Talk 9 - There's nothing original about sin
Gilbert Lennox · Wisdom and Foolishness
16 June 2024
https://media.glenabbey.church/talks/talk-9-theres-nothing-original-about-sin

[0:00] Well, we come back to the chaotic story of life in ancient Israel in the divided kingdom.
[0:11] And we're going to read in a moment from chapter 14, verses 1 to 6 to begin with.
[0:19] Where we left the story was that Jeroboam, the king of the ten tribes, was given a very dramatic warning by God about his behavior.
[0:34] But instead of listening, we see in verse 33 of chapter 13, even after this, Jeroboam did not change his evil ways.
[0:45] In fact, he doubled down on his determination to cut off the people from going to the temple, from listening to God, from having contact with God's word, and rather building up his alternatives to that, to going to the house of God that he had created.
[1:09] And to do that, he ordained more and more priests wherever he could find them to serve his progressive agenda.
[1:16] A clever tactic that is used even to this day.
[1:21] If you can get at the people in the training colleges and get them into the priesthood, they still will talk the religious talk, but underneath they deny God's authority, the authority of his word and his leadership through his word.
[1:38] And that, according to the historian comments on this, that was the sin of the house of Jeroboam, building these alternative structures, places of worship, to prevent people going and listening and contacting God the way God had asked them to.
[1:59] So now we read in chapter 14, another intriguing little story.
[2:04] At that time, Abijah, son of Jeroboam, became ill.
[2:09] And Jeroboam said to his wife, go disguise yourself so that you won't be recognized as the wife of Jeroboam.
[2:16] Then go to Shiloh.
[2:18] Ahijah, the prophet, is there, the one who told me I would be king over this people.
[2:23] Take 10 loaves of bread with you, some cakes, a jar of honey, and go to him and he will tell you what will happen to the boy.
[2:31] So Jeroboam's wife did what he said and went to Ahijah's house in Shiloh.
[2:37] Now Ahijah could not see.
[2:40] His sight was gone because of his age.
[2:44] But the Lord had told Ahijah, Jeroboam's wife is coming to ask you about her son for he is ill and you are to give her such and such an answer.
[2:51] When she arrives, she will pretend to be someone else.
[2:56] So when Ahijah heard the sound of her footsteps at the door, he said, Come in, wife of Jeroboam.
[3:02] Why this pretense?
[3:05] I have been sent to you with bad news.
[3:10] That's a fascinating little detail from Jeroboam's life, where his son falls ill, and he immediately senses that need to hear from the God whose voice he had shut off.
[3:29] And it's interesting just how often a personal crisis will expose our need and the futility and lostness of having abandoned God and his word.
[3:46] But he didn't want to admit it in public.
[3:51] So he asked his wife to go to Shiloh instead of him.
[3:54] to see the prophet Ahijah, to inquire from God what would happen to his son.
[4:00] And in addition, he didn't want Ahijah to know that she was his wife, just wanted him to think it was just an Israelite woman with a sick son.
[4:11] Because if God was going to say anything, Jeroboam wanted to limit it to the issue of his own personal crisis in the family, not the issue of his personal sin.
[4:28] Like so many, he wanted God to solve a problem.
[4:32] He didn't want to face what God had to say about his moral and spiritual evil.
[4:40] And so he sent his wife in disguise.
[4:46] It's just interesting to me.
[4:47] We talked about it last week.
[4:49] Here's more deception building on deception.
[4:53] We had the old prophet who deceived the young man of God last week.
[4:57] We've had Jeroboam deceiving the entire people with his false religion.
[5:02] And now here he is attempting to deceive Ahijah and deceive God himself.
[5:09] And of course it helped that Ahijah obviously had cataracts and was effectively blind in his old age.
[5:17] But did he think God had gone blind?
[5:21] That somehow God couldn't see what he was up to, couldn't see that this woman was in fact his wife.
[5:29] The reality was, of course, that God saw everything.
[5:33] much to her shock when Jeroboam's wife came in.
[5:37] The prophet immediately said, why this pretense?
[5:42] It's a good question, isn't it?
[5:44] Why do we on occasions pretend before God?
[5:54] God sees everything.
[5:58] Jeroboam was only fooling himself.
[6:02] If you remember when we were looking at the early chapters of Kings and the design of the house of the Lord, one of the features, intriguing features of it, and differences between it and the tabernacle that it replaced, is that the temple had windows in it.
[6:20] And the Jewish rabbis were much given to discussing the significance of these windows.
