Be careful what you wish for.
1. Because it might not be what you expect.
2. Because you might not be as ready for it as you think.
3. Because your memory might not be as good as you think it is.
4. Because you might need to do everything you can in the present grace God gives you.
AMOS 5:18-27
This week, my wife and I just celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary. Birthdays and anniversaries are a dangerous time for us, aren’t they men? I know that I’m pretty easy to buy for. A book, a tie, or anything with Craftsman on it. Simple, huh? But buying a present for your wife can be like navigating a minefield. Clothes ought to be easy, right? Don’t you dare get the wrong size! What about something for the house? Somehow a vacuum cleaner doesn’t have the same effect on her as a power tool does on me. It reminds me of a story I heard about a guy who forgot his anniversary all together. Their anniversary came and went and he hadn’t gotten her a thing. Needless to say, he was in big trouble. She was furious. Through her clenched teeth, she told him, “The only way you can make up for this is to get me a really good present. Tomorrow morning, I expect to find a gift in the driveway that goes from 0-200 in under 6 seconds.” And then she stomped off to bed. By the time she woke up the next morning, he was already gone to work. So, she got up and looked out the window. There, in the middle of the driveway, was a small gift-wrapped box. She put on her robe, ran out to the driveway and tore open the wrapping paper. When she opened the box, she found a brand-new bathroom scale. The husband’s funeral was scheduled two days later. That gift wasn’t what she expected, was it? She was expecting some sort of hot new sports car, but instead got a bathroom scale. But, in reality, she got exactly what she was asking for. She got something that would go 0-200 in a hurry. In our passage tonight, God talks to the Israelites about the Day of the Lord. But the way He talks to them about it is completely different than what they were wishing for. They were wishing for a Corvette and God was getting ready to give them a harsh picture of reality. Many times we look forward to end-times events as a wonderful pie-in-the-sky time. While the fulfillment of those events will result in unimaginable blessedness, we can’t forget that they are initiated by judgment. In these verses, God is letting Israel know that they aren’t ready for what they were wishing for. Are we? I want each of us to long for heaven despite the fact that judgment is coming. But you need to realize that if you’re not ready for the judgment that’s coming, you need to be careful what you wish for. The first reason to be careful what you wish for is because it might not be what you expect. Look with me at verses 18-20.
AMOS 5:18-20
The Day of the Lord might not be what you expect. I want you to think about most of the songs that we sing. What do most of them talk about? It seems like most of them talk about going to heaven. I would say that Israel of Amos’ day would have really enjoyed those songs. I can just hear them opening Amos’ preaching service with a rousing chorus of When We All Get to Heaven. That would have been fine, but they weren’t ready for Heaven. They thought they desired the Day of the Lord, but they didn’t really know what it was all about. They didn’t have a clue what they were saying. They had created a rosy picture of the end times. Kind of like those people you’ve heard who talk about when they die, “goin’ fishin’ with the Man upstairs.” How ridiculous is that! Heaven isn’t about fishing. And the man upstairs isn’t going to be there unless you live on the bottom floor of an apartment building with a Christian in the apartment above you. Many times we think of heaven as an escape. We look at the trials and troubles we go through here and long for a day when we won’t have them anymore. No more sickness and pain and heartache and tears, right? Right—if you’re saved. If you’re ready. And unless Jesus is your Lord and Master, you’re not ready. Israel wasn’t ready. Were they God’s chosen people? Yes. Had He cared for them and protected them and given them every opportunity to obey Him? Yes. But did they? No. But they still were longing for the sweet by-and-by. They were still looking for a heavenly escape from their current troubles. But what did the Lord tell them in verse 19? He said that for them, escaping the troubles of this world would be like running from a lion and running into a bear. And then running away from the bear and finally getting to the safety and security of the place they were longing for—home. Finally getting home and leaning up against the wall to relax. And then what happens? As soon as they take the first breath of relaxation, they get bit by a snake. You know you’re having a bad day when that happens to you. You know you’re having a bad day when all the light you’ve been looking forward to turns to darkness. When all of the heavenly bliss you expect turns to wrath and judgment. The fact is that many people think they’re going to heaven and are lost as they can be. Many people have called Jesus “Lord, Lord” but in that day He will say He never knew them. There is one thing about the Left Behind books that saddens me. They have left the impression with many people that they will have a second chance at salvation after the Rapture. That’s not what the Bible teaches. As a matter of fact, 2 Thessalonians 2:9-12 teaches the opposite. It teaches that once the Antichrist comes on the scene after the Rapture, those who had already refused to be saved will be eternally deluded and condemned. No escape. If you have not submitted your life to the Lord Jesus Christ, there is no escape. No matter how bad things get for you here, they’re eternally better than they will be. For you, the Day of the Lord will be eternally awful. Whether that day comes at your death or the Rapture—it won’t be what you expect. It won’t be what you expect, and you might not be as ready for it as you think. The second reason to be careful what you wish for is you might not be as ready for it as you think. Look at verses 21-23.
