Revival Begins with One

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I asked you a few minutes ago to turn to 2 Kings chapter 18. If you haven’t done that already, if you would please, I’d appreciate it. If you’re not familiar with 2 Kings, it’s right after 1 Kings and right before.

. . I wasn’t trying to be a smart mouth.

Sometimes it just comes naturally, I guess. It’s right after 1 Kings and right before Chronicles. So if you’ve not turned there, that’s where it is.

As I’ve looked over this passage this week, it seems familiar. I know I’ve taught on it before. I can’t remember if I’ve taught about Hezekiah here, but even if I have, it hasn’t been on the same topic, so I think we’re still all right.

If you’ve heard the passage before, I say it all the time, every passage has one meaning, but it can have multiple applications. So we’re going to look at the application as far as the life of the church, as far as the life of God’s people today. King Hezekiah.

I won’t give you a whole great deal of background on him. If you know King Hezekiah at all, you probably know him from the story of God telling him through the prophet that he was going to die. And him falling on his face before God and repenting of his sins and really confessing them and promising God that he would serve him if God would just spare him.

And God spared him and gave him 15 more years. That’s the story we most know King Hezekiah for. He was a descendant of King David, King Solomon.

He was a king of Judah. And he ruled over a country that really had trouble making up its mind with who it wanted to serve as far as who God was going to be. It seems like it’s the same story no matter what period of history we talk about from the Old Testament when we talk about, you know, I’ll tell you about what was going on in the time of the judges, what was going on in the time of Josiah, what was going on in the day of Isaiah.

All these different people, and it always seems to come back. I’m starting to think that’s a recurring theme or something throughout the Bible, that God’s people tend to wander. But it doesn’t matter what time period we look at in the Old Testament.

It seems like throughout the bulk of their history, the Israelites really were wavering between two opinions, as Joshua put it. Are they going to serve the one true God, or are they going to serve these others? And when they went to serve these others, it never was, oh, we’re through with this God.

They just sort of added him to the list of all the gods that they were going to serve. You know, for the pagan cultures around them, even later on for the Greeks and Romans, it was nothing to add another God to the mix. My goodness, we already served 35,000 or however many they had.

What’s one more? But God is a jealous God. And he said, I am the Lord.

He said to Isaiah, I am the Lord, that is my name, my glory, I will not give to another. He told them not to worship. He told them in Exodus 20 when he gave the Ten Commandments, Do not worship other gods.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me. He told them not to worship him in the wrong way by building graven images. After years of rereading the story of the golden calf, where Aaron built them the calf out of gold, and Moses came down from the mountain and was angry about it.

The problem was not that they were worshiping false gods. According to my rereading, this is just my opinion, but I’ve come to the conclusion they intended to worship the true God, they just needed something to look at in the process, and God had told them, don’t do that. Because part of his nature is that he’s unseen.

Any kind of image, any kind of picture, any kind of statue cannot capture the majesty of our God, and it only serves to diminish who he is. And so it was the case from the earliest days of Israel that they could not make up their minds about who they were going to serve. And it was no different in the day of King Hezekiah.

He comes to the throne and the country as a whole can’t figure out who it wants to serve. Should we serve these pagan gods and try to serve God as part of that pantheon or should we serve the one true God? 2 Kings 18, verse 1 says, Now it came to pass in the third year of Hosea, the son of Elah, king of Israel, that Hezekiah the son of Ahaz, king of Judah, began to reign.

That’s a lot of information they gave us there. There were two kingdoms, and they said, in such and such a year of the reign of the king of this other kingdom, Hezekiah began to reign. So that’s what’s important for us to know here, is that they’re starting at the beginning of King Hezekiah’s reign.

Twenty and five years old was he when he began to reign, and he reigned twenty and nine years in Jerusalem. I mentioned in the bulletin this morning that several people, not from this church, but several people from our sister churches have mentioned to me how shocked they were when they heard the news that you all had called, what was I, 25 at the time? Maybe 26.

