Hello and welcome to the Middletown Baptist Church podcast,
where we are proclaiming the truth to the world.
My name is Pastor Josh and I want to thank you for listening to
this podcast.
I hope that this podcast can be a blessing to you and strengthen
you in the word of God.
Now, come along, let's look into the Bible and see what God has
for us here today, day by day.
I hope you've had a.
A good day so far, and I can tell you I've had a good day.
One of the reasons why I'm having a good day is because this
is actually the third time that I've been able to preach today.
So third sermon I'm excited to do three.
If I could preach three times every day, that would be a dream.
But don't get a chance to preach three times every day unless
you guys want to come up to the church.
And I would just love to do that sometimes.
That's why.
That's one of the reasons why I got the podcast going.
It just lets me talk to the.
To the microphone there.
So hopefully tonight I don't get confused with the two other sermons
that I preached earlier on today, but I had a chance to preach
at a Christian school and then also do a memorial service up at
the Veteran Memorial Cemetery.
And so if you have your Bibles, let's turn to the book of.
Does anyone remember where we started last week?
Zephaniah.
I've got some good students here.
If you didn't remember that, that's okay.
You will get that for the next however long we're here.
Going to be getting the book of Zephaniah.
Now, Zephaniah is a book of the Bible in the Old Testament.
And so if you don't know where it is, you can flip around there
in the minor prophets.
Eventually you'll find it.
And I like that name, Zephaniah.
You don't hear a lot of people name Zephaniah these days.
Maybe if we have another child in the future, that name's coming
around.
No, Alicia says no.
No Zephaniah.
But anyway, Zephaniah means God.
God hides, God protects.
And we're going to see here in this case that God does protect his
own, that God honors those who humbly submit to him in faith.
But we also know that God as a just God, is a God who must enact
justice and judgment upon those that rebel against him.
And so God is amazingly holy in every aspect.
And so when he does enact justice, when he does demonstrate
punishment upon those that are Guilty.
It's done in a way that's perfect.
And so one of the things that sometimes we struggle with is God
demonstrating judgment upon different people.
In the Old Testament and the New, and even today, there are some
people out there that teach that, you know, if God is loving,
he will not judge those that are in sin.
And that's contrary to his character because God must be that
righteous judge.
In his holiness, he must deal with sin.
But we also do know that God in His holiness, offers a way for
forgiveness, and that is through repentance, that is through
humility, that is through that opportunity to trust in him and him
alone.
And we see that theme throughout the New Testament.
We see it in First Peter.
God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
And that's essentially what Zephaniah is doing here.
He's.
He's giving a prophecy.
And not all prophecies are necessarily things about the future.
They are in many cases that way in the Old Testament.
But really all prophecy is.
Is speaking forth truth.
And so what Zephaniah is doing is he's speaking the word of God
to the people there in Judah.
And he says, look, if you continue on in this path, God will
judge.
This is a certainty.
And so that's a warning.
Zephaniah is preaching now.
He is preaching the literal word of God.
That's how God spoke to his people, through the prophet.
And so Zephaniah is preaching repentance, he's preaching judgment,
he's preaching God's grace, but he's also preaching God's justice.
And we have to celebrate, as much as we celebrate God's love and
his grace and his holiness, we also have to celebrate his justice
and his righteousness.
And so what we see here in Zephaniah is last week we started
this, and he talks about this complete and utter.
You know, in this case in verse two, he says, I will utterly
consume all things from off the land, say at the Lord.
He's talking about a complete judgment.
He's talking about a judgment upon a nation if they reject.
And we're going to pick up here in verse number seven tonight.
Last week we talked about these individuals who were posing
as priests.
They were posing as religious people, but they were hypocrites.
They were mingling the truths of God with the truths of the false
God BAAL and the false God Moloch.
And they were taking in those practices and they were mingling
that with the practices that God had told them to follow.
And therefore they were living hypocritical lives.
And God said, I'm going to judge that.
I'm going to judge those spiritual leaders that are misleading
those people there in Jerusalem, there in Judah.
And so really, the first chapter is God going through all
the different types of people that he will judge if they don't
find repentance, if they don't come back to him in repentance.
And so we're going to pick up in verse number seven.
And he says this.
He says, hold thy peace at the presence of the Lord God.
Now, what is he saying here?
Well, essentially God is addressing the royalty in Judah.
Now he.
He shifts gears from the broad spectrum of all of Judah and from
the religious leaders of Judah.
Now he's going to speak to the leadership.
He's going to speak to the royalty there in Judah.
And what does he say?
Well, verse number seven is a nice way to say, be quiet.
Instead of trying to respond to me, instead of trying to get ahead
of me and give me excuses, you need to just listen because I'm going
to tell you the whole story.
And so God addresses the royalty of Judah in a way that they
aren't used to hearing.
He tells them to be quiet and listen to his pronouncement of judgment.
And he says, a sacrifice of judgment is going to be made against
a wicked nation.
He says, hold thy peace at the presence of the Lord God, for the
day of the Lord is at hand.
