9/29/19 - Judges 2:6-3:6 - "Disease of Apathy"

[0:00] Please join me in prayer. Father, we are grateful to be here gathered. We're grateful for another day, for another breath in our lungs.

[0:10] Father, for waking us up this morning. Thank you for life. And Father, thank you for this group of people that you call your family. And Father, as we study this text, let us identify that this is no ordinary text.

[0:26] But Lord, that this is supernatural. These are words that impact it. It raises the dead to life, the dead in sin to life. It brings about a knowledge of you that is unfathomable in our human brains.

[0:41] Father, bring about the meaning of your word this morning as we go through a difficult text in Judges. And Father, show us what this means to us today.

[0:52] We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. So last week we spoke in great length about the military failures of the nation of Israel.

[1:05] I had some visual aids to help with that, to show the great progressions and regressions. And the icing on the cake last week was literally in chapter 2 where the angel of the Lord came, known as a theophany, where it's a visible manifestation of God that came and evaluated all that God, all that Israel had done.

[1:26] Throughout their journeys of, they were supposed to conquer the Canaanites, drive them out, to destroy them. And today, the author cycles back around in this passage.

[1:41] We're still in, like, the introductory section of the book of Judges. And the author circles back around to the death of Joshua again. The book in the chapter 1, verse 1 started with the death of Joshua, and we see it occur here again.

[1:55] And this is significant because the author decided to circle back around and kind of, like, magnify the situation a little bit. So we saw the broad strokes of the progressions and all the regressions.

[2:07] But now he's kind of, like, zooming in the telescope or the microscope and saying, like, what exactly is going on? Getting a better vivid depiction of the state of Israel after the death of Joshua.

[2:20] So over the past week, we've had small groups going. We met here. It was a really good time, I must say, personally.

[2:30] Wednesday night was absolutely wonderful. And many questions have been raised in our small groups about, you know, the love of God expressed through his discipline.

[2:43] Questions like, does the punishment really fit the crime here? Would a loving God discipline so harshly? Kind of, like, empathizing with the Israelites. Like, well, we all screw up.

[2:54] Maybe the Israelites didn't really know what they were doing here in this passage. The angel of the Lord judged them very harshly. Well, I'm going to ask you to bring all those questions into our message today.

[3:07] And let's dive into this message and examine the second portion of the introductory section of this book called Judges. And more importantly, let's discover more vividly of who God is, but better yet, who we are.

[3:18] Let's read about this new generation. And I'm going to do this. I'm going to go through this text kind of through the lens and the eyes and the understanding of a doctor. What a doctor does of diagnosing and treating.

[3:32] So we're going to go through the eyes of a doctor. The state of Israel is on the operating table. We're trying to figure out what's going on. Let us look at this text through that eyes as we diagnose Israel.

[3:43] We go through scene 1 in verse 6. Read with me. Judges chapter 2, verse 6. We see early signs of infection.

[3:58] Verse 6. It says, When Joshua dismissed the people, the people of Israel went each to his inheritance to take possession of the land. And the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel.

[4:16] And Joshua, the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110 years. And they buried him within the boundaries of his inheritance in Timnath-Herez, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the mountain of Gaash.

[4:33] So church, we see another transitional period occur for the Israelites, beginning with the death of Joshua, just like last week. However, remember, we're magnifying that lens.

[4:43] We see transitional period, just as Ecclesiastes 1, verse says, A generation goes and a generation comes as a part of life, you know, life and death. You're all familiar with transitional seasons and things like that, being in the hospital with very young children in the NICU.

[5:01] You know, I have learned more about the medical profession in the shift changes. Usually at 7 o'clock on the hour, you know, the nurse comes and the nurse goes.

[5:12] Or like the early morning rounds, where I just learned all this useless information, that it's really intriguing, but it goes right out the other ear. You know, there's transition seasons and things that transition in life, and one of them being very prevalent, being in the hospital last month, the majority of the month.

[5:30] But very similar to last week, this passage begins nearly identical. The magnification zoomed in, however, in the state of Israel. It's clear that Joshua was one of the greatest leaders in the Old Testament.

[5:44] It shouldn't be new to us. We spoke about that a little bit more in length last week. He was very responsive to the words of God. And that accompanied by his great faith that acted upon those same words of God.

[5:58] Living out promises of God found in the book of Joshua. Joshua, the promises of provision and success. God used this one man so mightily to lead two million people by his authority.

[6:10] Through the Jordan River, on dry ground. Marched two million people around Jericho. Like, how do you get people to do that? Commanded the sun and moon to stand still.