I forget how old I am now. That’s not supposed to happen until later. But they talk about how they were shocked when you all called a 25 or 26-year-old to be your pastor.

And honestly, I was shocked by that too. Some of you have said that before you got to know me, you might have had some misgivings. That would be a frightening thing, the pulpit committee or whoever’s bringing in a 25-year-old.

Oh, my goodness, what are they getting us into? If you think it’s scary, the idea of your church being led by a 25-year-old, imagine turning the country over to a 25-year-old. Think about that.

Think about the 25-year-olds you know as a whole. Would you want to turn the United States over to them? Folks, Judah was in a mess at this point, I think.

They had turned the country over to a 25-year-old king. and he was 25 years old when he began to reign and he reigned 29 years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Abbey, the daughter of Zechariah and he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord according to all that his father David did.

Now this was the redeeming quality for King Hezekiah at this time was that he was a good man. Was that he followed according to the teachings of the Bible as they had it at that time. He worshipped the one true God.

He did what was right in God’s sight and he led the people in the right way. Or at least he led by example. And he did all that his father David did.

And that was probably your saving grace in calling me as well. At 25, I still don’t have a whole lot of life experience, have a whole lot of wisdom, but I do try to follow the Lord and do the right things. That was for them as well.

And no, this is not a message about comparing me to King Hezekiah. I guess I had glossed over that fact until I read it here now. I had never thought about the fact they turned the country over to a 25-year-old, so I just thought I’d share what a mess the country was probably in at that point.

But what made him a good king was not his wisdom, was not his experience, was not the seasoning that he had from years and years of service. It was the fact that he tried to follow the Lord, and that he did all that was right according to what his father David did. And that doesn’t mean David was literally his father.

We’re talking several hundred years later. David was an ancestor of his. It says in verse 4, He removed the high places and break the images, and cut down the groves and break in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made.

For unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it, and he called it Nehushtan. If you’re wondering what all these things mean, it said he removed the high places. And I’ve told you before in different lessons that they would go up and they would set up shrines for worship.

I heard somebody preaching about this on the radio a couple days ago, and I guess he was out of Texas or Oklahoma, someplace flat like I’m used to. And he was talking about, we don’t have these high places. He said, but if you can imagine, they would go up to the tops of the mountains.

And I was driving through Fayetteville and thinking, I don’t have to imagine. I can see this in front of me, what they would be doing. And I guess in my imagination, I could see the smoke coming up from places of worship on the tops of the hills.

Probably it was a controlled burn or something. But I thought to myself, I can picture it. It would be hard to go up on the tops of these mountains and not feel like you’re a little bit closer to God.

Even though we know that’s not true, you would almost feel that. And as the pagan worshipers, they thought, if we could just get closer to God in proximity. And they’d go up on the tops of these mountains and they’d set up shrines and places of worship.

And they would make sacrifices and they would burn incense. And the problem was, they were worshiping false gods in these high places. And they were also worshiping God in ways that he had not told them to do.

Because the first two commandments, as I’ve already said, were to worship the one true God only and to worship him in the right way. And so they would go up in these high places. It says he removed the high places.

It said he broke the images. He broke the images. the statues and things that they would use in their worship.

He tore them apart. He said, you don’t need these. These gods you’re praying to cannot hear you.

They cannot answer you. They’re made of wood and stone. And he tore them apart.

He said, we’re not going to do this anymore. And he cut down the groves. In many of their cultures, they thought groves of trees were sacred things.

Where we used to live in Bethany, one of the big major streets is Council Road. And come to find out it was called Council Road because it led past what used to be called the Council Grove, which was a place where the Indians would go and, one of the tribes, I don’t know which, would go and have their worship and their meetings. This is not something limited to the people of Israel.

Cultures all over the world find something sacred, something spiritual about trees, especially when they grow them in a certain way. And they would have these groves of sacred trees where they would go out and worship. And there are people that still do this today in the United States.