[6:24] What are windows for?
[6:27] Are they for letting the light in or letting you see out?
[6:31] Which is it?
[6:32] And of course you want to say, well, it's both.
[6:35] But I wonder if Jeroboam had thought a little more about the significance of those windows.
[6:40] He might have realized that God was saying something.
[6:44] The house of the Lord is not blind.
[6:46] God is not deceived.
[6:48] You can't pull the wool over his eyes.
[6:53] And we constantly read in the Old Testament about the eyes of the Lord.
[6:57] For example, in 2 Chronicles, we read the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him.
[7:07] God sees.
[7:08] Revelation gives us a vision of the risen Lord Jesus walking among the churches, and then he writes to them, And he's constantly saying, I know your works.
[7:19] I know your circumstances.
[7:20] I know all about you.
[7:22] I see.
[7:23] God is the God who sees everything.
[7:26] So why do we put on disguises and pretend of them to be holier than we are?
[7:39] It's foolish.
[7:43] if you're here in disguise this morning, pretending not to be what you are or pretending to be what you're not, well, you can deceive us, deceive me, but you can't deceive God.
[8:03] His word gets beyond the most brilliant disguise.
[8:11] So don't ever try to pretend anything before God.
[8:19] Come to him as you are.
[8:23] Admit what you're like and come boldly to the throne as we have just been singing about.
[8:31] And there find the forgiveness and the help and strength we need.
[8:36] Jeroboam discovered the truth of what Hebrews 4 tells us.
[8:41] that the word of God is alive and active and sharper than any two-edged sword.
[8:47] It penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrows.
[8:52] It judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
[8:55] Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight.
[9:01] Everything is uncovered and led bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.
[9:11] so don't try to pull the wool over God's eyes.
[9:18] And yet, in his mercy, God had spoken to Jeroboam.
[9:23] Jeroboam refused to repent.
[9:25] He persisted in his sin and his crude attempt to limit God's voice to one area of his life backfired spectacularly.
[9:37] And Ahijah announced to him God's judgment on his evil, there would be no Jeroboam dynasty.
[9:44] And indeed, Israel itself was going to eventually be uprooted.
[9:50] And now the camera swings back to the other side of the divided kingdom.
[9:57] So let's follow that.
[9:58] This is verse 21 now in chapter 14.
[10:02] And this is life under Rehoboam in Jerusalem and Judah.
[10:08] Rehoboam, son of Solomon, was king in Judah.
[10:10] He was 41 years old when he became king, and he reigned for 17 years in Jerusalem.
[10:16] The city the Lord had chosen out of all the tribes of Israel in which to put his name.
[10:21] His mother's name was Nama, and she was an Ammonite.
[10:25] And Judah did evil in the eyes of the Lord by the sins they committed.
[10:29] They stirred up they stirred up his jealous anger more than those who were before them had done.
[10:37] They also set up for themselves high places, sacred stones and asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree.
[10:46] They were even male shrine prostitutes in the land.
[10:50] The people engaged in all the detestable practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites.
[10:59] In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, Shishak, king of Egypt, attacked Jerusalem.
[11:04] He carried off the treasures of the temple of the Lord and the treasures of the royal palace.
[11:09] He took everything, including all the gold shields Solomon had made.
[11:16] So King Rehoboam made bronze shields to replace them and assigned those to the commanders of the guard on duty at the entrance to the royal palace.
[11:26] And whenever the king went to the Lord's temple, the guards bore the shields, and afterwards they returned them to the guard room.
[11:35] So what is this about, this business of the shields?
[11:39] Excuse me while I have a little drink.
[11:44] Jerusalem, we're reminded, was the city where the Lord had chosen uniquely to put his name.
[11:53] The house of the Lord, the temple was there.
[11:55] God's name and reputation were attached to this place uniquely.
[12:00] This was the center of the true religion.
[12:06] So were things any better here than they were with the 10 tribes under Jeroboam?
[12:13] And the answer is an emphatic no.
[12:16] Judah did evil in the sight of the Lord.
[12:22] And just notice a little detail.
[12:24] The account begins not just with a reference to God's name, but with the name of a woman, Raybone's mother.
[12:31] And in case we miss it, it's mentioned again at the end of this account.
[12:35] She was one of Solomon's many foreign wives.
[12:38] She was now the queen mother.
[12:41] She was an Ammonite.
[12:43] And why tell us this?
[12:45] Well, the Ammonites were worshippers of the detestable false god Moloch that we read about in chapter 11, whose worship involved sexual rituals and the sacrifice of babies.