This is speaking specifically to the judgment that will be seen
there at that time coming in the near future.
But also we know that, that ultimately the day of the Lord is
evidently going to be coming at the end time completely, to judge
all those that are in sin, to judge all of those that have rebelled
against God for all of history.
So he says, for the day of the Lord is at hand, for the Lord hath
prepared a sacrifice and he hath bid his guest.
And so what it says here is that God is ready to judge.
And this needs to be a reality for many people, because for a lot
of people, they put off repentance.
It's kind of like this idea of, well, I'm going to just hope
that it goes away, and eventually God's judgment will go
away.
But what we see is this is an inevitable thing.
Verse 8.
And he says here, and it shall come to pass in the day of the Lord's
sacrifice.
So he's talking about the day of judgment, that I will punish the
princes and the king's children and all such as are clothed
with strange apparel.
And what's he Talking about here?
Well, he says that this warning is not just for individuals
that are under the king's rule, but this is for the king and
the princes and all of the family.
And so this is a complete judgment upon that.
And even in the case of context, remember who is the king
at this point?
Does anyone remember, we read about it early on.
He's a good king.
Josiah.
Josiah is the king.
And so this is a warning even for those that would be considered,
hey, they're godly leaders.
This is a warning to stay on track.
This is a warning to say, you know what?
I need to be cognizant.
I need to be aware of the ability for me to drift off if I
become complacent.
I've heard a lot of preachers get up and say, I would never do
this or I would never do that.
I used to do that all the time with my children before I had children.
I remember when Alicia and I would go out to, like, eat at a restaurant,
and we would see these kids that were, like, making noise.
I remember saying, man, I will never let my children act up in a
public place.
I just don't know what these people are doing.
And then I realized when I started to have chillin.
It's not as easy, okay?
It takes some discipline, right?
And if we're not aware of that, the default setting will be
that there will be chaos.
There will be.
There will be confusion.
And so the warning here is not just for an unruly king.
It's for a king who is a.
What we would consider a good king, following the word of God.
But there always can be the path of divergent.
It always could go off, and it could always be a time where we could
fall into that trap of prayer.
And then he says here, and all such as are clothed with strange
apparel.
Or you could say it this way, clothed with foreign apparel.
And so the priests and the leaders of Judah were ashamed of
their national identity.
So much so that they love to look like the enemy.
They love to look like those pagan nations that were around them.
They wanted to be so much like the worldly nations around them that
they would actually emulate those nations around them.
They would wear their apparel.
They would identify with those pagan nations.
And so what is he speaking to here?
He's speaking to worldliness.
We talked about that on Sunday morning about separating ourselves
from the influence of this world, because who we associate with
will eventually lead to who influences us, right?
So if I associate with the world, I'm going to eventually be
influenced by the world.
I'm eventually going to compromise to the ways of the world
and ultimately fall into a path of living like the world.
And so the judgment, the condemnation, is against the individuals
who clothe themselves with foreign apparel to look like those
people that are around them.
Because they were looking at it from this perspective.
Look at these foreign nations.
Look at their success.
Look at the pleasure that they're having.
Look at the freedom that they have, right?
The seeming freedom of living a life of that pagan worship.
And it seemed to many of the people that were living in Judah
at the time that these foreigners were actually having more
success than they were.
And so what they would say is, hey, we'll still practice worship
the way that God tells us to worship, but we want to look like
the world.
And I'm going to tell you in practice today what that looks like
is, hey, you know what?
We're the church, but we want to look as much as we can like the
world.
Instead of saying we want the world to be influenced by the church,
we take the world and allow the world to influence what we do
within the church.
And that doesn't always look like what we expect it to look like.
Sometimes we say, well, you know what?
We look the part.
We look good, we look like a church.
And I would say, that's one step of it.
But I'd also say how we act, how we think, how we respond, how
we deal with people.
You know, there's ways that the world teaches today.
That is not what the Bible says is a unified church, right?
Get what you can, cut other people down, talk behind their back.
The Bible says, no, that's not the way to go.
And so these individuals were adopting the strange apparel of the
world, and they were expecting to receive the blessings of God.
And so all of those people there were allowing themselves to
be infiltrated by the ways of the world.
And God judges that God is opposed to that.
Verse nine, it says, in the same day also will I punish all those
that leap on the threshold.
Now, that's a phrase I had to look up, right?
Because I'm like, is God really mad when they leap on the
threshold?
What is he talking about here?
What we can see is that this was an idiom.
This was a phrase that would have been used at that timeframe
about changing their perspective on things, jumping ship,
if you will, go into another place.
And so there's a lot of commentators that would talk about
this.
This would be basically bringing pagan customs and superstitions
into the house of God.
We saw that obviously throughout the Old Testament, they
would take elements of pagan worship and they would try to cross
over that threshold and bring that into the house of God.
And that's what we were talking about before.
Taking things that are worldly focused, idolatrous, pagan, fleshly,
and trying to infiltrate that with the stamp of the church.