We’ll go out to groves of trees and worship. And he said, we don’t need those. And he had them chopped down.

And he broke in pieces. This is the thing that amazes me the most. Not that he broke it apart, but what was going on. He broke in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made.

Now, I know I’ve taught you on this story. It was probably a Wednesday night, though. When they were wandering in the wilderness in the book of Numbers, The people of Israel began to receive snake bites from what the Bible says were fiery serpents.

And there’s debate among theologians whether that means God sent fire in the form of snakes, that bit them and it did something, or if it was a certain species of snake that had a fiery pattern on it, and it bit and it felt like fire. It really doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t.

Some of the things, I mean, I want to know what the details are in the Bible, but some of the things people spend their time writing and debating about is amazing to me. It really doesn’t matter because we know from the story they were being bitten by these snakes, whatever kind they were, whatever it meant. These snakes were biting them.

It hurt, and they were dying in the wilderness. They had no hope. And so God told Moses to form a snake out of bronze and to put it up on a pole and told the people of Israel that anybody that was bitten by a snake, if they would just look at that serpent, that snake that was put up on a pole, that they would be healed.

It wasn’t anything mystical about the serpent. It wasn’t anything magical about it. There wasn’t anything powerful in the serpent.

It was the fact that if they turned and looked at the serpent, they were believing what God said. And it was their faith that accomplished it. And Jesus even compared himself to the bronze serpent and said, just as the bronze serpent was lifted up in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.

And if I be lifted up from the earth, I’ll draw all men unto myself. this was a picture of Christ it was a picture of Christ being raised up on the cross for our sins it was a picture of sin the very thing that afflicted them being put up there on the cross and of them turning in faith to that and trusting in what God said and being saved from it folks it was a picture of faith and it was a picture of God’s redemption and yet they had taken it and they had turned it into an idol it’s not amazing to me that Hezekiah tore apart the bronze serpent, although you’ve got to be pretty confident you’re doing God’s will to destroy something that you know God told Moses to build. Think about that.

God himself told Moses to build that, and here you are saying, I think we’re done with this thing. That’s a pretty gutsy move. But these people, what amazes me about it is it was such a, looking back, maybe it’s the fact that hindsight is 20-20, but looking at it, we see that it’s such a clear picture of the importance of faith in God’s promises.

And yet they had taken it and used it for idol worship. They worshipped it as though it was a god. I can’t imagine.

And Hezekiah said, that’s it. We’re done with this. For unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it.

And he called it Nehushtan. He trusted in the Lord God of Israel so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah nor any that were before him. He had such a faith and such a trust in the one true God that the Bible says there was no king like him before him or after him.

No king had such faith in God as Hezekiah. For he claimed to the Lord and departed not from following him. Folks, it was not just an inward belief, but it was an inward belief that led him to live differently.

See, to say we have faith means nothing. Just to believe something means nothing. If we really believe what we say we believe, it should cause us to act and live in a certain way.

And his faith was so strong that it led him to cleave to the Lord. It led him to follow the Lord. That word cleave is used in places in the Bible, for example, in the book of Genesis, where it talks about a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

It said he cleaved to the Lord. It’s talking about that kind of relationship, that kind of closeness that God intends for there to be between a husband and a wife. Not the exact same kind of relationship, but this kind of closeness and intimacy that should be between a husband and a wife on a spiritual and emotional level, saying that’s the kind of fellowship it led him to have with God, because his trust in God was that great.

And he followed God. He cleaved to the Lord and departed not from following Him, but kept his commandments, which the Lord commanded Moses. And the Lord was with him, verse 7.

And he prospered whithersoever he went forth, and he rebelled against the king of Assyria and served him not. And he smote the Philistines even unto Gaza and the borders thereof, and from the tower of the watchman to the fenced city. Now what’s the big deal about throwing in the king of Assyria here?