AMOS 5:21-23
You might not be as ready for the Day of the Lord as you think. What was happening here? Were the Israelites supposed to have feast days? Yes. Were they supposed to have solemn assemblies? Yes. Were they supposed to have burnt offerings and grain or meat offerings? Yes. What about peace offerings? Yes. So what was the problem? Their heart wasn’t right. God, I’m a pretty good old boy. I don’t drink or smoke or chew or go with the girls who do. I go to church. I pay my tithe. I help my neighbor out when I can. I’m alright. Right? Turn with me to Mark 10:17-22:
MARK 10:17-22
The rich young ruler in this passage did it all. He was a good old boy. He did everything right. But he had a wrong heart. He wasn’t able to give up what was most important to him in life. He wasn’t able to take up his cross and follow Jesus. And to bring it back to our passage in Amos, all the good things he did in his life were a stench in the nostrils of God. God will not tolerate self-righteousness. God will not tolerate our songs if we’re still sitting on the throne of our hearts. I don’t care if we sing hymns, southern gospel, choruses or contemporary—if our heart isn’t right, it’s just noise to the Lord. You see, it’s not the things you do that make you ready for the Day of the Lord. That was where Israel got so confused. They thought they could work their way into righteousness. That’s the worst sort of pride. What you do doesn’t make you ready for the Day of the Lord. You can have the most self-righteous, legalistic checklist of anybody in here and be no better off than the rich young ruler. As a matter of fact you can be worse off than him. At least he walked away sad. When he walked away, he knew he wasn’t ready for the Day of the Lord. The Bible says it grieved him. But how many of us mark off our self-righteous checklist and walk away thinking we’re somebody. That’s what Israel did. And God despised it. They thought they were ready for the Day of the Lord because of the things they were doing. But God knew they weren’t ready because they weren’t humble. They weren’t fully trusting in Him and His righteousness. They weren’t as ready for the Day of the Lord as they thought. The second reason to be careful what you wish for is you might not be as ready for it as you think. The third reason is your memory might not be as good as you think it is. Look at verses 24-26:
AMOS 5:24-26
Your memory might not be as good as you think it is. There were two older men sitting on the front porch one began to complain about his arthritis. The other said that his new medication was doing wonders for him. So the first man asked him, “What kind of medicine do you use?” He thought about it for a minute and said, “My memory’s terrible—what’s that flower with a long thorny stem, red petals and smells so nice?” The other man said, “A rose?” “A rose, that’s it! Hey Rose, what’s the name of that arthritis medicine I’ve been using?” They say that your memory is the second thing to go. For the life of me I can’t remember what the first one is. Memory is a funny thing isn’t it? One thing about our memory is that it tends to soften the past. I remember my Mamaw Drake used to say that she never had a bit of trouble out of her two boys. To hear her tell it, she never had to raise her voice, much less take a switch to them. Oh how I long for the day when my mother’s memory gets like that. But we tend to do that don’t we? We tend to look back at the past with rose-colored glasses. Every generation looks back to their parents generation as the “good old days.” I don’t know why that is, but it went on even back in Israel’s day. In verse 25, God asks them a rhetorical question. He asks them about their good old days. About how they used to obey Him completely back in the wilderness. How they did all the sacrifices and offerings they were supposed to back then. You can just about picture them sitting on the front porch in the glider talking about how things were so good back then. How they obeyed God just like they were supposed to back then. Not like this crazy generation now. What’s wrong with these crazy kids today? Well, what’s wrong was them. The first thing that was wrong was their memory. When God asked them that rhetorical question, He knew the answer. He knew that they didn’t offer the sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness. He knew that they disobeyed Him from the beginning. From the very moment that God delivered Israel from Egypt they were disobedient. As a matter of fact, while He was giving Moses the Law that they asked for, they were at the bottom of the mountain worshipping idols. And that’s what caused the second thing they did wrong. The first thing that was wrong was their memory. The second thing that was wrong was their example. From the time they left Egypt, each generation provided a bad example for the following generation to follow. And when each subsequent generation ended up following that example, things got worse. Just like today. The pincushioned, tattooed faces of today came from the poor example of my generation. My materialistic, self-centered wasteful