And so I would warn us against that because what it says here is
that it says that, that ultimately it says which fill their
masters houses with violence and deceit.
And so the outcome of bringing that into our midst is what it says
there, violence and deceit.
And the Bible has a lot to say about that.
But what we can see here is that ultimately when we compromise
our values, when we compromise our truth, and when we try to mingle
the ways of the world and God is never going to be pleased because
why it leads to sin, it leads to violence, it leads to division,
it leads to deceit, it leads to these lies that ultimately produce
themselves in actions that are not God honoring.
I talked to the Christian school group today and I was talking
to them about, hey, you hear all the rules and how you should
act and how you should live and how you should be different.
But a lot of times we see that from a perspective of performance.
Really, how can I try to follow all the rules?
How can I look the part?
And what the Bible says is really, this is a heart issue.
It's never really an issue of how much you have in your willpower.
Because there are some people that might have a stronger willpower
than others.
But eventually what the Bible tells us is that we're all gonna
fail if it's fleshly focused, whether it's good intentions or not.
Like, I could sit here today and I could wake up and I could say,
I'm gonna try my best not to and then fill in the blank with that
sin.
And I might go a period of time in my day where I feel like
I've accomplished that.
But the very moment that I trust in my own flesh to accomplish
these things is the moment that I'm focusing on self.
That's self worship.
A lot of times we think of idolatry as a figure outside of ourselves.
Like, so we think of a little statue of BAAL or a big statue of
Moloch, or maybe even today we understand, you know, like the phone
can become an idol.
But do you know that the Bible says that we can actually put the
focus on ourselves and lift ourselves up to a point where we
have become our own idol?
We're humanistic in our focus in our society.
Today, there is a strong push, and there always has been.
And it's packaged different ways, but there's always been a push
for humanism.
It's always about inflating yourself, lifting yourself up.
From the very beginning in the garden, right, the original lie was,
hey, you can be like God.
And that has progressed and progressed into.
Look at our society today.
That's this.
That's what we're seeing over and over and over again.
And Satan does that through as we see there, Verse nine, deceit.
And so what happens here is that God is telling them that he
will judge those that specifically are leaders, but all
folks that allow the worldly ways to infiltrate into their lives
and then affect their lives.
Now, of course, there's repentance, and of course there's
grace.
And of course there's ultimately God's forgiveness to those
that come back to him in humility.
But what he's saying is, you need to wake up to this.
Because what's happening here, and we're gonna see it here in a
few verses, there was a sense of complacency with these people
in Judah.
They were the ones that thought they were better than the
Northern Kingdom.
And the Northern Kingdom had fallen.
They were the ones that were pagan.
We're okay.
Everything's gonna be all right.
And so there is this sense of complacency.
And with that sense of complacency comes apathy, right?
I become complacent, and then I become apathetic, Meaning I don't
care about what's going on.
We're okay, God.
We don't need anything.
We're good.
Don't try to change what we're trying to do.
Isn't that what we are in our society today, in our churches today?
Like, hey, what if God pulls me to do something else?
No, I don't want to do that, because that's not what I'm comfortable
with.
I'm complacent, I'm apathetic.
And so what we see here in this case is that God says, you need
to wake up to the reality of what you're actually doing.
And so judgment is upon those leaders.
But then we see verse 10.
He shifts gears.
And now the judgment is going to be promised to the merchants.
And the merchants are those at this time period that would deal
with the money.
And obviously they were selling goods.
And we're going to talk about two different industries.
But really what he's addressing here is those that are
putting their trust and their faith in finances.
They're putting all Their hope in their money.
So we're seeing God go right down the line and show all the things
that he hates.
He hates those religious hypocrites.
He hates those compromise compromisers, the ones that bring
the worldliness into worship.
And now he's going to talk about those who love money.
We know what the New Testament says about that, that the love of
money, not money itself, but the love of money, is the root of
evil.
It's the root of all different types of sin.
Because of our prideful hearts.
And I mentioned this morning to the Christian school and I've
said this within our own church.
A good thing can become a bad thing if it becomes the first thing.
I can tell you there's a lot of things in our life that in and
of themselves are not sinful.
Right?
Money in and of itself is not sinful.
A hobby in and of itself is not sinful.
Loving another human being is not sinful unless that comes first
before our love for God.
And so what he's going to say here is this verse 10.
And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord, that there
shall be the noise of a cry from the fish gate and then howling
from the second and a great crashing from the hills.
Now, if you were to read that in and of itself, you would say,
what is he talking about there?
The fish, the fish gate.
Well, the fish gate was a specific gate there in Jerusalem.
That would have been the gate that the fishermen would use for
their commerce.
They would bring in the fish from the different areas and they
would come and they would trade.
So it was the gate to the fish market.
So it was a place where they would get money.
It was a place where they would bring in those finances that
they were loving so much.
And then we see in verse number 11, he says how ye inhabitants
of Maktesh, for all the merchant people are cut down.
All they that bear silver are cut off.
