The Work of Prayer

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Ezra chapter 9. I’ll give you just a second to turn there. Last week we talked about revival in Acts chapter 2.

And lest we leave with the wrong impression about what revival is, we went through the whole chapter and we looked at what happened in the early church on the day of Pentecost. And we saw how they were both baptized and filled with the Holy Spirit at the same time they began to preach the gospel in languages that they didn’t know, that people around them from different parts of the world said, This is amazing. This is incredible. We’re hearing the gospel in our own language, and these people are Galileans.

They don’t speak our languages. And as a result, 3,000 people, as a result of their preaching the gospel, and Peter’s straightening them out when they thought these people are drunk, and he began to preach the gospel too. As a result of Peter straightening them out and the Holy Spirit getting a hold of people, 3,000 people were added to the church that day.

It was an incredible day. But then it goes on to talk about all the things the church did after that. It talks about their prayer, their worship, their study of the Word, their continuance in the Apostles’ doctrine.

It talks about their care for the poor. It talks about all the things that they did that a church is supposed to do. And lest there be any confusion, ladies and gentlemen, the revival didn’t take place in the beginning of Acts chapter 2.

That was just when they were filled with the Holy Spirit. I say just as though it wasn’t something amazing. That was amazing.

But it was the filling of the Holy Spirit that led to the real revival. Revival is when the Holy Spirit gets a hold of us and leads us as God’s people to do what we know we’re supposed to do. That’s when revival takes place. It’s not simply gifts and manifestations and all these things that people think of today with revival, amazing things happening.

It’s when the Spirit of God gets a hold of the people of God and leads us to follow God the way we know we’re supposed to. I’ve seen videos on the Internet, maybe some of you have seen them too, so-called revivals in different parts of our country that have been going on for years, where they will have people bark like dogs, laugh uncontrollably, where the preacher says the Holy Spirit told me to kick that woman in the face and she’d be healed. And folks, yeah, I heard somebody gasp.

I did too when I first saw it. Kicked a woman in the face and said God’s Spirit told him to do it. Folks, and this is what’s being called by so many churches throughout our country and what is being hailed by the media as a revival. It’s not a revival, it’s a circus.

Revival happens when the Holy Spirit really gets a hold of us and leads us to live out Christianity, to be the church that he’s called us to be. The revival took place at the end of Acts chapter 2 when the church, it said when everybody noticed what was going on in the church because of their prayer, their study, their fellowship, their love for one another, their care for the poor. Revival takes place when the Holy Spirit gets a hold of us and leads us to do what we know we’re supposed to do.

The same thing was true in the book of Ezra. Ezra is an interesting character from the Old Testament. When I say character, I don’t mean that he’s made up.

He’s just, you know, how you’ll say somebody’s a character. He’s an interesting character from the Old Testament, one that’s not talked about a lot. He’s a priest that worked in Jerusalem around the same time as Nehemiah going back to rebuild the walls.

What had happened leading up here to Ezra chapter 9 is that if you’ll remember back in your history, and just a refresher if you don’t know what happened, We all pretty well know about David being king of Israel. When he died, his son Solomon took over and ruled well for the most part, but also did some things he was not supposed to. When he died, there was a civil war.

His son took the throne and oppressed the people so badly that ten of the tribes split off and formed their own kingdom. And this went on for about 300 years until God said, enough with the northern kingdom, these ten tribes that broke off, because they were so wicked they had no good king ever. It was wickedness for 300 years.

And God sent the Assyrians in to come and take them captive, come and take them prisoner. There were occasionally good kings in the southern kingdom, Judah, that because of them and because of them leading the people to follow God, God gave the kingdom of Judah a little more time to straighten themselves out, and they never did, never did completely. And so about 200 years after the northern kingdom fell, God sent in the Babylonians, and they came and took the people of Judah captive.

That’s where we get the stories of Daniel in the lion’s den. It’s where we get Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego walking through the fire. These took place because they were in captivity under the Babylonians and the Persians.