generation came from the poor example of my parents’ generation. My parents’ prideful, workaholic, get ahead at all cost generation came from my grandparents’ generation. And on and on and on and on it goes. All the way back to the fall. So when we look at an 18-year old kid with more holes in his body than a colander—what do we say? We say, judgment has run down as waters. They are bearing the fruit of the gods the previous generations made to themselves. But that’s not how we remember it. And that’s not what Israel remembered. They remembered the good old days. Instead of repenting for their real past, they gloried in an imaginary one. And in the Day of the Lord, God would judge them for that. He would judge them because they never did get it right. They never did get it right and they never did repent of it. The third reason to be careful what you wish for is your memory might not be as good as you think it is. The final reason is you might need to do everything you can in the present grace God gives you. Look at verse 27:
AMOS 5:27
You might need to do everything you can in the present grace God gives you. God is a gracious God. Let me put this in terms of a parent-child relationship. As a child, it was pretty easy to see grace in the times when you got to go out and play before you got your homework done. It was pretty easy to see when your Dad stepped in and paid for the window that you broke. But is that really grace? I don’t know—it could be. But what about the time you got a whipping? Was that grace? Probably. At least that’s one of the ways God shows His grace. Hebrews 12:6-7 says, “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?” That’s what God did with Israel. He told them that He was going to send them into captivity. Now, later on in the Old Testament as they were being taken captive, they thought that was the Day of the Lord. They were wrong. The captivity wasn’t their judgment. Even their later destruction under Antiochus Epiphanies wasn’t. Their destruction under Titus in 70 AD wasn’t their judgment under Day of the Lord. The Holocaust under Hitler wasn’t their judgment under the Day of the Lord. Each of those was a divine spanking. A spanking that hurt God more than it hurt Israel. A spanking designed as a part of God’s grace. God’s grace extended to cause His people to repent and turn to Him. We can easily look through history and see Israel’s spankings. Do you think America is being spanked? Was the Civil War a spanking? It must have worked—revival followed. Was the Great Depression a spanking? It must have worked—revival followed. Were the two World Wars a spanking? It must have worked—revival followed. Even a semblance of a revival broke out after Vietnam. It was called the Jesus Movement. But what about our spankings now? 9/11? Katrina? Virginia Tech? The Minneapolis Bridge? Are we as Americans responding to our spankings? What about in our church? Has our church ever been spanked? How have we responded? Have we responded like the rebellious child and blamed it on everybody and everything else? Or have we repented? Corporately—as a body. Like God desired of Israel. Like they will one day do during the tribulation. God gives present grace for a reason. He spanks for a reason. Not because He’s mean. Not because He isn’t in control. He does it so we will turn to Him—wholly and completely to Him. Are we responding by doing everything we can in the present grace He gives us? Or, on the Day of the Lord, are we going to have to answer for our lack of response?
So, what does all this add up to? The Day of the Lord might not be what you expect. You might not be as ready for it as you think. Your memory might not be as good as you think it is. And you might need to do everything you can in the present grace God gives you. That all sounds pretty negative, doesn’t it? Well it is. It is because that’s the message God had to give the Israelites. They had continually rejected His grace and refused to listen to His prophetic warnings for them. They wanted to trust in themselves and not His grace. They wanted to rely on what they could do and not what God would do for them. Because of that, they were crazy to desire the Day of the Lord. They weren’t ready for it. They weren’t ready to meet their Judge. When the prophet Joel talks about the Day of the Lord, he calls it the great and terrible Day of the Lord. Think about that. Great and terrible. It’s terrible for those who aren’t ready. But for those who are—what a great and glorious day it will be. What a day it will be when my Jesus I shall see. When I look upon His face, the One who saved me by His grace. When He takes me by the hand and leads me to the Promised Land. What a day. Glorious day that will be. When we trust Jesus as our Savior. And when we live with Him as our Lord and Master. When we take up our cross daily and follow Him. When we do, we can say like John in Revelation 22:20, “…Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” As we pray and in the invitation to follow, examine your heart. See if you can honestly say with John, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”