Now, I had to look up what Maktesh was, but Maktesh was a place
where the silver merchants would be.
And they were obviously known for loving money and pushing things
upon people and allowing themselves to be overtaken by the
love of that money.
And so what does the Lord say here?
Well, he says that the merchants and those with money, that
they.
That they would put their faith and trust in their riches.
Now God promises to cut those people down in their idolatry, the
idolatry of money.
And the Bible tells us that this isn't just a, an Old Testament
concept.
This is a New Testament concept.
Colossians chapter 3, verses 5 and 6.
Mortify, therefore your members.
You know what that word mortify means?
It means kill it.
Mortify, therefore your members which are upon the earth.
And he talks about these different sins.
He says, fornication.
And we know that fornication is anything, anything sexual outside
the bond of marriage.
Fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence,
and covetousness, which is idolatry.
So the Bible actually says that when we love money and we covet
money, that is idolatry.
And what basically happens is that money becomes our idol.
And you don't have to have a lot of money to love money.
I think that was sometimes a concept that I didn't grasp when
I was.
When I was a young man out of college, I was working at a Christian
school.
And if you know anything about Christian schools, any teacher that's
working at a Christian school is not gonna become a millionaire
off of the salary of that Christian school.
Okay, if there is a Christian school that's like that, let me know,
okay?
I'm gonna spread the word around.
But the reality is we were getting paid very little.
And I would hear a preacher get up and say, you know what?
The love of money is the root of all sin.
And I'm like, well, trust me, I can't love the money that I don't
have, okay?
And I had to have someone sit down next to me.
And they say, it's not about how much you have, it's about how
hard you're trying to hold on to that.
Right?
And so I didn't have much money.
So I love that money so much that I'm like, I can't do anything
with it.
And that's all I can focus on.
The truth is, it doesn't matter how much is in our bank account.
What matters is our heart.
It always goes back to that.
And so what we can see here in this case is that God hates that.
He lists all these sins and he says, and covetousness, which is
idolatry, for which things sake of the wrath of God, cometh
on the children of disobedience.
And so the Bible speaks very strongly in the Old Testament and
the new of those folks who desire money more than anything else.
These folks were desiring money more than God.
They were desiring the silver more than God.
And therefore God says, I'm going to judge you unless you repent.
And so the judgment was placed upon the originally those spiritual
leaders that were misleading them with false teaching.
There was judgment upon the leaders who had compromised to the
worldly ways.
There was judgment upon those that love money, the merchants.
And now we're going to see in verse number 12, judgment promised
to the complacent.
And these are the people that we would say that they're not out
there doing these horrible pagan things.
They're people that are just complacent.
It says, and it shall come to pass at that time that I will search
Jerusalem with candles, man.
This shows that God is serious about this.
Even when it gets dark, he's going to search with candles and
punish the men that are settled on their lees.
Now, this is interesting here.
What he basically says is this.
That word lees is a archaic term for complacency.
And so he says, I'm going to punish those who are settled in their
complacency.
The Lord promised judgment against those who felt that God was
distant or detached from their lives.
And so because of that perceived distance from God, they
just became complacent.
They didn't care anymore about their relationship with God.
And so the Lord says, I'm going to judge those people who have
gone to this place of complacency.
And what now, what was their.
How could we say that they were complacent?
Well, it says there, verse number 12, that say in their hearts,
the Lord will not do good, neither will he do evil.
And some people believe in this case that, you know, God isn't
interested in my matters.
He's not interested in my life.
This is the classic theological teaching of Deism, that
God is this great clockmaker, that he sets everything in motion
and he just backs up.
He doesn't want a personal relationship with me.
He doesn't care about my life.
He has bigger things to deal with.
And that's really what they're saying here.
Some people believe that God is just this great clockmaker who
creates the universe, winds it up, and then just lets it go.
Those who believe this way don't understand the closeness that
God desires for us in our relationship.
Those who believe that there is no God or that he doesn't want
anything to do with man totally miss out on what the Bible
actually says about the character of God.
God wants a personal relationship with us.
He wanted a personal relationship with Israel.
He wants a personal relationship with you.
And so these people are saying, you know what?
The Lord will not do good, neither will he do evil.
He just is just up there.
He's just this being up in the sky.
And isn't that.
I mean, even more so maybe A few years ago.
Nowadays we're seeing on the rise atheism, just basically, there
is no God.
Or.
Or agnosticism, which is like, well, there might be a God, but how
could I ever know?
But even so, even with people that would claim to be religious
in our society today, they're not really understanding that it
is a personal walk with God.
It's more just, hey, there's a big man upstairs.
He cares about certain things.
But you know what?
How could I really even know?
I don't know.
If you've ever shared the gospel with somebody.
If you have shared the gospel with somebody, at some point, you've
probably heard the answer to this question.
Okay, if I was to ask you, hey, are you going to heaven?
I think that's a kind of an interesting question to ask someone
because you can always kind of tell where they stand when they answer.
And a lot of times people will say yes.