[13:00] The sins of Judah were worse than those now of the previous generation.
[13:09] They set up alternative shrines, sacred stones, Asherah poles, and every high hill, and under every spreading tree.
[13:16] They were all over the country.
[13:18] Asherah was the mother goddess of Canaanite.
[13:21] She represented fertility and sex.
[13:24] So on the one hand, we had everywhere the worship of fertility and sex, and on the other, the sacrifice of children and babies sounds rather contemporary.
[13:39] This strange, sad mixture of promoting sex, fertility, and at the same time sacrificing babies goes back a long way.
[13:53] These were the evil things practiced by the Canaanite nations that God had judged and driven out before he had given the land to Israel.
[14:02] and now here was Israel indulging themselves in the same sins.
[14:10] This was a complete denial of the basis of their very existence in the land.
[14:20] And we should notice in passing that sexual license is often portrayed as a modern thing.
[14:32] as a progressive thing.
[14:33] The 60s are hailed as a great time of sexual liberation and freedom as a sign of a maturing society when in fact there is nothing progressive or mature about it at all.
[14:47] It is regressive.
[14:48] It's a going back to what it always was.
[14:54] It always was.
[14:55] Sin and all sin has consequences.
[14:59] and that's what this business of the shields is about
[15:05] because sin leaves a person or a nation
[15:10] spiritually weak and vulnerable to attack and in the fifth year of Rehoboam's reign Shishak king of Egypt no less the country that God had taken the people out of to their freedom and now King Shishak comes and attacks Jerusalem and he carries off the treasures of the temple and the royal palace,
[15:37] whether through violence or because Rehoboam simply paid him off.
[15:43] We don't know.
[15:44] I think the latter is likely.
[15:47] And from this disaster, one single detail is highlighted.
[15:52] Shishak took away all the gold shields carried by the royal guard When they escorted the king to the temple, they would carry these golden shields because these shields represented God as their protection.
[16:08] King David had spoken of God being his shields.
[16:12] And we love those Psalms that talk about it.
[16:14] It was an expression of divine protection.
[16:18] And Solomon had made the shields out of gold to reflect that, but the richness had gone.
[16:27] The gold replaced with bronze, a cheap plastic lookalike really.
[16:33] You know, the way kids would dress up and use plastic shields and swords and so on, pretend they looked the real thing, but they're not the real thing.
[16:42] Just so that the guard would have something to carry.
[16:45] Why?
[16:46] Because the show must go on.
[16:50] maintaining the pretense of trusting in God's protection when there was absolutely no reality behind it.
[17:01] The show must go on.
[17:02] It reminds me of a comment that Paul makes to Timothy about people who have an outward show of godliness but have denied its power.
[17:12] The structure is there.
[17:13] The show is there.
[17:14] But the richness has gone.
[17:16] They keep the show of genuine spirituality going.
[17:20] But underneath, says Paul, they are lovers of themselves.
[17:24] They are lovers of money.
[17:26] They are lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.
[17:31] And you see this decline now down through the generations from David to Solomon to Rehoboam.
[17:39] It cost David a great deal as a young man to remain loyal to God.
[17:45] He nearly lost his life.
[17:47] Solomon, well, not so much.
[17:51] He allowed his heart in his old age to become divided.
[17:54] And now here's Rehoboam, who completely decried his spiritual inheritance.
[18:04] Counted us for nothing.
[18:06] The richness had gone.
[18:07] He didn't have to fight for it.
[18:08] He took it all for granted as a young man.
[18:11] He played around.
[18:12] He kept the show going.
[18:14] But there's no wealth.
[18:15] no depth, no reality in it.
[18:19] And sometimes that happens.
[18:22] Each generation needs to engage with the richness of their spiritual inheritance for themselves.
[18:33] And sometimes they don't.
[18:34] Sometimes we can have it too easy.
[18:37] There isn't the same pioneer spirit.
[18:40] There isn't the same struggle.
[18:43] and it makes us complacent and weak and prone to attack.
[18:51] Their idolatry, their self-indulgence had weakened them, and the king of Egypt comes against them, and now they're back in a sense in bondage to the very nation that God had delivered them from.
[19:09] As Paul would say in a contemporary setting, it was for freedom that Christ set us free.
[19:15] But don't let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
[19:22] Sin weakens us.
[19:26] Especially the sins we practice out of self-love and lovers of pleasure rather than loving God.
[19:37] The sins we do deliberately when we think no one is looking.
