Fears of an Unlikely Prophet

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Transcript:

We’re going to be in Amos chapter 7 tonight. Amos chapter 7. That’s in the Old Testament.

Open your Bible about halfway, and you should be there pretty close to it. I want to share with you a little bit tonight about one of my favorite characters from the Bible, and especially my favorite among, or one of my favorites among those that we don’t really know a whole lot about. We don’t know a whole lot about the prophet Amos other than what he tells us in his book, But one of the things that I like about Amos, one of the things that I’ve always identified with, is his feeling that he was nobody all that special. To give you a little bit of a background on the guy, he was a fig farmer.

And we’ll talk about that in chapter 7 here. But he was a fig farmer. That’s fig with an F, not pig with a P.

No oinking. He was a nice Jewish boy wouldn’t be a pig farmer. He was a fig farmer.

And there was legend evidently that when God called him to speak and he went and spoke in the royal courts that he showed up with his hand stained purple because of his work as a fig farmer and also keeping flocks of sheep. But I’m drawn to this guy because he’s so opposite not only of his own time but of the time we live in. We live in a world that is driven by society, not society, driven by celebrity, aren’t we?

millions of dollars are going to be spent tonight to put on, maybe trillions, yeah, going to be spent tonight to put on one of the biggest spectacles in our society. And I’m not anti-Super Bowl. I have no interest in it, but I’m not anti that.

As long as they’re not spending my money, what do I care? So they can do that if they want to. But people will tune in just to see celebrity that’s going to sing year to year.

People, there are a lot of people that watch channels just devoted to following celebrities around and talking about what they had for breakfast. And Twitter and Facebook, and everybody wants to be famous, and everybody wants to be a celebrity. And we see this picture of a man who, you know, there was a lot of that in his own time. There was a lot of, they of course didn’t have Twitter and Facebook, but he was sent to the royal court where it was all about who you were and how much money you had and how important you were.

And here’s a man who stands in stark contrast to that. He just wanted to farm. He just wanted to do what he needed to do to take care of his family and didn’t really care about who was king or what they were doing.

Didn’t really care about going up to the Capitol and being part of the rich and beautiful people. He just wanted to mind his own business until God got a hold of him and said, You’ve got a job to do. And Amos really was a nobody.

And I say that as a compliment, not as a put down. I don’t want to get to heaven and Amos say, I heard you were talking trash about me. No, it’s a compliment.

He minded his own business and did what he was supposed to do. But God gave him a job to do. God gave him a mission.

God called him to leave his farm and go share his word with people who needed to hear it, but also needed to do it. people who needed to make a change in their lives because of God’s work. And this was in the time that Israel was split into two different kingdoms, and they were kind of mad at each other for a couple hundred years and fought constantly in intrigue and strategizing against each other.

And God sent him, first of all, to his own country. The kingdom of Judah sent him to the king and said, you know, there’s wickedness going on here in the country. There’s wickedness in your own court and in your own family.

You need to do something about it. God sent him to prophesy against the foreign countries around and say, you know, you’re worshiping these false gods, you’re doing all these wicked things, because it’s not just they were a different religion. A lot of these false gods of the countries around them, it involved things like ritualized prostitution or sacrificing their children.

I mean, these were evil things that were done in the name of religion. And his message to them was, you have forsaken the one true God, and you’re worshiping these false gods, and you’ve got to stop. And where we get to him tonight in chapter 7 is where God sends him to go to the other kingdom.

God sends him to Israel. He was from Judah, and he was sent to go deal with the people in Israel, to go deal with the king of Israel. And just to put it in some context, just to give you some idea about it, God had put David and his descendants on the throne.

And they held the southern kingdom, but there was also a rebellion in the north. That kingdom in the south became Judah. That was David’s family that God had put there.

But the ten northern tribes had broken off and formed their own rival kingdom. There had been a rebellion, and they had started the kingdom of Israel. And so to give you some idea of what this would have been like in his day from our own history, imagine God calling someone from the northern United States to go and speak to the, during the Civil War, to speak to the leadership in the Confederacy, and say, God has sent me to come and address all the wickedness that’s going on in your society, they would not have been a fan of his, would they?