And then you say, well, why do you think that?
And then you'll see sometimes the human nature come out, well,
I think that I'm a good person.
I think my good outweighs my bad.
So that individual is trusting in their own works, right?
That individual is trusting in this idea that, hey, I might be a
good person.
There's other people that would say, oh, no, I.
I'm not going to heaven.
I'm a bad person.
And they have no concept of that.
There could be forgiveness for that.
I've already done enough wrongs.
But then you'll also find people that will say this, well,
I hope that I will go to heaven, but how can we ever really
know?
And these are all fallacies.
These are all terrible interpretations of scripture.
The Bible says in First John, chapter five, these things are written
unto you that believe in the name of the.
Of the Lord, that you can know that you have everlasting life.
There is an assurance when it comes to our faith.
And so these people here that are listed in verses 12 and 13, they
were.
They were complacent.
I was reading excerpts of the book the decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, and some of you are like, wow, that's a heavy read.
Okay, I was reading excerpts of it.
I wasn't reading the whole thing, but recently I was reading
through it and I saw this basically highlighted.
There were attitudes that were characterized in the end of the Roman
Empire that I would say are a lot similar to what we have today
in our society.
It said this.
The people regarded all religions as equally true.
We see a lot of people saying that today.
Right.
Well, all you gotta do is be, you know, serious about something
and that's enough.
The philosophers regarded all religions as false.
Like basically, it's all about man.
If you're a religious person, it's just a distraction.
And then it said the politicians regarded all religions
as equally useful.
Meaning there were people that use religion for their own purposes,
right?
And we saw that in the fall of the Roman Empire and we're seeing
that happening today.
And so there is this judgment that comes upon these different people
and they don't care.
They don't care.
Verse 13.
Therefore their good shall become a booty and their houses a
desolation.
They shall also build houses, but not inhabit them.
And they shall plant vineyards, but not drink the wine
thereof.
And so the Bible tells us very clearly here that these people are
so complacent that they don't even care.
They're building things, they're planning for things, and
they don't even care about the judgment that is to come.
Their minds are so focused on what they have in front of them,
they don't care about what God says.
And I can tell you that that is very similar to our society today.
There are people out there preaching the truth.
There are people out there warning people, but that is not enough
for many people because they just don't care.
I don't want to hear it.
Don't tell me this.
And I'm going to tell you here today, don't be opposed to hearing
about God's judgment because that allows us to understand that
God is a righteous judge.
And I would even say that as a Christian, if you are a born again
believer, don't shy away from the preaching of the word of God
that steps on your toes, that gives you conviction.
I know that sometimes I would be.
I heard a lot of preaching in my life because I went to a Christian
school.
We would have chapel on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
I would go to church on Wednesday night.
I would go to church on Sunday morning, Sunday night.
I would get sermons basically throughout the week, all week.
And that was a good thing.
But also I do remember when preachers would get up and hit the
topics that I was convicted on.
You know what I would do?
I would just.
I wouldn't really physically do it because that would be kind
of weird.
But I wanted to just put my fingers in my ears and just go, I
don't want to hear this.
I don't want to hear this.
I don't want to be responsible for this.
And sometimes we don't do that physically, but sometimes Spiritually,
we just say, you know what?
I just don't want to think about that.
But the truth is that when that conviction comes, that's a good
thing, because that's God trying to call out to you.
That's God pricking your heart.
And you have to make that decision on whether or not you're
going to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit.
Are you going to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit's call in your
life for conviction?
All of us want the comfort.
The Bible says that the Holy Spirit is a comforter, and we, hopefully,
you strive for the comfort of the Spirit.
That's an exciting thing, to be comforted by the Spirit.
If you've never experienced that, folks, that's something that
is undeniably a miracle, that you can feel the comfort of the Spirit
in the midst of a difficulty, and we welcome that.
But a lot of times, we don't welcome the conviction of the Spirit.
And the conviction of the Spirit is what leads us to a place
of comfort, because we need to get that right.
God chastises.
He disciplines his own.
And if there's an individual, and I'm gonna go out on a limb here,
and I'm gonna say, if there's a Christian that says, you know what?
I haven't felt the Holy Spirit's conviction in a very, very
long time, there is an issue there.
There is a problem there.
A little while back, I don't know what happened to me, but I must
have hurt something in my back that made my right pinky go numb.
I could not feel my pinky.
And it was the weirdest thing.
It was like two weeks, and I kept saying, like, man, I just don't
feel my pinky.
And Alicia was like, oh, you probably tweaked something in your
back.
And I'm like, yeah.
So all of a sudden, I would just keep hitting it and bumping
it and getting it cut and bruised, and I was like, I'm not
even feeling this.
Eventually, I got the feeling back, and I started, man, why do
I keep hurting my pinkies?
Because I was so used to not feeling anything that I would just
bump it around and not do anything, not care about it, jam
it back.
I didn't, you know.
And then I started feeling that again.
I'm like, wow, that's weird.
That feels different.
