It's Time For A Change

It’s Time For A Change

1/08/05 2 Kings, 22:1-20 1 Corinthians 11:27-32

Back in 1980, there was a guy, whom I will call Mountain Jack, who had been living on Mt. St. Helens for almost all his life. Mountain Jack was true mountain man in every since of the word. Then one day a geologist came and explained to him that he was living in danger. They told him that according to their records, Mt. St. Helena was an active volcano and that it could erupt at any moment and destroy everything for miles.

Mountain Jack explained to the geologist, “I have been on the mountain for years, and no little rumbling in the ground is about to scare me off. I have heard rumblings long time before and nothing happened. I appreciate your concern, but I will be staying put.” On May 18th, 1980, Mt. St. Helens, exploded with such a force that it blacked out the sun for many cities in the west. Mountain Jack was never seen or heard from again.

Have you ever been in a situation in your own life, where you didn’t make a change when you should have, and it has cost you dearly? Sometimes people may have even come up to you and suggested that you change, take a different course of action, let that person go, move out the house, go back to school, but for one reason or another, you decided not to make the change. The only problem is, you know now that you have missed out on an opportunity that could really have made a difference in your life. The good news is that Jesus Christ can still help you to make the change you need, to get back charge of your life.

Sometimes, we need to make a change, and we do not know it. We can be deceived by all the good things that are going on around us and think that it’s going to last forever. But in reality the world around us is changing, circumstances are changing, and we ourselves are changing. Change is an inevitable part of life. We have to make choices everyday, and the choices we make today are going to affect us for a very long time to come.

Let’s look at a guy by the name of Josiah. Josiah’s dad was anything but a good role model. His father had completed rejected the ways of God. Josiah’s father became king at age 22, and did just about everything he could to alienate God by worshiping idols and offering sacrifices to them. His father reigned as king for two years, because his own government officials decided enough was enough, and they assassinated him in the palace.

The people rose up and put to death all the officials who had assassinated the king and they made Josiah king in his father’s place. At age 8, Josiah became the 2nd youngest king ever over the nation of Judah. You might ask, what difference could an eight year old make in the life of the nation. Let me tell you a little bit of what was going on at the time he became king. First of all the nation was at peace with its neighbors so times were pretty good. The economy seemed to be doing all right. The people were very relaxed in their relationship to God because there was no pressing emergency.

Many of the people had slipped from God altogether. Throughout the country, people were creating their own gods and offering sacrifices to them. Parents were offering their children as sacrifices to the demonic devil Molech. Anybody who wanted to become a priest could become a priest. In the rooms of the temple of God, There was a room set aside for horses that had been dedicated to the sun and the sun and moon were worshipped as though they were gods.

There were altars built to foreign gods in the courtyard of the temple. There were rooms set aside in the temple for male prostitution. All in all it was a spiritual and moral disaster. The people were doing basically anything they wanted to do in the name of religion and thought nothing of it. There is something inside of us that seeks to want to worship, but not do it according to the word of God. Since God will not bend to our rules, we end up recreating a god for our lives that is more to our liking.

Josiah inherited all this as an 8 year old king. What a way to start your reign. Your father’s been murdered, people think you’re too young for the job, your nation is a moral disaster and you don’t have a clue as to what you’re getting yourself into. He did not inherit an ideal situation. What should you do, when you don’t know what to do? Well we learn that in the eighth year of Josiah’s reign, that means at age 16, he began to seek the God of his father David.