He didn’t say, oh, well, I follow God and I’ve got God on my side now, so we’re going to go out and pick a fight with Assyria. That’s not what he did at all. Throughout this period of history, the kings of Judah and of Israel had been fighting with the pagan countries around them, not because of their pagan worship, but because they were out for glory and power themselves.

And when they would get into trouble, God had told them to trust in Him. God had told them to let Him lead them. And yet the kings of Israel, the kings of Judah, made it their practice, instead of trusting God, to go out and make alliances with pagan kings, which God had said not to do, and they would say, will you help us and can we be in this alliance?

And the pagan kings would say, sure, but you’re going to owe me. And the king of Assyria was one of these that they made alliances with, and God had told them no because they became entangled with Assyria, and they had to do what Assyria wanted, and they had to let Assyria influence them, and Assyria was not a nice place. It was one of the most violent of the ancient cultures, and they worshipped gods completely foreign to our own.

And so such was the strength of Hezekiah’s faith in God that he said, not only are we going to clean things up here. And by the way, if you read into 2 Chronicles chapter 29, I believe, it talks more about the reform Hezekiah made. He cleaned up the temple.

And I don’t mean he just had it swept out. I mean he got rid of the pagan altars and things that were in the temple. He got rid of the unclean things that were dishonoring to God.

He got the priests to get back in line. They began to celebrate the feasts and the sacrifice and the things that they were supposed to do. And the people as a whole, as a nation, turned their hearts back to God as a result of Hezekiah’s leadership.

But he didn’t just clean up his own country. He didn’t just clean up the temple and the religious practices. He said, our country has got to be free from the influence of these people that want us to walk away from God.

And so he was the first who said, you know, it really doesn’t matter how strong the king of Assyria is. We don’t need him because we’ve got God. We can trust in God the way he told us to.

And so when it says that he trusted in God and the Lord was with him and he rebelled against the king of Assyria and he served him not, it means Hezekiah was the first one to say, we don’t need the alliances. We don’t need the support. We don’t need to be under the thumb of the king of Assyria to survive.

Our God will take care of us. And knowing what we know about how violent and how vindictive and how aggressive the Assyrians were, that took some real faith in God. You say, we’re not going to do what you tell us anymore because you lead us in the wrong direction.

Folks, Hezekiah, there’s not a lot of detail about him in the Bible, but he was from what we can tell. He was not a perfect man, but he was a great leader of his people. He was a great leader of God’s people.

Because of what he did here, as I told you a moment ago, Judah turned back to God as a nation. They began to worship the one true God. They put away their idols.

I’m sure there were some that he didn’t get around to hack into pieces. But the people got rid of their idols. The priests got rid of their corruption.

So many times the problems that we see in the Bible where the people become lazy before God is because the religious leaders become corrupt. Religious leaders are not perfect. They need to do what they’re supposed to do as well.

You need a dose of reality sometimes. And Hezekiah came along to the priests and said, Folks, you have messed up too. And got them to turn to the Lord.

And the people, as a result of Hezekiah’s leadership, began to serve God again. Now, did it last forever? No.

Because later on, a new generation would come along and they would serve idols again and somebody else would have to deal with that. But for this time, the people under Hezekiah’s leadership turned back to the one true God. Ladies and gentlemen, every time we want to see something big accomplished, any time we want to see something important happen, we think we need a movement.

We think we need to have millions and millions of people on board or it’s impossible. I’ve been impressed. I won’t say I agree with absolutely everything taught by either one.

But I’ve been impressed by the Tea Party and the Occupy movements, that they’ve been able to, I mean, you’ve got one on the right and one on the left, and they’ve been able to mobilize millions of, well, maybe not millions of people. They’ve been able to get millions of people on the bandwagon as far as talking about what they want to have happen, but they’ve been able to get thousands of people involved in things that never were involved before because they want to see changes made. Folks, the history of our country, the history of the world, really, if it should teach us anything, is that change usually happens when you’ve got a very small group of determined people.