And for some of us, the Bible speaks of searing our conscience,
so much so that we don't even feel the conviction of the Spirit
anymore, folks.
That's a dangerous place to be that we have grieved the Holy Spirit
so much that we have now seared our conscience to the fact
that when the Holy Spirit is calling us, we go, yeah, I just,
I'm complacent.
I don't care.
The Bible says that is the characteristic of these people back
at this time is they were so numb to the call of God to be repentant,
that they had just been so set in their ways that God says, I have
to wake you up.
And so please, if anything, be sensitive to the preaching of the
Word of God.
Be sensitive to what the word of God is leading you to do.
The Bible says that when that conviction comes, that is a time
to embrace and repent and submit.
Because remember that principle.
God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
I don't know about you, but I want God's grace.
I'm desperate for God's grace.
I need God's grace every single day.
And so how do I find that grace?
By humility.
In saying I admit that I am wrong God.
First John, chapter one, verse nine.
If you confess your sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our
sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
That doesn't mean that we just keep getting resaved over and over
and over again.
What that means is that yes, I'm saved and yes, I am a child of
God, but yet there is something in my relationship with
God that I have driven a divide in, in my life.
It's like, I use this analogy a lot with Micah.
I can pick on Micah, cause he's not here.
Micah's my nine year old son.
And you know, I know that he loves me and he knows that I love
him.
He knows that nothing can change in the fact that I'm his dad.
But there have been times where I've gotten onto him and he's
gotten in trouble and he's gotten so mad that he goes, I'm not
talking to you, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna turn around and
go somewhere.
All right.
There has been a break in our fellowship, but there's not a break
in our relationship.
Right?
And so in the relationship, I am his dad, he is my son.
But he has turned his back because he's mad at me.
And there needs to be that restoration.
And so sometimes as Christians, it's not that we lose
our salvation, it's because we are so upset with something that
God is doing or we're so focused on what we're doing that
we have turned our backs against him.
He's waiting for that Repentance.
He's waiting for that relationship.
But we have turned and we need to come back.
And that's what biblical revival really is.
Biblical revival is not when we go out and get a tent and a preacher
yells really loud at us.
That can happen at a revival.
Okay, I'm not.
I'm not opposed to getting under a tent.
I like tent meetings.
I'm not opposed to a preacher getting a little animated.
Animated.
I'm not opposed to doing extra music.
But that in and of itself is not the revival.
The revival is what happens in our heart.
Revival starts with repentance.
Revival starts with, I need to change what I'm doing to get back
to a refreshment and a renewal in my love for God.
That is revival.
Revival is not more people.
Now, more people can be a result of revival, but revival is
something that happens in the heart of the individual, between
God and the child of God.
And so what we can see here in Zephaniah is that God is pursuing
them, but he's also warning them of the dangers of rejection,
rejecting the conviction.
And so what we see in verses 14 through 16, and this will be the
last thing we look at here tonight, is the description of the
intensity of the judgment.
Verse 14.
The great day of the Lord is near.
It is near and hasteth greatly.
Even the voice of the day of the Lord, the mighty man, shall cry
there bitterly.
Man, I don't know if you just caught that, but what does it say
there?
It says, in God's judgment, even the voice, the day of the Lord,
the mighty man, shall cry there bitterly.
Doesn't matter how strong that we are, how powerful that we think
we are, God will bring in his judgment, wrath upon everyone, and
everybody will feel that.
And so what I can see here is that it doesn't matter how much money
you have, it doesn't matter how much power you have, it doesn't
matter how much position you have.
Ultimately, God's judgment will reach us in a place that we
will feel.
Verse 15.
That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day
of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a
day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of the trumpet and
alarm against the fenced cities, against the high towers.
And I will bring distress upon men that they shall walk like blind
men because they have sinned against the Lord.
It shows the reason.
God's not arbitrarily just doing this because he doesn't like
these people.
It's because of their sin.
And their blood shall be poured out as dust and their flesh
as the dung.
Neither there's in this man.
Catch this in verse 18.
Because there's the certainty of judgment.
And then he says, you know what?
In judgment, there's nothing that you can do.
Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them
in the day of the Lord's wrath.
There will be people.
There has been people throughout history that have claimed,
hey, you know what?
I've got enough money.
I can fight this, right?
When I stand before God, or if, you know, if God's judging me,
I can say, you know, I have enough.
I can buy my way out of this.
You can't buy your way out of God's judgment.
You can't use your silver and gold.
You can't use your power.
You can't use your persuasion to get away from the Lord's wrath.
It says, but the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of
his jealousy.
And I'm thankful that I serve a jealous God.
I know that sometimes people see jealousy as a negative thing.
But remember God.
Remember his defining attribute.
His defining attribute is his holiness.
And so when God is jealous, he's perfectly jealous.
And what that means is that God doesn't want us to go around
and share our love with other people.
It's the same thing.
Like, I'm jealous for my wife.
And the concept, like, okay, I love my wife.
I don't want to share her with anybody else.