And at the end of this, see, God could have easily wiped the people of Judah out because of their sin, and He would have been completely right to do so. He would be right to wipe all of us out because of our sin. And yet God, in His mercy, had promised a Savior, had promised a Messiah, and he promised that the Messiah would come through the bloodline of the people of Judah.

And so because of that promise, he preserved them. He sent them off into slavery for 70 years. And yet he brought them back to Jerusalem, to a holy city that was in disrepair.

Nehemiah had to come back and rebuild the walls. The temple was in a shambles. And they had to rebuild the temple.

They had to clean up the temple. The whole country was in disrepair. Nehemiah wept over it in the beginning of the book of Nehemiah, not just for the physical condition of Jerusalem, but for the spiritual condition of the nation.

They still had not completely gotten rid of the sins that caused God to punish them in the first place. And now at the end of this 70-year period, they were coming back to Jerusalem, and again, fixing up the walls, rebuilding the holy city, cleaning up the temple, and yet there was still sin to be dealt with. Because the city outwardly looked good.

They had rebuilt God’s holy city, and it looked good. but the hearts of the people still were not right before God. And Ezra chapter 9 says, Now when these things were done, the princes came to me, this is Ezra speaking, the princes came to me saying, the people of Israel and the priests and the Levites have not separated themselves from the people of the lands, doing according to their abominations, even the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites.

For they have taken of their daughters for themselves and for their sons, so that the holy seed have mingled themselves with the people of those lands. Yea, the hand of the princes and the rulers hath been chief in this trespass. And what he says is the people come and tell Ezra there’s a problem among the people.

They have not separated themselves from the people and the practices of the lands around them. And the men of Judah have taken to themselves wives of these foreign pagan kingdoms. And it was a problem because God had told them not to. Folks, it’s not because God was racist or God is racist or because God hated these people and said, it wasn’t because God was evil and vindictive.

God told the people of Judah, God told the people of Israel throughout their history not to mix too much and not to intermarry with the people of the foreign pagan kingdoms because their hearts were far from God and because their practices were far from God and because they would corrupt the people of Israel as opposed to the people of Israel leading them in the right direction. We talked several weeks ago on a Wednesday night about King Solomon. King Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived.

He prayed and asked God for wisdom so he could rule well, and God gave him wisdom. King Solomon’s problem came. I can’t remember the number now.

Does anybody remember something around a thousand? King Solomon’s problem came when he decided to marry or take us his concubines, close to a thousand women from foreign pagan countries. And I told you then, I’m wise enough to know that one wife is all I can handle.

And I’m sure you men would agree as well. One wife is all we can handle. And God had told him not to multiply wives to himself, not to take these pagan women as his wives.

And he did it anyway. And what God warned about came to pass because Solomon, it wasn’t enough just to marry these women, but in order to make them happy, he started building pagan altars throughout the kingdom. He started in his household by allowing shrines and things, and then it came to building altars.

And then he began to worship at them too. And before you know it, the whole nation was turned to idolatry. So it wasn’t that God said, oh, these people are less than human.

God was trying to protect the people of Israel and said, don’t take these foreign people into your tribes. Don’t marry these women. It wasn’t the fact that they were foreign.

It was the fact that they had rejected God. And he said, don’t do it. And yet Israel throughout their history said, we know better.

We don’t care what God says. Maybe they wouldn’t say it in those exact words. But we don’t care what God says.

We’re going to do what we want to do. And it led to all kinds of problems. So what’s the problem? First of all, God will not share his worship with anyone else.

God will not be worshipped as second. God will not even be worshipped as first on the list. God must be the whole list. He also refuses to be worshipped in the wrong way. You see, not only would they build these altars and these idols to other gods, they would often say, well, don’t we need something to represent our God?

And so they would build idols that they thought in their minds represented the true God. In their minds, they weren’t doing anything wrong. But God had said, don’t build any graven images or bow down to them.