They would not have been inclined to hear him. Not only was he from the other kingdom, he’s from the one we broke off from, and he’s come to tell us how wicked we are. But God sent him anyway, and Amos went.

It’s incredible enough to me that God would call somebody unimportant like this, But it’s incredible to me as well that he went. Because I know what it’s like to be human. I know what it’s like to have those fears.

All those things that run through your mind that must have run through his mind that made him probably say, I can’t serve God. And yet he went because God called him to. Starting in verse 10 of Amos chapter 7, it says, Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent to Jeroboam, king of Israel, saying, Amos hath conspired against thee in the midst of the house of Israel.

So Amos is in the north and he’s prophesying. There are things that God wanted them to stop. There was idolatry.

There was sexual sin. There was corrupt leadership. There were people oppressing and stealing from the common people.

There were all sorts of things that made God angry and that needed to stop. And so Amos had come in and preached. And as he’s speaking to people in Israel, the priest at Bethel sent King Jeroboam a message saying, Amos hath conspired against thee in the midst of the house of Israel.

The land is not able to bear his words. This priest sends a message to the king and says, this prophet down here, this Amos, is down here in the country and he’s stirring up trouble. He’s causing trouble against you.

Because one of the things Amos had to do was call out the king. Now that was an uncomfortable thing to do. Nowadays, we can speak out against the government.

And not fear having our lives taken for that. For that matter, apparently we can set fire to cars in the streets and not worry about consequence. But in that day, you speak out against the king.

You are very literally taking your life in your own hands. You may very well end up dead before the day is over. And so this message comes out that he’s stirring up trouble, not just against Israel, but against you in the middle of Israel.

And the land cannot bear his words. His words are causing too much trouble for our country, the priest says. And he recounts to him everything that Amos is saying.

For thus Amos saith, Jeroboam shall die by the sword. How would you like to take that message? The king is going to be killed by the sword.

Now this was not a threat from Amos that I’m going to kill you with a sword. So it’s nothing that the secret service of their day would have needed to investigate. But he was saying this message comes from God.

It’s going to happen. Jeroboam’s going to be cut down by the sword. And eventually he was.

And Israel shall surely be led away captive out of their own land. So he comes and tells them that the king is going to die. and then the nation of Israel is going to be carried away captive.

That would not be a message that they would want to hear. Imagine somebody came to us saying they were preaching God’s word and said, America is going to fall, and we’re going to be conquered, we’re going to be split between the Mexicans and the Canadians, and we’re going to be overrun, and America, we would, my goodness, we would not react well to that at all. Our patriotism would well up, and we would be dead set against that guy.

So it was brave, it was bold of him to step into this kind of role because God called him to do it. He’ll die by the sword. Israel will be surely led away captive out of their own land.

These things came true. Eventually the Assyrians came in not too long after this and overran Israel and not just took them over, but scattered the people. They said, we’ve conquered all these other countries and we don’t want the Israelites all together and we don’t want these people all together and we don’t want these people all together they’ll get together and they’ll rise up together and they’ll present a danger to us.

It would be like if somebody took over the United States. You don’t want to leave all the Texans together because they’re going to cause trouble. You don’t want to leave all the people in Montana together because they’re going to cause trouble.

And the New Yorkers are going to cause trouble and the Oklahomans are going to. . .

No, you want to scatter those people around so you don’t have a bunch of Texans leaking up and a bunch of Oklahomans leaking up. We’re going to scatter Israelites and all these other countries. And so there was no longer these ten tribes.

They didn’t disappear. We call them the lost tribes. They didn’t get lost. They just got dispersed, scattered among everybody else.

So what Amos said eventually came to pass. Also Amaziah, verse 12, also Amaziah said unto Amos, O thou seer, go, flee thee away into the land of Judah, and there eat bread and prophesy there. Amaziah the priest turned to Amos and said, why don’t you just go home?

If you’ve got something to say, go say it to your own people. We don’t need your kind here. But prophesy not again anymore at Bethel, for it is the king’s chapel and it is the king’s court.