It wasn’t the, we’ve talked about the American Revolution the last month or so, not the whole time, but we have talked about it. You know, it wasn’t the entire population of the country that decided to rebel. It was 52 men that got together and signed the Declaration of Independence, and then everybody, it seems like, got backbone and followed suit once these men put it on the line.

Folks, history teaches us that it doesn’t take a majority to move things. It doesn’t take a massive number to move things. I’m always bothered by whether it’s somebody you like or somebody you don’t like.

There are always, I think, these candidates that run for office that have good ideas. And the reason they don’t get elected is because everybody says, well, I really like him, but I won’t vote for him because he can’t win. Well, if everybody says that, then sure.

But if everybody just get it out of their mind that it took what everybody else was doing, folks, it doesn’t take a massive number of people to change things. Moving away from our politics, it’s never been the massive movements of people that have turned things back to God. God never got together with the entire nation of Israel, the millions of people, and said, I want you to do the right thing.

No, usually in the history of God’s redemption, He’s gotten together with one or two people, maybe a small handful, a prophet here and there, and called them to do what they were supposed to. And they, in turn, were able to turn the nation back to God. See, it rarely does a change start with a mass mobilization of people.

Hezekiah did not wait to see what the priests wanted to do, what the ruling class of Judah wanted to do. He didn’t wait to see how many people he could get together in his movement. Hezekiah as somebody who respected God, who feared God, and who served God, simply did what he knew he was supposed to do, even if it meant standing by himself.

As we’ve talked about revival the last few weeks, I remember the first week I talked about it, I read you a fairly long and detailed definition of what revival is and what it looks like. And I like that definition still, but it’s not easy for me to remember. So I’m going to go with my definition instead that I’ve shared with you the last couple weeks.

Revival is when God gets a hold of his people and leads them to do what they should be doing in the first place. Is that a fairly workable definition of what revival is? That’s what we see here in the book of 2 Kings and in the book of 2 Chronicles, that God got a hold of his people and led them to do what they should have been doing all along.

But it didn’t start with trying to get all the people together and convince them to do the right thing. It’s our nature to sit back and say, well, I’m going to wait and see what so-and-so does. They used to drive me crazy in college and in the youth group at church.

We’d try to make plans and, are you coming to such a, you know, we’re having a dinner night for our Sunday school class. Are you coming? Well, I don’t know what so-and-so is doing.

Are they coming? What does it matter what so-and-so is doing? Are you coming?

And that’s the way we are as human beings. Well, I want to wait and see what everybody else is going to do first. Ladies and gentlemen, as people who follow God, it should not matter to us what everybody else is going to do. We should do the right thing.

We should follow God. We should serve Him with everything we have because it’s right and because we love God, even if we’re standing by ourselves. Hezekiah stood by himself.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that one man with God makes a majority. Folks, God on his own is the majority, and we just happen to add a vote to that. But one man who stands with God is a majority.

It does not matter what the group thinks, what the prevailing culture thinks. We’ve talked for so many weeks about revival, and some of you have come to me and said things along the lines of, you see what needs to happen. You see what we need.

You want God to do something in this place. And I’ve told you that it’s something only God can do, and it’s something that we’ve got to pray for, and I think it really does begin with God getting a hold of our hearts. But if we want to see revival spread, when God gets a hold of our hearts and tells us, drives us to do what we’re supposed to be doing in the first place, if we want to see revival spread, we cannot sit around and wait for the rest of the church to get on board.

We cannot sit around and wait for the other churches around us to get on board. And for pity’s sake, we cannot sit around and wait for the prevailing culture around us to get on board with what God wants, because it’s just not going to happen. When God impresses on our hearts what we need to do, when God impresses on our hearts that we need to worship Him fully, that we need to worship Him alone, that we need to be serious about what He’s called us to do, when God impresses that upon our hearts and leads us to do it, let us not wait and say, well, what is so-and-so going to do?