The first two commandments deal with this very fact. And on top of the fact of God being a jealous God and not willing to share his worship, the practices of these pagan worshipers were atrocious. Just to name one of them, they worshiped a God called Molech.

There were several gods like this, but one of these tribes worshipped a god called Molech, who was a god of fire, and in order to appease him, the pagan people would actually sacrifice their children by burning them alive on the altar. And it says throughout the Old Testament that God found that absolutely disgusting, as I’m sure you all do as well. And yet the Israelites came along and said, well, these people aren’t so bad, and they began to practice and worship just like them.

So this was a big deal that they had intermarried with these other nations it led them to worship false gods. It led them to worship God in false ways, and it led them to do unspeakable things. And Ezra and some other leaders were brokenhearted over this, especially when they realized that it was the political leaders, it was the princes and the chief people of the kingdom who were most to blame in this.

He says that they have been chief in this trespass. The princes and rulers have been chief in this trespass. They actually led the people to do these things.

Verse 3 says, and when I heard this thing, again Ezra speaking, I rent my garment, I tore my clothes and my mantle and plucked off the hair of my head and of my beard and sat down astonished or appalled. He was so upset when he heard these things that he tore his robes and he began to pull out his hair and he just sat down appalled at what was going on among God’s people. Verse 4, then were assembled unto me everyone that trembled at the words of the God of Israel because of the transgression of those that had been carried away, and I sat astonished until the evening sacrifice.

Then all the people who feared God got together and sat down and trembled because they believed what God said about these practices, and they trembled at the evil that had taken place in their land, and they just sat there appalled until the time for the evening sacrifices. And at the evening sacrifice I rose up from my heaviness, and having rent my garment and my mantle, I fell upon my knees and spread out my hands unto the Lord my God. When he’s finally able to stand, he throws himself down again on his face, on his hands and knees before God.

He humbles himself, he gets as low as he possibly can get, and said, O my God, I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to thee. Ezra had not married foreign women, but on behalf of God’s people of whom he was one of the spiritual leaders, he was ashamed to even look up to God. For our iniquities, our iniquities, because even though he hadn’t married pagan women, he was still a sinner as well.

Our iniquities are increased over our head, and our trespass is grown up into the heavens. We say sometimes, I’ve had it up to here. I’ve had it up to here.

Talking about our irritation. Folks, with their sin, they were past being up to here. It was over their heads.

They were swallowed up. They were drowning in their own sin. Verse 7, and to give us a nail in this holy place that our God may lighten our eyes and give us a little reviving in our bondage.

He said, grace. It wasn’t anything they had earned or deserved. It wasn’t anything they were worthy of, but God, because of his grace, showed a little bit of mercy, allowed them to survive, allowed some of them to return to Jerusalem, and it says, gave them a nail.

I read that and I thought, what is that? Why would God give them a nail? That word there is what they would use for a tent peg, a tent spike, to stake it into the ground.

And a lot of times the Israelites had wandered and lived in tents. And so God had allowed them to return to a place where they could settle down. When he says, give them a nail in this holy place, God had allowed them to return there and settle, that he may lighten our eyes.

He might help them see again and give us a little reviving in our bondage. God had been already, just by letting them leave from Babylon, leave from Persia and come back to the holy city, God had already been more merciful to them than they deserved. Ezra said of himself and his people.

For we were in bondage, yet our God hath not forsaken us in our bondage, but hath extended mercy unto us in the sight of the kings of Persia to give us a reviving, to set up the house of our God, and to repair the desolations thereof, and to give us a wall in Judah and Jerusalem. And now, O our God, what shall we say after this? For we have forsaken thy commandments.

See, many might have said it was, oh, the kings of Persia, they were so nice, they let us go. And Ezra here recognizes that it was the hand of God that moved on the kings of Persia and said, let my people go back to their city. That God was in control of all of this.

That it was the mercy of God that he remembered his people even in their bondage and sent them back to Jerusalem. And he says, in spite of this, we’ve still disobeyed your commandments. What can we say now?