[6:21] It was like victory after victory. Joshua obeyed the Lord. Surely, after all these victories, after all these testimonies and these accounts of God's victory.

[6:31] How do you even make up a story like that? Marching around this city and then all of a sudden the walls go crumbling down. Surely this would carry over generation to generation, right?

[6:45] But as the scene continues in scene one, let's pinpoint the disease in verse 10. Read with me. It says, And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers.

[6:58] And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel. So after all the mighty provisions of the Lord to the nation of Israel, how could people all of a sudden not know about all the work that the Lord had done for them?

[7:19] Why all of a sudden? This reminded me of growing up. We'd all be kind of like eating, eating food on like TV tray tables, like in the living room.

[7:30] Just be packed house. And there'd be grandpa, you know, sitting on the chair. And grandpa had a number of stories. However, his stories were very limited. And they got old after a while.

[7:42] And so, you know, often we would say to ourselves like, oh, here goes grandpa again. Back in my day. You know, you kids, you know how the story goes.

[7:54] I don't know if you can relate. Maybe you had like an Uncle Rico, like a former like football star from Napoleon Dynamite. I don't know. But those guys who live in this certain glory day.

[8:10] And they bring those stories to you. It reminds me of a hymn back in 1866 by Catherine Hankey, Tell Me the Old, Old Story.

[8:21] The hymn was just running through my head all week. The problem, church, is that what happened to Israel didn't happen all that suddenly.

[8:33] It was all but suddenly. It was one occurrence after another, church, of, yeah, yeah. Here goes grandpa again about his tales in the wilderness. The mighty tales.

[8:45] You know, just like people like taunted Uncle Rico out there throwing the football. There he is. You know, wondering, can we put him in a home yet? The truth about the situation is that Israel lived quite the glory days through Joshua.

[9:01] But upon carrying his lifeless body to the grave, everything would be completely lost. What arose was a generation who was informed of God's faithfulness, but they were not impacted by God's faithfulness of the past.

[9:20] They were dulled to the wonder and the awe of the same great truth. They lost interest. They were just merely okay. What if the truth of God's faithfulness was more than to merely inform us, but to impact us, to move us?

[9:37] What disease did this young generation experience after the death of Joshua? This is what the church calls apathy. The rich recollection of the word of the Lord became a dry and distant truth to a generation who became bored.

[9:58] And their boredom being rooted in self-centeredness, as you can imagine. Could this be what occurred in the hearts of a lost generation? I think so. Where are you at today, church? I'm sure not many of you jumped for joy when you found out, Brent's taking us through the book of Judges.

[10:15] Woo! I mean, maybe some of you, but it's not a common book to go through. Where are you at today, church? I know for certain, after a long work week, the last thing that sometimes gets on our mind is we've lost the awe and the wonder of gathering as God's people on Sunday morning.

[10:37] It's hard to even get out of bed. It was hard to get out of bed today. We were up fairly late with our boys last night. I know it. I go through the same struggles as you.

[10:51] However, I got news for you. The same temptations the nation of Israel struggled with were the coals stoked by Satan himself. The father of lies has been successfully been drawing God's people away from that deep devotion with him.

[11:08] The victory of the evil one is found in binding God's church in apathy. Spiritual apathy, apathy specifically. This is a great disease that manifests in our lives, which reduces the rich life offered in Christ and trades it for complacency and the lack of interest and awe.

[11:27] Just like, hmm, yeah. Going to church again. Let's go into scene two as we see the symptoms of this disease begin to worsen.

[11:38] In verse 11, it continues. And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals.

[11:49] And they abandoned the Lord and the God of their fathers who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods from among the gods of the peoples who were around them and bowed down to them.

[12:01] And they provoked the anger of the Lord. They abandoned the Lord and served the Baals and the Ashtoreth. If there is one thing we can observe clearly in this passage of Scripture, is that this apathetic generation church knew exactly, precisely what they were doing.

[12:21] Look at the words used in this passage between just verse 11, 12, and 13. We see words like, they abandoned in verse 12, and it's used in verse 13.

[12:32] They went after, in verse 12, and they provoked. You don't provoke somebody on accident. It is difficult to understand fully what the evil that Israel did in the sight of the Lord.

[12:49] We're only kind of left with broad strokes describing their devotion to the Baals and the Ashtoreth being greater than their devotion to God. However, what we do know is that rather than serving the one true God, they made a commandment error, and they took on Canaanite religious practices, which consisted in many gods.

