many. They look around and they’re not quite sure where they fit in society. They look around and they see other people experiencing things that they don’t know if they’ll ever be able to experience. They see people with their own color skin going through struggles. And we have to figure out what we can do to help the situation. And some people are saying we should go this way, some people we should go this way. All kinds of different offerings are being offered, some of them in line with biblical values, some of them way off and even against biblical values.

We have to decide, “What do we do?” And the first thing I want you to realize is King Solomon so he’s got to decide this thing. But he could also just write this off, ignore it, pretend it didn’t happen. He’s still king. But for you and I, we are called to be a kingdom of priests. Kings and priests of God. We are supposed to be salt and light in this world. We need to go into situations like this and bring the truth and love of God so that justice can actually happen. We don’t sit around and wait for society to figure it out. They never will. We have the Spirit of God. We’ve been cleansed with the blood of Jesus. We have the word of God. And we need to be going and finding situations and not shrinking away from them, but begging God for the wisdom to actually do something that helps. It’s our call. That’s what Jesus did.

So Solomon, in this situation of impossible, no way to know. Solomon didn’t know what was right. He didn’t know who was lying and who was telling the truth. But he had asked the Lord for a discerning heart. In this moment, something came into his mind. Not what was true or what was right, but a way to find out what was true or right. So he calls to someone and says, “Bring me a sword.” So they bring him a sword. At that time there were a lot more swords lying around, I guess. If I just said, “Bring me a sword,” I don’t know how long it would take for me to actually get a sword. But it was quick. He got a sword.

Then he walks down to this little baby and he says, “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to cut the baby in half and I’m going to give half to that mom, half to that mom.” And you can almost feel the collective sigh in the room, “Great. Our new king is absolutely insane. This is not going to be good. How could he do that?”

If the media was there, think of all the story lines that would go out. And as he lifts that sword to go chop that baby, one of the moms cries out and says, “Please stop! Just give her the baby. Please do not hurt the baby!”

Solomon puts the sword down and says, “I’m going to make my ruling now. Take this baby and give it to the woman that was willing to give up that son’s life just to protect him. Because she’s the true mom.” And everyone in the room didn’t have to debate what was true and right. They didn’t have to wonder, “Oh, was this really right?” Everyone in that moment knew exactly what was true and what was right. And they all rejoiced.

Solomon’s renown obviously spread as a great king of wisdom. But this is, and I mean I don’t know how else to say it, this is what we as the people of God are called to do. To be salt and light. To execute justice in our world. To right the wrongs in society. Just like Solomon was able to do in this moment. Just like Jesus, the one we’re following, did time and time again when they came and put him in an impossible situation. “Jesus, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The law says we should stone her. What do you say?”

And Jesus was able to create a moment, come up with another option that caused everyone to know that God is in this place, and go home with their pride and their judgment that was false, and this woman to walk free and to know the love of God.

We are the Church. We are the Bride of Christ. We are his sons and daughters. This is our call, to walk in this way. So how do we do it? How do we do it? Well, first I think we’ve got to pray and ask the Lord for a listening heart, a discerning heart. Absolutely. And then, after we’ve done that, we’ve go to go to this place where, when we are faced with this situation, we’ve got to listen. A discerning heart is a listening heart.

So when someone comes to you with something they are carrying, you don’t immediately say this or that, you listen to what’s going on. You hear them out. And you listen for what the Lord is saying. And in this moment, somehow the Lord put in Solomon’s mind, Get a sword. Pretend to chop the baby. Then you’ll find out what’s true.

For me and my wife, one time it was, Go to Belize and see what I have for you there. It was like, “Whoa. We’ve got a one-year-old daughter. We can’t just be going to Belize. It doesn’t make any sense. We’ve got all kinds of people telling us that.”

Then the second time the Lord told us to go, I had a kid in a wheelchair. You can’t just go places with kids in wheelchairs. It didn’t make any sense. But we had this idea that we were supposed to go.

Solomon had this idea. But he also had the courage to walk in it. The courage to try it out. And so he got the sword and he went for it. What came was a revelation that made it clear for everybody that it was right.

And by God’s grace, we’ve come back from Belize. Everyone that knows us, that knows our story, they’re like, “Yeah, I think that was right.” Now you say that. Telling us, “Don’t do it.” Now you’re saying, “Oh, yeah. That was the Lord. That was great.” That’s the way it goes sometimes.

But one last thing. We’ve got to pray for a discerning heart, definitely. We’ve got to make sure we listen when he Lord is speaking to us in each and every situation. And we’ve got to have the courage to walk those things out. So that not only us, but everybody else can see what the Lord’s doing.

But one last thing that we cannot forget is that Solomon asked for a sword. He asked for a sword and, in the scriptures, it’s very clear to us in Hebrews chapter 4:

12 For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

What we have in this book right here, whether you like it or not, whether it adheres to your desires or not, whether it’s popular in society or not, this is the sword that we have to cut through the crap. This is the sword that we have. And this is not this sword’s first rodeo. Societies come and go but the word of God has stood forever, and will withstand whatever our society decides it wants to do. This is living and powerful. We’re reading a book that is thousands of years old and it’s speaking right to the core of our society today. It’s alive. And it is powerful. And it is trustworthy. You can stand on this. And it is becoming more and more unpopular, more and more resisted, and more and more offensive—not because anything’s wrong with this. But Solomon used a sword.

And Jesus is doing the same thing with us. He’s telling us we need to use the sword. When you look at Jesus’ life. When the devil came and tempted him. He gave him three temptations. When we read those temptations, it’s almost fairytale. But those were falling right at the core identity that was in Jesus. He was hungry. He was God. And the temptations actually kind of went right at the core of those issues. And yet, Jesus Christ answered every single one of those temptations with a scripture that actually came straight from the Old Testament. He knew how important in the day of opposition, in the day of temptation, to use the word of God and know the word of God.

For us, as people, if we want to get it right in 2021, if we don’t want to be blown to and fro by every wind of doctrine, we need to know the word of God. We need to stand on the word of God.

There’s one organization I’m investigating right now, especially in the idea of justice. They’re called the AND Campaign. There are all these social justice organizations that are basically resisting or anti-biblical values. Why can’t it be social justice and biblical values? Why can’t we understand that our biblical values actually command and demand us to do social justice. But also, if we try to do social justice without biblical values, we’re just causing more harm than good. There are lots of organizations like that right now.

Solomon used the sword. Solomon prayed for a discerning heart. He listened to see what the Lord might say. He walked courageously in that. And he never forgot to use the sword.

Will you guys pray with me? I thought it would be good for us to just go to our knees right now if you’re able. Online or in person, just spend a moment coming before the throne of God, our Father Almighty, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, Who has never spoken a word that wasn’t true. Who’s never thought a thought that wasn’t beautiful. Who’s never done a single thing that wasn’t for our good.

Father in heaven, you are holy. You see everything clearly. You cannot be moved. You can’t be manipulated. You cannot be deceived. And you are so hungry for justice. So we, Lord, we ask that you would give us a discerning heart. I pray for each person right now that is touched by one of these difficult situations we’ve mentioned, someone who is feeling all of the burden of the divide of race in our country, whether it’s their own personal feelings or someone they love, I pray you’d give them a discerning heart, Lord. That they’d be able to do something beautiful in their community, just like Solomon did on this day.
I pray for those with gender dysphoria, or are dealing with sexual attractions that don’t fit in line with your scriptures. I pray you’d meet them right where they are, that they’d know that you’re for them, you love them, and you are a great rewarder of those who honor you, no matter what the cost is.
We need your wisdom in our day. Jesus, we thank you for your words and your life example.

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