Which thou hast commanded, verse 11, by thy servants the prophets, saying, the land unto which ye go to possess it is an unclean land with the filthiness of the people of the lands with their abominations which have filled it from one end to another with their uncleanness. Now therefore give not your daughters unto their sons, neither take their daughters unto your sons, nor seek their peace or their wealth forever, that ye may be strong, and eat the good of the land, and leave it for an inheritance for your children forever. God had been telling them from the beginning that the land that they were sent to, the promised land, was at that point an evil place.

It was full of people who had rejected God, who were involved in all sorts of sinful practices, and they were supposed to remain separate from those things. And yet they didn’t do it. He says in verse 13, And after all that has come upon us for our evil deeds and for our great trespass, seeing that thou, our God, has punished us less than our iniquities deserve, and has given us such deliverance as this, should we again break thy commandments and join in affinity with the people of those abominations?

Wouldst not thou be angry with us until thou hast consumed us, so that there should be no remnant nor escaping? He said, you’ve already been gracious to us, God, and yet we went back and we’re committing the same sins over and over. Can we continue?

And he’s not actually asking permission. This is a rhetorical question. Can we continue, God, to spit in your face and you not be so angry that you annihilate us?

And by the way, he admits God would have been right to do so. He says, God, you’ve not even punished our sins as much as we deserve. O Lord God of Israel, thou art righteous, for we remain yet escaped as it is this day.

Behold, we are before thee in our trespasses, for we cannot stand before thee because of this. And he admits that it’s just by God’s hand that they have survived and that they have gone back to their land. And he admits that they are so wicked in their own hearts that they can’t even stand before God.

Chapter 10, we’re not going to go through the whole chapter, but just look at a few verses here. Chapter 10, verse 1, Now when Ezra had prayed, what we’ve been reading up to this point has been Ezra’s prayer to God. When Ezra had prayed, and when he had confessed, weeping and casting himself down before the house of God, There assembled unto him out of Israel a very great congregation of men and women and children, for the people wept very sore.

After Ezra prayed, after Ezra prayed to God for and about his people and their sins, the Bible said when he finally was able to get up, the people gathered themselves to Ezra. Maybe not all of them. The great multitude of the people gathered themselves to Ezra, and it says they wept sore.

It means they wept bitterly. They cried hot tears. And ladies and gentlemen, the reason they wept is because they realized their sin at that point before God.

And I won’t read on any further. I’d invite you, if you’d like to, to go read it for yourself. But later on in chapter 10, Ezra calls the people together, and the priests call the people together and say, you have sinned against God because we’ve just come out of captivity, we’ve just come out of enslavement, and we come back here, and you’re going again marrying the foreign people, And not only that, you’re adopting their ways, you’re adopting their gods, their detestable practices, you’re doing all these things again after God just finished dealing with us about this.

And it’s wrong. And the people said in verse 12, Then all the congregation answered and said with a loud voice, As thou hast said, so must we do. And what he had said was that they needed to go back and obey God.

They needed to cleanse the land of the wicked practices. They needed to return themselves to the worship of the one true God. They needed to return themselves to loyalty to him and to him alone, not just him at the head of a list of others.

And when they realized their sin before God, they said, as you’ve said, so must we do. And they go on to discuss a little further about how they’re supposed to do it. But folks, at that moment, the heart of the nation was right before God.

They discussed, how are we going to do this? How are we going to make it work? But they wanted to do what God expected them to do.

And as we see later on in the book, if you want to read in the book of Nehemiah, At this point, a revival breaks out in the nation of Judah. A revival breaks out in the country. It breaks out because they began to put away their pagan practices that they had adopted from the people around them.

They began to separate themselves the way God said to do. They began to turn toward the Lord. They rediscovered the books of God’s law.

They rediscovered the Scriptures, and they began to read them out loud, and the people wept and sought God. Ladies and gentlemen, there was a revival in Jerusalem that had not taken place probably since the days of King Josiah some 200 years earlier, I believe. And it started because Ezra prayed.