You don’t come into Jeroboam’s city and prophesy against him. You go home and you do what you want to do there in Judah, but you don’t come into Israel, you don’t come into Bethel and cause this trouble here. Verse 14, then answered Amos and said to Amaziah, I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet’s son, but I was a herdman and a gatherer of sycamore fruit.

And the Lord took me as I followed the flock, and the Lord said unto me, Go prophesy unto my people Israel. Now therefore hear thou the word of the Lord. Thou sayest, Prophesy not against Israel, and drop not thy word against the house of Isaac.

Therefore thus saith the Lord, Thy wife shall be a harlot in the city, and thy sons and thy daughter shall fall by the sword, and thy land shall be divided by line, and thou shalt die in a polluted land, and Israel shall surely go into captivity forth of his land. And Amos goes on from there, saying all the things that the people in power told him not to say, which coincidentally were exactly the things that God told him to say. And so Amos was faced with a choice.

Do I listen to what Jeroboam and Amaziah are telling me, or do I do what God sent me here to do? And from a human standpoint, it might be easy to say, I’m going to do what Jeroboam and Amaziah say because they’ve got the army behind them and I can see the army. But Amos was wise enough to realize, you do what God says.

God is more powerful. And let me tell you this, God is always right. If somebody disagrees with God, God’s not the one who’s wrong.

And God’s not the one who needs to change. So Amos goes on and says, you know what, you told me not to say things. God told me to say things, so I’m going to I’m going to say what needs to be fixed in this country I’m going to say what’s going to happen if they’re not done I’m going to say these things not because they’re my opinion not because they come from Amos but because they come from God and so this was a bold man this was a bold man who was willing to go and just be obedient to God and do what God told him to do now there were lots of things that could have stopped Amos there are lots of things that if we were Amos might have stopped us first of all is that he was unqualified have you ever thought about that I’m not qualified to serve God.

I’m not qualified to serve in this role. I’m not qualified to do that. I’m not qualified to go talk to them.

Through the months of sending out resumes, I was starting to think I wasn’t qualified to preach anymore because I didn’t have a seminary degree. But God calls people who are not qualified. And Amos says here, I wasn’t a prophet.

I wasn’t a prophet’s son. There was a class of people in ancient Israel, and the Old Testament talks about the school of the prophets, I believe, That there was a class of people that they were set apart and the people recognized them as prophets. Amos wasn’t one of those guys.

Amos was chasing sheep around on his fig farm when God called him and said, Hey, I want you to go take my message. Who, me? Yeah, you.

But I’m not qualified. I mean, he points it out to Amaziah here. Hey, I’m not here prophesying because I’m a prophet.

I’m not a prophet. My dad’s not a prophet. There was no history of prophecy in my family.

This was not my destiny. I was just minding my own business, and then God told me to go do it. And there may be things that God calls you to do that you’re just minding your own business.

It’s not even on your radar, and he calls you to do it, and you think, well, I’m not qualified. It doesn’t matter. If God says you’re qualified, you’re qualified.

So Amos maybe should have been scared because he was unqualified. I mean, from a human standpoint, but that didn’t matter. He was uneducated.

He wasn’t somebody who’d grown up in the places where they trained the prophets and they taught. He was a farmer. Which is not to say that being a farmer makes you stupid.

As a matter of fact, you put your average farmer and your average city person next to each other. Who knows more about life and skills that matter? I’m probably going to go with the farmer.

And I’m not trying to put down city people either. I’m just saying, if the revolution comes and suddenly there are no grocery stores, I want to go be with the farmer. But he didn’t have some fancy education and work in the temple and all this.

It says he was a herdsman and he grew sycamore fruit. Wait a minute, I don’t have the right education. Doesn’t matter.

God saw him on his farm and said, you don’t have to be educated. You don’t have to know all the best words. Just go tell him what I tell you to say.

And you may think I don’t have the right. It might not be education. You might think I don t have the right this or that.

I don t have the money. I don t have the education. I don t have the good looks.

It doesn t matter. Whatever God s called you to do, he s going to equip you for. Maybe from a human standpoint, Amos should have been afraid because he was uneducated, but it didn t matter.