[13:11] And we see two mentioned here, Baal and Ashtoreth. Baal is a god in charge of a special place, the storm and rain god whose blessing was needed for fertility of the land, and Ashtoreth, a female goddess of sensual love, fertility, and war.

[13:27] However, she accounted for violence and sexual depravity, also known as the patron of sex and war. And to understand from, like, the original audience's perspective, whoever got this book first, this bound text, Canaanite worship was extremely imitative.

[13:48] That they would worship their god by literally behaving like their god. Can you imagine the details that this text doesn't include in it, when it mentions serving the Baals and serving, or bowing down to Ashtoreth?

[14:03] Think, the Canaanites engaged in temporal prostitution, fertility rites, drunken sexual orgies, animal worship, homosexuality, and even human sacrifices.

[14:14] Everything the Canaanites desired was in complete contradiction to the Bible, morally, ethically, and ritually. Literally, if they were given just one second to repent of their sin, they would not repent, and God knew that.

[14:30] So if you see this, why would God destroy these people? Because they were purely evil. But we see in verse 14 that the Lord responds.

[14:42] Remember today, we're kind of magnifying more details into the progressions and regressions that we spoke of last week. We begin to understand the situation a little bit better. The symptoms of this serious condition of apathy, of losing interest and losing that awe and wonder.

[14:59] It wasn't that they forgot the Lord. It's that they didn't care to remember Him. And so God responds in verse 14. It says, So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and He gave them over to plunderers who plundered them.

[15:16] And He sold them into the hand of their surrounding enemies so they could no longer withstand their enemies. Whenever they marched out, the hand of the Lord was against them for harm, as the Lord had warned and as the Lord had sworn to them.

[15:31] And they were in terrible distress. Due to Israel's sin, there was a new enemy, and it wasn't the Canaanites anymore. Their new enemy became God Himself.

[15:46] The Lord's provision was completely removed, and since His hand was not with them, we can only understand that His hand was against them. This is not a cheerful, happy depiction of God.

[15:58] At all. Israel is experiencing the discipline of the Lord because the Lord knew what was best for them, and it was out of His deep love for His children that He was merciful enough to give them time to learn.

[16:14] His love is steadfast. How great a regression the Israelites experienced instead of allowing the words of God to inform the culture, like sin is sin.

[16:28] The Israelites allowed the culture to inform the Word of God. It's almost like they could probably meet the... The Canaanites may have been like the nicest people face to face.

[16:39] You know, maybe God's wrong about this. And those thoughts that came into Eve's head and her ear whispered by the snake, did God really say that back in Genesis? Doesn't that sound familiar?

[16:52] How quickly we too, church, can abandon the Word of God and allow the culture to adapt our understanding and original intention of Scripture. The world is in kind of like another cycle of redefining itself.

[17:07] Nothing is new on the news or in the headlines today. You can open the New York Post and things like that. The only difference is that we have technology at our fingertips. Looking back, even just going back to 50 years ago, everything was happening back then.

[17:23] The slogan back in the cultural revolution of the 1960s was, quote, do your own thing. There was this big movement and wave of equality and gender equality.

[17:35] And there's this moral revolution today, dismissing history and being even ignorant of history, of what's happened in the past. It's nothing new. It's just another cycle of it.

[17:47] Finding new ways of expressing themselves, which has no moral center, no rhyme or reason, based solely on what is right in their own eyes. And solely do, thanks to social media today, that these lies can be spread like wildfire.

[18:04] Also, we see Israel needed discipline, church. And so do we at times. Remember Hebrews. The motivation of this discipline is listed in Hebrews.

[18:17] It says in Hebrews 12, 5 through 6, Seeing the Lord's discipline as mercy in our New Testament church and in our current culture today is where we actually understand true maturity as Christians.

[18:47] that when the Lord does have his hand against us, he's trying to help us to understand something. That because we are so prone to wander, just as that hymn that we just sang, we're so prone to wander.

[19:00] We could feel it from time and time again. And the Lord used even things like church discipline, where we all hold each other accountable, to be on track together as one unit, one body, connected and united.

[19:17] By Christ. So the symptoms of Israel are there. It's about time we get to some treatment for this disease. We get into scene three of God's provision and his treatment plan.

[19:32] Look at me with verse 16. It says, Then the Lord raised up judges who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them. Yet they did not listen to their judges.

[19:43] For they whored after other gods and bowed down to them. They soon turned aside from the way in which their fathers had walked, who had obeyed the commandments of the Lord.