It started because Ezra prayed. We’ve been talking about revival for the last few weeks because, as I’ve told you, if we want to reach people in Fayetteville, if we want to be faithful to everything God has called us to do, we could very easily go out and start all kinds of programs. We could very easily try to change things up. We could very easily try to spend all kinds of money and try to do things that where our hearts are right, but it’s not necessarily things God has called us to do.

It’s just the things we think are good ideas. But ladies and gentlemen, if we want a faithful church, if we want a church that is burdened to go share the gospel with the people around us, if we want a church that’s generous in our support of missionaries, If we want a church that loves one another, and I’m not saying we don’t have those things, but if we really want the fullness of what we could have. If we want a church that prays like we mean it.

If we want to have a church that fellowships together where we’re not just people who sit next to each other in a pew three times a week, but we really are a part of each other’s lives. If we want the kind of church that’s described in the Bible, if we want to be the kind of church that does the things that God calls us to do, we need a revival. As I said a few weeks ago, starting things and new projects and all of those things, I think, are great if they come from where God is leading. But to try to turn things around, to try to build some kind of spiritual movement, to cause something to happen by starting projects and programs is getting backwards.

We need to go out and do things because God has moved us, not to do things to try to get God to move among us. And ladies and gentlemen, our revival, I believe, will begin with prayer. We’ve got to recognize our need for revival. For revival to happen, as we talked about two weeks ago, we’ve got to recognize that something is either wrong or something is missing.

And there can be good churches in need of revival. Needing revival doesn’t necessarily mean that we have wandered into open sin to the extent of the Israelites. But even sometimes among God’s people, there’s a fire that’s lacking. There’s a desire to serve God that’s lacking.

We’ve first got to recognize that something is missing. And we’ve got to realize we can’t do it ourselves, that we’re completely reliant on God and His Spirit, as we learned last week. And knowing that something is lacking and only God can provide it, our only option in doing something about it is to pray and to seek God and to beseech Him to do something among us.

Ezra didn’t immediately go to the people and say, you’ve got a problem, you need to straighten it out. Let’s start a program where we get rid of the foreigners. Let’s start a program where we all try to do better.

Ezra got on his face before God. I love that. Most of us in here probably pray with some regularity.

But some of the times in my life that I have been most moved, that I’ve been most refreshed after prayer, that I’ve seen things happen, have been the few occasions where I’ve been so moved about a need gotten on my face. It’s easy to stand here and pray and just, it’s nothing. I shouldn’t say it’s nothing, but it’s easy to pray that way.

But to be so burdened over something that it drives us to our knees, drives us to our face, to cry out before God, something that comes from the heart. And Ezra got on his face, and when he did so, he humbled himself before God. The prayer for revival includes humbling ourselves before a holy God.

I mentioned a few minutes ago, most of the revivals that take place in this country or that are on YouTube or on the news or whatever in the newspapers will have these evangelists come out and they’re very full of themselves and think what great people they are. And they live in big fancy houses, drive limousines or have somebody drive them in a limousine. And folks having somebody who thinks how great they are come and talk to us about can be as great as them will not lead to revival. Revival begins when men and women get a vision, get a picture of how holy God is, of how righteous, how just, how powerful God is.

And as a result, we fall on our faces and we humble ourselves before God because we realize that something is lacking and He’s the only one who can supply it. As we pray for revival, folks, I know the Bible says that we can go boldly before the throne of grace, but I at the same time would not presume to go and tell God what he is and is not going to do in our church. We as a church, individually and collectively, need to humble ourselves before God and beg him to do what only he can do.

Ezra fell on his face before God. He was so heavy with the burden of his sin, it says he blushed, he told God he blushed even to look up at him. We’ve got to first humble ourselves.

Stop trying to make things happen in the church on our own, but trust God to do it. This idea, though, is so ingrained in us that we’ve got to make it happen. Nobody said it here, but the idea creeps into churches that, oh, the pastor can fix everything.