Okay?
There's nothing wrong with that.
I think that's biblical, right?
That.
That's that healthy jealousy, right?
It's not jealousy.
Like, well, I'm jealous of that person's getting good.
And that's a selfish jealousy.
And so God is jealous over his children because he doesn't want
his children going to Moloch and going to these pagan gods.
He doesn't want them to go to the world.
He doesn't want them to go in their own power.
He wants them to see him for who he is and to experience that
love.
And so it says, they're devoured by the fire of his jealousy.
For he shall make even a speedy riddance of all them that
dwell in the land.
And so this speaks to this idea that no matter what we think
we have in our own strength, men might trust in silver and gold,
but it will not do them any good in the day of God's judgment.
When we stand before God, we cannot appeal to how much money we
have, what positions we had within the church, whatever it is,
we cannot stand before Him.
The only thing that can stand on our account is the blood of Jesus
Christ.
That's the only thing that matters.
Because you know that in Matthew, chapter seven, what happens?
You guys know the story.
There are all these people standing in front of Jesus, and these
people are getting judged.
And they're like, wait, I did things for you.
I cast out demons.
I prophesied in your name.
And he says, depart from me.
Right?
I didn't know you.
You're a worker of iniquity.
What was the difference?
He didn't know them.
There wasn't a.
And it's not that God doesn't know these people.
He knows them intellectually in his omniscience.
He's saying, I don't know you personally.
And so that's the only distinction at the end of the day,
it's the blood of Jesus Christ on our account.
That is what we can stand on when it comes to our hope and our
faith.
And so I would encourage you to think about that not just for
your own life, but for the way that we deal with other people around
us, how we share our faith with people.
Does God want us to be holy people?
Yes.
But it's the heart of it.
It's the heart of holiness.
The heart of holiness is that God has done this for me, and I'm
responding in repentance and in humility.
And that's all of what chapter two is about.
We're going to get into our study in chapter two.
And it's the desire of God that we seek him, that we seek after
Him.
And I would encourage you to never lose your desire to seek after
God.
The moment we get into that place of complacency is the moment
that we fall into that delusion that.
Remember at the very beginning that deceitfulness.
And what I would tell you is this.
We have to.
And you'll hear this phrase over and over again in my preaching
because it's infiltrated my own life and it's helped me understand
why sometimes I go astray.
And it's this, think biblically about things sometimes.
I know the theological truth, but I don't think about it biblically.
I take it from the perspective of, I know the Bible says this, but
this is different in my situation.
I would encourage you to think about everything through the lens
of Scripture.
And what does that mean for me today?
What that means for me today is this.
As I come into a place in my life where I might say, you know
what?
Trust my heart.
Right?
I'm gonna trust my heart.
You Know, I'm gonna use a silly analogy.
It's this, like, maybe you're watching a movie, and the main character
at the end of the story says, you know what I'm gonna do?
I'm gonna go to my friend and he's gonna give me this advice.
And the friend goes up to him and says, just trust your heart.
Trust your heart and everything will be fine.
And at the end of the movie, the person trusts their heart and
they come out on top and everything works out.
And what we could be tempted to do is think, well, if it worked
for that person on Netflix or whatever movie you're watching, then
that must be able to work for me.
And I know this is silly, but you guys see how this worldly wisdom
seeps in.
And so we start thinking, I know the Bible says this, but it
worked for that.
And so therefore, what I'm going to do is I'm going to trust
my heart.
What does the Bible say about that?
Well, thinking biblically, the Bible says that our heart is wicked,
it's deceitful, it's going to lie to us because our heart wants
what the heart wants.
And that's the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the
pride of life.
And so, just in that little simple conversation, that simple
analogy, we can see how something from the world can infiltrate
our minds and sound good, but it's not, because it's not thinking
biblically.
So we go back to repentance.
Let's think about repentance and judgment.
If I start telling myself, well, everything's okay because I
don't see the world on fire right now, maybe some of you are
like, I think the world is on fire.
But maybe in your own life, you might say, everything's going
okay, I must be okay.
The truth is, is that it's sometimes when we least expect in
our lives that we can fall into the trap of complacency.
Because I'm hoping that most of you are not struggling with BAAL
worship.
If you are struggling with BAAL worship, come talk to me after
the service.
We need to have an intervention or Moloch.
Okay?
Either one of those might be getting you in trouble here.
But here's the thing.
So a lot of times it's not that, but sometimes it's.
And sometimes it seeps in very, very subtly.
We start to make a little bit of a compromise.
We allow the worldly ways.
We wear the foreign apparel.
Now, I'm not talking about, like, foreign apparel.
Like, we have our international meal and people dress
up.
I'M not talking about that.
I'm talking about the apparel of the world, right?
And we try to look like the world enough just to get into that
system and just get enough of that.
And the Bible says, hey, you know what?
Don't be the way of the world.
And so that might be a temptation for you.
You might say, you know what?
I've allowed the world's ways.
I've worn the foreign apparel.