[19:41] and we might be able to keep up the appearance that all is well.
[19:46] But it weakens us spiritually and you can tell it fouls up our relationship with God.
[19:53] It blunts our spiritual perception.
[19:56] It closes our mouths when they should be open in praise or prayer or witness.
[20:03] Sin weakens us and
[20:08] sadly Rehoboam didn't learn the lesson he didn't go before God after this attack and say what a fool I've been Lord would you come back and could we be restored to you and you protect us he just carried on before persisted in maintaining the show and then when he died Abijam his son took over his reign was short but long enough for him to commit all the sins his father had done before him.
[20:38] His heart, we read, was not fully devoted to the Lord as the heart of David had been, and Kings has nothing good to say about him.
[20:50] But then, in the middle of this depressing catalog of disaster.
[20:57] We read the following in 1 Kings 15 verse 4.
[21:02] For David's sake, the Lord God gave him a lamp in Jerusalem by raising up a son to succeed him.
[21:14] Now, I just love that idea.
[21:16] A light in the gathering gloom, a lamp in Jerusalem.
[21:22] And the lamp's name was Asa, or whatever way you pronounce it.
[21:27] Those of you who know all the Hebrew pronunciations can come and tell me afterwards.
[21:30] I would be very grateful.
[21:31] But I'm going to call him Asa, A-S-A.
[21:35] Nice short name.
[21:37] He reigned in Jerusalem for 41 years, one year longer than his great-grandfather David.
[21:44] And like David, he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord.
[21:48] He arrested that generational decline in his family.
[21:56] Now, he wasn't perfect, but he did good.
[22:01] And we can read a little bit about Asa from verse nine in chapter 15.
[22:07] He reigned in Jerusalem for 41 years.
[22:10] His grandmother's name was Maka, daughter of Abishalom, and Asa did what was right in the eyes of the Lord as his father David had done.
[22:20] He expelled the male shrine prostitutes from the land and got rid of all the idols his ancestors had made.
[22:26] He even deposed his grandmother, Maka, from her position as queen mother because she had made a repulsive image for the worship of Asherah.
[22:37] Asa cut it down, burned it in the Kidron Valley.
[22:41] Although he did not remove the high places, Asa's heart was fully committed to the Lord all his life.
[22:49] He brought into the temple of the Lord the silver and gold and the articles that he and his father had dedicated.
[22:57] There was war between Asa and Basha, king of Israel throughout their reigns.
[23:02] And Basha, king of Israel, went up against Judah and fortified Ramah to prevent anyone from leaving or entering the territory of Asa, king of Judah.
[23:17] So Asa wasn't perfect, but he was a good king.
[23:24] He did good.
[23:27] What Solomon had got so badly wrong and Rehoboam had continued, Asa began to put right.
[23:35] He didn't take this generational decline as determinative in his life.
[23:40] He stood against it.
[23:42] That takes some doing in a family.
[23:45] He dismantled the idols his predecessors had introduced.
[23:48] He expelled the male shrine prostitutes.
[23:52] Now try to imagine that.
[23:54] That took courage, even for a king.
[23:57] Think of all the people who were involved in this false worship.
[24:01] All the people who had jobs, if you like, in it.
[24:04] Can you imagine the headlines in the paper, the God Squad took away our jobs?
[24:09] Can you imagine the Minorities Commission coming and complaining about, you know, all kinds of things going on?
[24:18] Asa, heart was to the Lord, and he was reversing the generational decline, and that takes courage.
[24:25] It wasn't easy.
[24:27] He also, we read, deposed his grandmother from her position as queen mother because she had made an image for the worship of Asherah.
[24:38] My wife was asking me in the car what particular things I'd be talking about, so I decided to tell her that I'm going to be talking about a bad granny.
[24:48] She is a granny, but she's not a bad granny.
[24:52] To go against your family is not easy.
[25:02] This woman had made a hideous image for the worship of Asherah.
[25:07] He cut it down and burned it.
[25:10] Not easy to do.
[25:12] That probably took even more courage and emotional energy than to go against the other stuff.
[25:20] But for him it was either God's word or his grandmother.
[25:26] And that can be a heart-wrenching decision.
[25:30] That's not easy.
[25:34] But his first loyalty, his heart was right with God.
[25:41] His first loyalty was the Lord.
[25:43] And Jesus himself commented on this kind of issue.
[25:48] He said, you can't fully follow me and be my disciple if you don't put the love of God first above all natural loves.
[26:02] We are to honor our parents.