The pastor can make everything happen. And I hear it when we go to meetings and, oh, how are things at your church? Oh, well, we’re running 500 since I came there.

We’re not running 500 since I came here, obviously. Or, oh, brother so-and-so, so great. Oh, he’s baptized this number of people.

and we talk about it as though growth in the church happens because the pastor came there, because the pastor did it, or so-and-so is on staff. And I can probably hinder what God wants to do here. I can probably be a bad influence.

But folks, I believe that if there’s a movement of God in a church, it really is a movement of God and not the pastor, not the committees that cause things to happen. And I’m not saying we’re not supposed to work for the Lord, that we’re not supposed to care and we’re not supposed to contribute, But revival begins by humbling ourselves before God and asking Him to do what only He can do instead of trying to make it happen ourselves. Second, a prayer for revival includes confession of sin.

It includes confession of sin. It’s easy to go to God and say, God, will you do something among us? God, will you grow us?

God, why aren’t you doing what we want you to do? And all the time there’s something among us that hasn’t been dealt with. And Ezra was able to get up and speak to the people with a clear conscience and not hung up on what’s going on in his own life, but speak to them the Word of God clearly and with compassion and with conviction because he had already dealt with the sin in his own heart.

He dealt with his sins and insofar as he contributed to the sins of the nation, he had confessed that too. And he confessed on their behalf. If we wonder why God isn’t at work in our personal lives, or our life as a church, we’ve got to ask ourselves, is there some way that we’ve wandered away from what God has expected from us?

If I don’t feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be at spiritually, is there unconfessed sin in my heart? As a church, are there things that we need to confess? As a group, are there things we need to repent of?

And I’m not talking about we need to have an inquisition and say, well, you’re doing such and such, come up and answer. I’m talking about are there things that we need to go to God about and confess? God, I have not been following you in this area.

God, we as a church have not been following you in this area. God, we haven’t been loving one another the way we’re supposed to. God, we’ve not been praying for the lost the way we’re supposed to.

Folks, what are the things we as a church, individually and collectively, need to confess before God? When Ezra prayed for God to do something in their midst, he confessed the sin of his nation before God. Prayer for revival includes appealing to God, as I said a moment ago, to do what only He can do.

Ezra recognized when he prayed, throughout his prayer, he recognized that they only existed still as a nation. They only survived. They only drew their next breath because God had allowed it.

I’ve never heard anybody say, God, why weren’t you harder on us? Any of you ever gone through a situation in your life and thought, God, why weren’t you harder? God, punish me more.

No, I don’t think any of us have ever thought that. But that shows us the unique spiritual insight of Ezra to say, God, you went so easy on us. You gave us far less punishment than we deserved.

He recognized that God would have been completely justified in wiping them off the face of the earth because of their sins. And you know what? That goes for each and every one of us.

And no, that’s not just the mean preacher talking about you. I’m talking about me as well. God would be completely justified in stopping my heart right now.

God would have been completely justified in allowing me to go to hell. and yet he extends grace to us just as he extended to the people of Judah in Ezra’s day. The fact that they lived and could go back to Jerusalem, the fact that they could straighten out the problems with the foreign pagan practices, the fact that they could get right with God was testament to God doing what only he could do.

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we as a church need to pray for revival. I believe we need to pray for revival like our life depends on it. And it begins with humbling ourselves before God. It includes confessing our sins to God, and it includes appealing to Him to do what only He can do.

If we go out and start a bunch of things and do a bunch of things, we might see a few things happen. But if we want to see real spiritual transformation in people’s lives, if we want to see Christians established and grounded and discipled in the faith, grown into the kinds of believers they need to be, if we want to see the lost world come to know Jesus Christ and their lives and their eternities change, These are not things we can do on our own. We can work, and we can be a part of what God’s doing, but ultimately, it’s Him.

If we want to see a movement of God in this church, why do we think we can make it happen? You don’t have to answer me that, because I’m not even sure I can an

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