Third of all, he was unimportant, and he was sent to speak to important people. He was just one of many people who were doing the things that he did, and yet God called him to go into Bethel, into the king’s backyard. And he was called there to preach among the people who were the powerful people in the nation of Israel, in the kingdom of Israel.

He was sent there to a place where he would stir up not only the king, but the king’s household, all the priests that were there at Bethel, that he would find his audience there. And God could have sent him very easily to preach to his own people out there at the fields, but God said, no, I want you to go to where all these important people are. Now, I’m pretty sure that to God, none of us are any more important than anybody else.

But these are the people that the nation would have looked at and said, these are important. These are the people who would have looked at themselves and said, I’m important. Don’t you know who I am?

Do you know some people like that? I’ve been around politics enough. I know some people like that.

I’m the most important person in the room. Yeah, I’m pretty sure you’re made out of the same dust that we all are. Okay?

And yet these were the movers and shakers. These were the people who were determined they didn’t have to listen to God. And that’s where the problem was.

And so, yeah, it might have been more comfortable if God had sent him to speak to his own people, but God said, no, I want you to go speak to the so-called important people. Go to Bethel. Go speak before the priests.

Go speak before the royal court. Go shake up the people who need to be shaken up. Fourth of all, his message was unpopular.

It was unpopular because of who he was and where he came from. Again, they talk about, Amaziah tells him, go back where you came from. Go to Judah and do this.

Well, he had already, Judah wasn’t missing out either. Judah got theirs as well. Judah got their message as well.

But he says, go back home. But not only because of where the messenger was from, but the message that he brought. Your nation is about to be destroyed.

They didn’t want to hear it. It was an unpopular message. And sometimes to serve God, we’ve got to say unpopular things.

I don’t mean that we ever try to offend people on purpose. Heaven forbid. The only thing offensive about us should be the gospel.

Let me say that again because I think it’s important enough to repeat. The only thing offensive about us should be the gospel. I don’t want to go and offend people because of my tone or my attitude or because I can’t love them past the box that we put them in.

and hopefully you know what I mean by box our society we label everybody you hear about it at election time but it’s true all the time he’s a millennial he’s Asian he’s LGBT she’s this, she’s that oh my goodness we’re all just a list of boxes but I don’t want to offend people just because of my attitude or again my tone or because I don’t love them because of the box they’re in or because I say things purposely to be provocative I don’t want to offend people. I don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. And yet at the same time, that can’t stop us from speaking the truth.

Sometimes the truth is offensive and that’s just the way it is. We’re supposed to speak the truth in love. Not ha ha, your country’s going to be destroyed, but a message of, hey, you need to turn back to God.

I’m pleading with you. I’m begging you turn back to God because your country’s going to be destroyed otherwise. The truth hurt, but I don’t see Amos doing this in a hateful spirit.

Sometimes to serve God, we’re going to have to speak an unpopular message. And a lot of churches and a lot of people who call themselves Christians have surrendered on this point. And just so they don’t offend anybody, have started embracing things that the Bible says we can’t embrace.

We can still love people, but we can’t embrace every sin that goes on in our society and expect to remain true to the Christian faith. Because honestly, if we start removing everything that’s offensive from the message that God’s given us, that includes all the way up to the cross. Because the Bible calls the cross a stumbling block and foolishness in the eyes of the world and calls Jesus the rock of offense.

The message of the cross is offensive because it’s a message that we need to be forgiven by God. And the world looks at that and says, who are you to tell me I need to be forgiven? Sometimes the truth is going to be an unpopular message.

As a matter of fact, the more popular a message is, the less likely I am to want to hear it. When somebody tells me, oh, you need to read this book by this preacher, it’s great. okay, I’ll consider reading it.

When 15 people tell me you need to read this book, I’m probably not going to read it. That’s not always true. I find the more popular a book is or the more popular a preacher is, the less I’m probably going to enjoy listening to it.

Anyway, the truth is often going to be unpopular. And maybe he should have been afraid because he was taking an unpopular message, but it didn’t matter. Maybe he should have been afraid fifth of all because he was threatened.