[19:54] And they did not do so. Verse 18 continues. Whenever the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge. And he saved them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge.

[20:07] For the Lord was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who afflicted and oppressed them. But whenever the judge died, they turned back and were more corrupt than their fathers, going after other gods, serving them and bowing down to them.

[20:23] They did not drop any of their practices or their stubborn ways. Clearly, church, Israel needed a leader. Joshua died.

[20:35] We are becoming complacent and apathetic. Isn't it amazing how God even responded to such disobedient people?

[20:47] You're dealing with people who want to destroy people around December when they cut you in line at Macy's or Walmart. You just want the wrath of God to be poured out.

[21:02] We'll not have that. Isn't it amazing how God even responded to such disobedient people of Israel? Surely God would have destroyed such people, but he didn't.

[21:16] Look in this passage. God heard them. He was moved to pity. And he provided for them. God gave them quite a few second chances.

[21:29] So what was the Lord's provision? It was a judge to lead them. They needed a judge. And so we see in this passage, specifically verse 16 to verse 19, really highlights that cycle that we spoke about in the overview of Judges.

[21:47] We see here, verse 16 through 19, they highlight that sinful cycle found in Judges, that fast downward spiral. And isn't it interesting in verse 19, but whenever the judge died, you would think, okay, you know, the next generation is good.

[22:05] We're at least good for this generation. But no, they ended up being more corrupt than their fathers. Like, there's a human problem here. There's a sin problem here.

[22:17] And this is going to continue through the book of Judges 2. And so the Lord speaks in verse 20. Look at me in the scene 3 as we're coming to the end.

[22:28] Verse 20 says, So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he said, this section is going to be very similar to the beginning of chapter 2, as you'll recognize. Because this people have transgressed my covenant that I commanded their fathers and have not obeyed my voice, I will no longer drive out before them any of the nations that Joshua left when he died in order to test Israel by them, whether they will take care to walk in the way of the Lord that their fathers did or not.

[22:59] So the Lord left those nations not driving them out quickly, and he did not give them into the hand of Joshua. This section of passage reinforces the very same words that the angel of the Lord spoke at the beginning of the chapter.

[23:15] The Israelites transgressed God's covenants. We as human beings get angry over the silliest things, literally the silliest things, that of being holiday lines in December as you're shopping, getting your Christmas shopping done, but even just, even spousal arguments, sometimes you just bicker at each other.

[23:40] You live together. We're humans, we're flawed. Guess what? We're going to bicker and we're going to argue. Even church members, sometimes we just kind of disagree at times and it creates some sort of tension.

[23:51] Sometimes we get so lost in our anger and sometimes our frustration with one another that we forget totally what we're arguing about. And so we find stuff to argue about. I don't know if you can relate, but like, ah, your shoes are in the hallway.

[24:07] You know, just like searching, grasping at straws, trying to find something because you're just angry. Can you relate to that? Well, I think the next season of the church will be some marital counseling, possibly.

[24:26] But we want to be careful because what we see here, the Lord's anger being kindled, we want to be cautious of something called anthropomorphism and that's applying our flawed and human conditions and our human emotions to a mighty, a holy and just supreme God and trying to understand what's going on here through the lens of what we experience.

[24:54] We want to be careful because we see the anger of the Lord was kindled and this is no light moment for the nation of Israel. We read here of an informed anger.

[25:07] anger. This anger is perfect anger. We can't experience perfect anger in our sinfulness as human beings. This is something unfathomable and so to look at that as being something as silly as fighting over the shoes in the hallway, we're missing it here.

[25:27] This is a reverent anger, a covenant of God, a covenant of which God kept for this nation of Israel throughout this time and he warned them, he promised them mankind has chosen to break but through God's informed anger we also find an informed love because guess what he does?

[25:49] He doesn't destroy them. He bears with them and he gives them judges. He helps this nation. Isn't this what we believe in the cross of Calvary where Jesus hung and bled and suffered for us?

[26:03] The anger, the perfect anger and the perfect wrath of God of which should have been poured upon us in our sinfulness. God went on the cross himself and poured it upon himself.

[26:19] He took on his own wrath, the perfect atoning sacrifice to free the sinner from their sins and eternity in hell. As we come to a close in chapter 3, it opens us with a new setting in the text and an explanation of how the Lord used these judges to temporarily deliver them and to test them.

[26:41] The treatment plan continues. Look at me in verse 3, chapter 3, verse 1. It says, Now these are the nations that the Lord left to test Israel by them, that is, all in Israel who had not experienced the wars in Canaan.