[26:05] We are to ensure that they are cared for.
[26:10] But ultimately, Christ and his word comes first.
[26:16] Our call is to obedience to the Lord Jesus.
[26:22] He got this right.
[26:24] He didn't manage to get rid of all the alternative shrines.
[26:29] That's a helpful touch of realism, I think.
[26:32] Some things take a long time to recover, if they ever are.
[26:38] No leader is perfect.
[26:39] No leader can do everything.
[26:41] As a lamp, you affect what you can, not what you can't.
[26:45] There are lots of darkness around you.
[26:48] You can't change everything in your workplace, in your nation, or even in your family.
[26:55] Daniel didn't, but you can still shine as a lamp.
[27:01] And he did that.
[27:02] He wasn't able to heal the split and the divided nation.
[27:05] He wasn't perfect.
[27:06] But what leader ever is, his heart was right.
[27:09] His heart was fully committed to the Lord all his life.
[27:12] And God doesn't wait until we get everything right, until he uses us.
[27:19] And it's just as well when I think about myself.
[27:24] God looks at the heart.
[27:25] And if I had the choice between Asa as a leader and Solomon, I would choose Asa every time.
[27:34] For 35 years, he led Judah well.
[27:38] But then we read the new king of 10 tribes, Basha came against Judah.
[27:43] And whereas Jeroboam had only discouraged people from the 10 tribes going to Jerusalem to worship God, Basha now went a step further and he tried to prevent them from going by building massive fortifications at Ramah, which is only five miles north of Jerusalem.
[28:02] And so here was a challenge for Asa.
[28:06] And the way he chose to deal with it was successful in the end.
[28:11] but it was very costly and it was in fact questionable.
[28:16] It involved paying the pagan ruler of Damascus, Ben Hadad, to break a treaty that he had made with Basha and going into partnership with him against Israel, his own people, and that led to Ben Hadad's army attacking and defeating a number of the Israelite cities.
[28:38] And that certainly wasn't ideal.
[28:40] The author of Kings passes no comment, but Chronicles 16 passes plenty of comment on it and tells us how a prophet Hanani came to Asa and criticized him for going into partnership with the Syrians rather than relying on God.
[29:00] Instead of going to God, he had indulged in a little bit of very clever politics.
[29:06] And it worked.
[29:09] I mean, we were shrewd.
[29:11] And I have never been in his kind of position.
[29:16] So I'm not throwing stones at people who are involved at this kind of level of government and so on.
[29:23] It worked, but it came as a cost.
[29:27] And when this was pointed out to Asa, very sadly, he reacted badly, as some leaders do when they are criticized.
[29:37] and he actually put Hanani the prophet in prison and then began to treat some of his own people badly.
[29:45] His heart was right, but it didn't stop him from making an error of judgment, which then he and the nation had to live with.
[29:55] Having our heart right with God is vital, but it also matters what we do.
[30:03] It is possible to have a good heart and to act foolishly with consequences that go down through the generations.
[30:12] If the heart is in the right place, but the mind isn't, costly mistakes can be made.
[30:19] So there needs to be a willingness to learn, a desire to learn from the Lord, a humility before him where we're relying on him and not our own sharps.
[30:31] Heart and mind working together.
[30:35] He was able to salvage something from the disaster and was able to take a lot of the materials that Basha had used to try to build these fortifications and use them to fortify some of the cities.
[30:47] But what a pity to have had to divert so much wealth to coping with this problem.
[30:55] I could say more about that, but I won't.
[31:00] Asa, as I said, is the lamp, as God said about him, is a lamp in Jerusalem.
[31:10] And I'm challenged by that.
[31:14] It was costly for him.
[31:17] It required great courage, it required great emotional energy.
[31:24] And I think the challenge is for us.
[31:31] to be a lamp in your family,
[31:38] in your neighborhood, in your workplace, in this country.
[31:46] Not with any grandiose ideas that we're going to change the world.
[31:52] But we are going to shine, it's up to God to change the world, not us.
[31:58] But what we can do is to shine as a lamp.
[32:03] The decline through the generations is not necessary.
[32:10] You can arrest that decline.
[32:12] You may be the first in your family to take a stand for Jesus Christ for many years.
[32:17] Or you may be like me.
[32:19] I don't know how many generations died.
[32:23] But the challenge is still there to ensure that in your generation and for your generation, your heart is right with God and you're prepared to shine as a lamp in the country.
[32:43] It's a depressing list from here on in.
[32:47] The camera swings back to the other side of the divided kingdom.