He was told, get out of here and don’t come back here and preach these words again. Don’t come back here and bring a message like this again. Why don’t you go home?

And implied in that message, you’re in the king’s backyard, is a threat of don’t you know what the king can do to you. And we don’t face this so much here in our country in 2017, but lots of people around the world today face it, where they’re threatened either by their government or by the people around them, mobs and such, that if they preach the gospel, if they speak out on God’s behalf, people are killed, people are abducted, people are imprisoned, people’s homes are burned, people’s families are gone after. Go check out the website of Voice of the Martyrs sometimes.

People are threatened all the time, and the threats are followed through all the time because people are being obedient to God. And so maybe he should have been scared and dissuaded because he was threatened, but it didn’t matter. Because even though he was all these things, he was unqualified, he was uneducated, he was unimportant, his message was unpopular, he was threatened.

Even though he was all these things, none of them really mattered because of the final thing that he was, and that was obedient. He was obedient. We see this in verse 15 and in the beginning of 16.

And the Lord took me. Again, he’s telling Amaziah here. The Lord took me as I followed the flock, and the Lord said unto me, Go, prophesy unto my people Israel.

So I was just minding my own business, watching my flock, and then God said, go and take this message. Now, therefore, hear what he has to say. I mean, just in that verse and a half, we see his obedience.

This wasn’t my plan. I was minding my own business. God said, go and tell them.

So now you listen up to what I’ve got to tell you. That’s obedience. And I’m not saying tonight that God’s going to call all of us to go preach in another country and tell them how wicked they are, or preach in our own country and tell them how wicked they are, that God’s going to send all of us to confront the king or in our day, whoever’s in power.

I’m not saying that God is going to send all of us into a confrontational ministry the way that Amos was called into. But here’s the bottom line for you. God has called each of you to do something.

And I would love to tell you what it is, but I don’t know specifically what that looks like for you. God’s called you to do it. And odds are some of you, if not all of you, may be sitting there thinking, how does he know?

How does he know God’s called me to fill in the blank? I know in my case, I knew God was calling me to preach and I didn’t want to. I had other plans for my career.

Now, I love the ministry that he’s given me. I love that I get to do this. But when I was in high school and I first really started realizing he was calling me, these were not my career plans.

And I argued with God for a couple of years. I know you’re not supposed to admit that. You’re the preacher.

You’re supposed to do everything God tells you to. I argued with God for a couple of years. And I would hear messages like this and think, I don’t know what God’s called me to do, and I don’t want to.

I thought it was enough to just be obedient to all the other stuff He called me to do, but I don’t want to do that. Odds are you may be sitting there and you’ve got some idea what God’s called you to do. It’s not necessarily a full-time ministry, but God’s called you to do something in His service.

What’s the thing that He’s called you to do today or tomorrow or next week? What is the next marching order He’s given you? And you may be sitting there thinking, but I don’t want to.

Because we get all these reasons in our mind. I can’t do it because I’m unqualified. I can’t do it because I’m scared.

I can’t do it because I’m poor. I can’t do it because I’m old. I can’t do of disobedient.

It’s not I’m old. It’s not I’m tired. It’s not I’m poor.

It’s not I’m uneducated. I’m disobedient. And I say that as somebody who argued with God for two or three years.

Because see, all these other things that I am, when you know what God’s called you to do, all these other things that I am don’t matter if you can look on the other side of the list and it says I am obedient. And this message tonight, and I’m just about finished, but this message tonight is not to come and jump all over you and say, you’re just disobedient and make you feel bad. This message, I really want you to take from this not, oh, I’m just so disobedient.

God’s so disappointed in me. I want you to take from this that all these other things don’t matter if we’ll just be obedient. God doesn’t care if you’re qualified.

God doesn’t care if you’re educated. God doesn’t care if you’re important. God doesn’t choose usually to use the educated and the qualified.

God chooses to use the obedient. The Apostle Paul talks about how God has chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise. I’m so glad that he has.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t be standing here in front of you. All these other things that we put in our mind and say, I’m this, I’m that, that prevent us from doing the next thing that God called us to do, they don’t matter if on the other side of the list we can say, I’m obedient, and I will be obedient.