Ladies and gentlemen, the nation of Judah turned back to God, not as a result of everybody waiting around in consensus before they did anything. It turned back to God because Hezekiah, as one man of God, realized what he needed to do, and he did it. Forget what the consequences were.

He was going to follow God. And he followed God, and the people around him said, wait, this is what we’re supposed to be doing. It takes one person with backbone for other people’s spines to kind of stiffen up.

Ladies and gentlemen, revival in this church, revival in any church, will not begin, I believe, with a mass movement. I believe God can do whatever he wants to do. But even at the day of Pentecost, the revival that broke out there did not begin with 3,000.

It began with the 11 that were sitting there worshiping together, praying together. And the Holy Spirit broke out amongst them and they began to preach the gospel that they knew they were supposed to. Revival does not necessarily have to begin with all the members of Eastside.

Revival begins with one person or can begin with one person. We can learn from Hezekiah’s example that revival begins with one person who will put away the things that keep him from serving the Lord. Hezekiah not only broke down the idols, not only broke down the sinful things, but folks, there were even some good traditional religious things there, like the bronze serpent.

It had a good meaning. It was there for a good reason, but it had become a hindrance. It had outlived its usefulness.

And whatever the things are that hinder us from serving God, whether they are inherently sinful, or whether they are inherently good, or they are inherently neutral, we’ve got to get rid of them. And revival begins with one person who’s willing to stand up and say, I’m going to get rid of the things. In my own life, in my own heart, I’m willing to get rid of the things that hinder me from serving God the way He deserves to be served.

We can’t sit around and wait and say, well, is everybody else going to get serious about this? It begins with one of us. It begins with two of us.

It begins with anybody who’s willing to say, time for being serious, in my heart, crunch time, am I going to get rid of the things that hinder me from serving God? Revival begins with one who will put his full trust in God.

Hezekiah put his full trust in God he could not have done the things he did if he had not trusted God to serve God will cause us to have to take some stands that are unpopular with the world around us they may be unpopular with our neighbors may be unpopular with our families ladies and gentlemen they may be even unpopular with some other believers but to serve God fully sometimes means to take stands that the world doesn’t understand and doesn’t like And to do that, we had better have faith in God, that He’s going to take care of us, and that it really doesn’t matter which way the world directs us, what they can do to us, that it only matters that we cleave to the Lord the way Hezekiah did. Revival begins with one who will trust God fully. But it doesn’t matter the consequences of serving God.

I’m going to serve Him anyway. Revival begins with one who commits himself or herself to God to follow and obey. Not just to say, I belong to God.

Anybody can say that. But to say as one of his children, I will follow him and I will obey him. From time to time I may mess up, but my goal is going to be to follow him and obey him in everything that he tells me to do.

Folks, there are some teachings in the Bible that are more weighty than others, but there’s nothing in this book that is not important. There’s no command in this book. There’s no direction.

There’s no principle in this book that’s optional. And no, I’m not talking about the Old Testament civil laws and things like that. I’m talking about the teaching of the New Testament where he tells us how to live as God’s people. There’s no teaching about that.

There’s no command. There’s no principle that’s optional. That God says, I think this is good for you, but hey, if you don’t want to do it, that’s fine. You can pick and choose.

Revival begins with one who will commit himself to God or herself to God to follow him and obey him. To say, it really doesn’t matter what my brother or my sister is doing. I hope they’ll join me.

But just on my own, because I know it’s right, today I start to serve God. I start to obey everything He tells me. As I read this book, as I listen to the Holy Spirit, as I find things in my life that do not square with this book, that do not fit with what God tells me, I’m willing to get rid of them.

If there are things that God expects for me that I’m not living up to, I’m willing to change it. If there’s a direction I’m headed, no matter how long I’ve been heading that way or how much I have invested in it, If there’s a way I’m headed that is not in accordance with God’s will, I’m willing to change course. Revival begins with even just one person who’s willing to say, God, I belong to you.

Thy will be done. And ladies and gentlemen, Heze

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