[26:58] It was only in the order that the generations of the people of Israel might know war to teach war unto those who had not known it before. Verse 3 says, These are the nations, the five lords of the Philistines and all the Canaanites and the Sidonians and the Hivites who live in Mount Lebanon from Mount Bel-Herman as far as Lebo-Hemoth.

[27:21] They were for the testing of Israel, to know whether Israel would obey the commands of the Lord which he commanded their fathers by the hand of Moses. So the people of Israel lived among the Canaanites, the Hittites and the Amorites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites and their daughters took to themselves for wives and their own daughters.

[27:44] They gave to their sons and they served their gods. The testing is an opportunity for a generation who had not seen the work of the Lord on their behalf being exercised.

[27:58] And those people who didn't experience that, they would have an opportunity to see it. This is an opportunity for them to see the glory of God. And we see how they do over the next coming weeks.

[28:12] We're going to be going through this first half of Judges for the next couple weeks until about Thanksgiving. And we're also going to see what the Lord reveals to this lost and corrupt generation.

[28:25] The story will end here today though, church. The testing begins with God, the cycle begins for Israel, but where does this leave us today? Well, I got an idea.

[28:35] We can all become monks and nuns, move to the hills, just tend to ourselves, just live kindly, not try to intermix with sin.

[28:46] You know, these news headlines. We just got to get away from the evil. Because guess what? We live among this evil every day. A remembrance, church, is essential for growth in the faith.

[29:02] If we're honest, we have more similarities to the nation of Israel than we do differences. We often give Israel so much disgust, like even reading through, I don't know, reading through Deuteronomy, seeing like the seas part, and you would imagine like, I don't know what would go through my mind if I was walking through a sea.

[29:24] Surely I wouldn't get to the other side and be complaining to my leader of where we're going to get food from. I'll be like, man, this is going to be a feast. I just saw the craziest thing. This is good.

[29:34] We're good. Thank you, Moses. Lead us. But no, these people complained about where they're going to get their next meal. They want to go back into slavery.

[29:46] They thought Moses was going to lead them to death in the wilderness. But we have more similarities to Israel than differences, church. Prior to coming to Christ, we were lost in complete rebellion against God.

[29:59] In our grief of that rebellion, we were moved to repentance through the power of the Holy Spirit, which only pointed us to Christ who took the wrath that we deserve. And it's true.

[30:11] Today, we may not be tempted to worship Baal or Ashtaroth, but we are faced with spiritual equivalence through expressing our allegiance to creation. But as we go back to the gospel, as we diagnose the disease for Israel, of which laid beneath the surface of their going after their gods and bowing down to their gods, they had this contagion of apathy that spread like wildfire among these people.

[30:38] The fruit produced through this spiritual apathy will always manifest in discontentedness. Discontentedness in your marriage, finding a lack of intimacy all of a sudden, lack of interest, lack of kind of like that dating phase that used to just invigorate you back when you first got to know each other.

[31:02] Discontentedness in your job, you know, the pay isn't worth it, these people are kind of nuts. Is this, why am I even doing this? And you forget starting that job in the awe and the wonder of God providing you with income.

[31:18] Discontentedness in your home, you know, the size, maybe the paint, maybe the neighbors, but even discontentedness with church, the preaching, the music, maybe the lights, I don't know.

[31:32] all of these signs are like a car's engine, check engine light going off, like just beeping, just flashing, saying, danger, danger, danger.

[31:48] Church, if remembrance is vital to spiritual maturity, how great is it to uphold our devotion to his words? No, it's not just my job right here weekly on Sundays, but it's the six days in between Sundays.

[32:02] The only antidote to spiritual apathy is the investment of time in the word and not just being informed, not just taking on information, but being impacted. And God wants to use you for others too, for others to remember, to spark that distant memory in somebody just fading from their relationship from God to start and ignite that distant memory, that one that moment when they first knew Jesus and when he was working in their life, those who are stuck in apathy and complacency.

[32:37] Obviously for Israel, a leader was not enough for them to bring lasting effects. We see the judge would pass away and then they'd come back, swing back around, being even more corrupt than their fathers.

[32:52] In the longing of their sinfulness, it cries out self-interest rather than covenant devotion. So I want to ask you, church, a question here. I just want you to take a moment to evaluate.

[33:04] Is God's word enough for you? Think about that. Like, seriously. I need you to, like, really think about that with the most intention of severity as we struggle with this just like Israel, as the Israelites.