[32:51] We come to Basha.
[32:52] He reigned for 24 years over the 10 tribes.
[32:55] He did evil in the eyes of the Lord, following the ways of Jeroboam, committing the same sin Jeroboam had caused Israel to commit.
[33:02] He replaced the house of the Lord with his own shrines and so on.
[33:05] He died.
[33:07] Elah succeeded him as king.
[33:08] He lasted for two years until one day he was on an alcoholic binge with the palace administrator, Zimri.
[33:17] One of his other officials took advantage and killed him.
[33:20] Wiped out his entire family in order to establish himself, Zimri, as king.
[33:24] and Zimri lasted seven days.
[33:27] His attempted coup d'etat came to the attention of the army.
[33:31] They were having none of it.
[33:32] They proclaimed Omri, their commander-in-chief, as king.
[33:34] They set fire to Zimri's palace, and his reign went up in smoke.
[33:38] This had the effect of further dividing the ten tribes.
[33:41] Half were in favor of Omri.
[33:43] Half supported a certain Tiffany.
[33:45] So they held a football match over 30s against the under 30s to decide the winner.
[33:50] Well, not exactly, but the supporters of Omri were stronger than the supporters of Tiffany, So Tibby died and Omri was the undisputed champion.
[33:57] And Omri lasted 12 years.
[33:59] But again, we read the often repeated phrase, Omri did evil in the eyes of the Lord.
[34:04] In fact, he sinned more than all of those before him.
[34:07] He followed completely the ways of Jeroboam, committing the same sin, the same sin, the same sin.
[34:17] It's depressing.
[34:20] And it's meant to be.
[34:24] Because there's two things that strike me from this as I finish.
[34:27] Number one, sin is boring.
[34:30] It's monotonous.
[34:31] It's repetitive.
[34:32] It's uncreative.
[34:33] It's destructive.
[34:34] May seem exciting for a while.
[34:37] And Satan's genius is to paint it in attractive colors to the person doing the sin, but rarely to the person on the receiving end.
[34:44] Do you like to be lied to?
[34:47] Do you want to be the victim of unfaithfulness or greed?
[34:51] There is no beauty here.
[34:53] There's nothing creative, just the same old greed, the same old adultery, the same old lies with the resulting carnage of damaged people everywhere.
[35:00] That's the first thing.
[35:01] Sin is boring.
[35:03] Secondly, one sin tends to lead to another in a descending spiral, a hardening of the heart, a closing of the mind, and eventually an increasing despair and hopelessness and bitterness and anger.
[35:16] The law of diminishing returns.
[35:17] The more you put in, the less you get back, the more you need to put in.
[35:22] In Christ, we have an opportunity to reverse that.
[35:27] I want to show you a photograph as I finish.
[35:30] And some of you will recognize this.
[35:34] The northern lights.
[35:38] And you can be a northern light.
[35:41] Not dancing in the sky above the giant's causeway.
[35:46] But a light in your generation.
[35:48] Listen to what Paul says.
[35:50] For you were once darkness.
[35:53] but now you are light in the Lord.
[35:57] Live as children of light for the fruit of the light consists in, here we go.
[36:04] What does it consist in?
[36:05] What does it involve me doing?
[36:07] Oh, goodness, righteousness, and truth and find out what pleases the Lord.
[36:17] Can you do that?
[36:19] Because goodness is beautiful.
[36:22] righteousness is beautiful truth is beautiful and make it your ambition as a lamp to find out what pleases the Lord and it's not hard to find this book is full of it
[36:37] and do that we read of the Lord Jesus that he went about the country and Peter describes him as this doing good it's not complicated is it your heart right with God, doing good, shining like a lamp in our generation.
[37:01] Let's pray.
[37:02] Lord, thank you for allowing us a little peep inside
[37:09] the lives of these ancient kings.
[37:12] And it partly depresses and distresses this monotony
[37:20] of sin I pray that as we read through, it would make us sick of the sight of sin if we're not already.
[37:30] And less prone to play around with envy and jealousy and lust.
[37:39] I pray too that the example of this good king, not perfect, but good king,
[37:48] would stay with us.
[37:50] That you would make us and give us as lamps to our families, to our communities, to our nation, to our workplaces, to our world.
[38:07] Enable us to shine as lights because in Christ we have his light.
[38:17] And if we wake up, Paul says, he will shine upon us and we can reflect him to others.
[38:25] Use your word, we pray, in Jesus' name.
[38:28] Amen.
[38:32] Amen.