I've allowed myself to get to a place where I try to be a little
bit like the world and a little bit like what God tells me
to be.
But then it might be this, it might be that you are that person.
That's.
Maybe you're not literally a fish merchant or a silver merchant,
but you've allowed your possessions to grip you, to hold
you in.
You know, it's not wrong to have something.
It's wrong if that something has you.
And so I would encourage you to think about that materialism in
your life.
Man, I struggle with that.
I can be honest with you guys.
I'm always honest with you guys.
I try to be honest with you guys.
And I try to be as transparent as I can be as a pastor.
Sometimes it's hard when I'm driving through my neighbor and I
see my neighbor gets this new car.
It's like, I want that.
Why can't I have that?
Or I see a house come up on the market and I go, I want that
bigger house.
I want that nicer thing.
And that materialism can seep into my life.
And without me even knowing, that's what my lifeblood is, that's
what I desire.
Well, if I could just have this, I'll be happy.
I'm going to tell you every single time in my life, when I have
obtained something that I thought I want, it might have been
good for a moment and then it fell off.
It's like, what?
I want more.
I want something different.
I want something better.
That's what that's talking about there with those merchants.
They just wanted more and they wanted more, and they just kept consuming
and desiring.
Folks die to the material desires.
Is it wrong to have material things?
No.
Jesus had, you know, clothes and food.
He didn't have a house.
But we know at least at that time, Jesus had to take in certain
things.
And there was, you know, they had money, they had to buy food.
And so there wasn't anything wrong with having something.
But it's that idea of desiring materialism before anything else.
And then we see, I think, the group of People that we all probably
fall into the most is that complacent group, that group that
just isn't affected by God's word.
It isn't affected by God's teaching.
And we just say, you know, it'll be okay, it'll be okay.
When is pastor gonna get done?
My football team's on at 1:00.
We gotta get out of here.
We gotta get food.
I mean, I've been there, I've been sitting in a service and all
I could think about is what I was gonna eat after the service.
I'm like, oh, where are we going to eat today?
I can't wait for that now.
Not so much anymore.
I'm kind of distracted during the preaching, but back when I was
in the pews, that's sometimes what I would think about.
And the truth is that Satan will not always use just out and
out evil things to distract us.
He'll just use things that we like and he will distract us with
that.
Fathers, he'll distract you in how you're raising your children.
Wives will distract you on how you're raising your children.
It, it'll be all the way across the board.
He's trying to get us to keep our eyes off of the thing that matters.
Now we have an election coming up, okay?
And everyone's waiting their bated breath about what, you know,
we're going to say about this.
I'm going to say this.
I think you should get involved.
I.
This is my personal preference.
Vote how God is leading you to vote.
Be involved.
Don't just be a bystander, okay?
That's my opinion.
You could have a different opinion.
I'm not going to tell you who to vote for, but I'm going to tell
you to vote for the way that God leads you to vote and according
to his word.
But I will say this, I will say this.
Politics can become a distraction.
I'm not saying that it is a distraction in and of itself, but
it can be a distraction.
And so what we have to do is we have to deal with it and think
about it.
What do we say biblically?
Think about it biblically.
Now I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell you for the most part,
I can tell you one thing.
There will be a lot of people next week, or however long it takes,
there will be a lot of people that are going to be upset.
That's one thing I can say very clearly in our country that
I feel like I'm very confident I'll be right there.
Will be a lot of people upset.
And the truth is, one way or the other, people are going to be
upset.
And what I would tell you to do is pray.
Pray for the Lord to work.
But what I will say is that understand that our world is not
shaken.
If somebody is somewhere that we don't agree with our King of kings
and our Lord of Lords is Jesus Christ, there are people that we
can vote for.
There are people that we can trust.
There are people that we can say, you know what?
I think that they're better here or better there.
But what I will tell you is that Jesus Christ is the one that
we look to.
And so, again, this is not a message to say, you, you better go
do this, you better go do that.
But I will say, and I would encourage you to be a part of this,
to speak the truth of the word of God.
And so this is always going to be my guide because this will never
fail me.
The people have failed me.
People have failed me.
My possessions have failed me.
Everything.
My health has failed me.
And so what do we do?
We point the truth to what has never failed.
And the Bible says, the grass will fail.
The grass will fade, the flesh will fail, but the word of God will
stand forever.
And I will tell you that the word of God is where we set everything
in.
So repentance.
What does that mean?
That means that when the Word of God is spoken to me, I listen.
And so I would encourage you to do that, not just this week, but
for the rest of your life.
And know that as God judges, he also offers.
He offers forgiveness.
He offers grace.
But that only comes to those that humble themselves in submission
to the Lord.
So we're going to look at next week what it means to seek the Lord
in the midst of judgment.
Thank you again for listening to the Middletown Baptist Church
podcast.
I hope that this sermon has been a blessing for you.
If you would like to find out more information about our church
or this sermon, you can find us at middletownbaptistchurch.org
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Thank you so much.
God bless.
Have a wonderful day.