[33:20] We have this bound book that has many volumes and Israel didn't have that. And we're still prone to wander the same way that they wandered.

[33:31] Is God's word enough for you? Is the family of God enough for you? Or do you find yourself drifting in a cyclical pattern like of kind of like being in and out of church or left or right like, you know, with your beliefs up or down?

[33:48] Like, man, I'm on a high. No, I'm on a low. And then Monday comes, I'm on a high. Then Tuesday, I'm on a low. Just like a roller coaster. The word of God just straightens and it balances all things that happen in life.

[34:00] Even the blessings that we rejoice in when we're on the mountaintop and even the times when we're suffering and we feel distant from God. What made the Canaanites, the gods of the Canaanites so seductive to the Israelites?

[34:17] It was the promises that they made but they failed to deliver. It's quite an exhausting pursuit if you could imagine. What in our lives might on the front end look like it's promising all these great things.

[34:33] Maybe book covers are the biggest thing. You walk into Mars and no one's like, live your best life now and have, you know, your greatest this and that. And if you're constantly going through a cycle, you get to the end of the book and you're just like, hmm, what else is there?

[34:47] There's got to be something new. You're always going to be switching through, finding the new, the bigger and the better and drifting. There's no foundation in that life. And this is what the Israelites were stuck in.

[35:00] They were drifters. Isn't this what also crept into the New Testament church? If we flip forward to Colossians.

[35:12] You know, Gnosticism, it appeared an enticing like the experience that these guys like, oh, you've heard of Jesus, you've been saved and everything, but I got some things up my sleeve.

[35:24] I know how to take you to the next level. You know, do this and that and that. They wrap their arms around you, give you a new, higher level of self. Remember, in Colossians, we went through a study in Colossians not too long ago.

[35:40] Colossians 2, 18, it says, let no one disqualify you insisting on asceticism and worship of angels going on in detail about visions puffed up without reason by a sensuous mind and not holding fast to the head from whom the whole body nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments grows from a growth that comes from God.

[36:03] Church, you don't need a new Bible. There's nothing wrong with it. You don't need another devotional. We try to do this stuff in our sinfulness. You don't need another Bible. You don't need another devotional.

[36:14] You don't need another church. You need Christ. Satan works through pulling on heartstrings of apathy and no matter what, quote, awe and wonder is promised, all is futile unless your heart is after Christ and not self-interest.

[36:32] And guess what? False teachers capitalize on apathetic people. People who, aren't getting that same sort of same sort of jollies from just preaching faithfully week after week.

[36:46] They kind of add some other things in there and say, here, here, check this out. False teachers capitalize on apathetic people. We are a church devoted to remembering and making Christ central in all we do.

[37:00] Remember Romans 12 too. Do not conform to the patterns of this world. You'll be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Church, Joshua was taken to the grave with his predecessors, with his successors, all lifeless in the grave.

[37:19] But our leader, church, standing in the New Testament, church, looking backwards, is not in the grave. Hello? If that truth is not invigorating and awe-inspiring and fills you with wonder and adoration for God, I don't know what will.

[37:37] And trust me, you can seek maybe some other things that accommodate this book and the things and the truth and the reality that Jesus Christ rose from the grave. I don't know what else can move you.

[37:49] Is the word of God enough for you? Are you satisfied in him alone? And trust me, church, if I were after self-interest, I may not be here standing here as your pastor today.

[38:04] It's a hard reality. Pastoral ministry is extremely daunting. It's so hard. But Christ must be central.

[38:16] So renew your faithful devotion to him today, everyone gathered here today. When you're stuck, let us remember the faithful devotion to God as we are faithful in return.

[38:28] When we suffer, when we rejoice, let us remember his faithful devotion to us as we are faithful to him in return. When we take communion, when the Bible becomes dry when we are let down, let us remember his faithful devotion to us as we are faithful to him in return.

[38:51] Lord, help us be impacted by your word and not just informed. That was my prayer. And just as Grandpa told his stories over and over and over again, let the words of the Lord be upon our minds, filling our hearts and motivating us to serve the Lord more faithfully and let the words of that 1866 hymn, Tell Me the Old, Old Story be upon our lips as it sings.

[39:17] Tell me the same old story when you have caused the fear that this world's empty glory is costing me too dear. Yes, and when that world's glory is dawning on my soul, tell me the old, old story Christ Jesus makes thee whole.

[39:36] Let's pray. To be continued... To be continued... Here we come to同 develop technology as a spiritual