THE POVERTY OF COMPLACENCY
TEXT: 2 Kings 7:3-9
ll Kings 7:3 9 -- “And there were four leprous men at the entering in of the gate: and they said one to another, Why sit we here until we die?” “If we say, We will enter into the city, then the famine is in the city, and we shall die there: and if we sit still here, we die also. Now therefore come, and let us fall unto the host of the Syrians: if they save us alive, we shall live; and if they kill us, we shall but die.” “And they rose up in the twilight, to go unto the camp of the Syrians: and when they were come to the uttermost part of the camp of Syria, behold, there was no man there.” “For the Lord had made the host of the Syrians to hear a noise of chariots, and a noise of horses, even the noise of a great host: and they said one to another, Lo, the king of Israel hath hired against us the kings of the Hittites, and the kings of the Egyptians, to come upon us.” “Wherefore they arose and fled in the twilight, and left their tents, and their horses, and their asses, even the camp as it was, and fled for their life.” “And when these lepers came to the uttermost part of the camp, they went into one tent, and did eat and drink, and carried thence silver, and gold, and raiment, and went and hid it; and came again, and entered into another tent, and carried thence also, and went and hid it.” “Then they said one to another, We do not well: this day is a day of good tidings, and we hold our peace: if we tarry till the morning light, some mischief will come upon us: now therefore come, that we may go and tell the king’s household.”
l. THE POVERTY OF COMPLACENY
-Complacency is the enemy of the soul. Spiritual satisfaction can lead us to a place of spiritual poverty. Our own spiritual complacency keeps men from striving toward the great places of the Kingdom of God.
-Spiritual satisfaction leads to spiritual paralysis and our soul atrophies and becomes useless.
-Spiritual complacency is a vice that must be fought against every single day of our lives.
Abraham Lincoln -- “Failure is not a crime, but low aim is.”
-Yet there are some things that creates a sense of spiritual complacency for men.
Insurmountable Odds.
Overwhelming Losses.
Entrapment in the Past.
Fear of the Future.
-Contentment with earthly goods is the mark of a saint; contentment with our spiritual state is a mark of inward blindness.
Philippians 3:13 14 -- “Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before,” “I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”
1 Corinthians 9:26 27 -- “I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air:” “But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.”
-Spiritual growth never comes without some form of sacrifice or suffering.
-The greatest men of God has always had something inside of them that was hungry for more of a work of the Spirit.
Psalm 42:2 -- “My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?”
Psalm 63:1 2 -- “O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is;” “To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary.”
-The cries from the Psalms are nothing more than the echoes of life. They are true to life because they are drawn from the stuff that life is made of:
Hope and Fear
Love and Hate
Jubilation and Frustration
Faith and Anxiety
Joy and Despair
-One moment the singer stands on the bedrock of hope, the next he is wallowing in the quicksands of horror, one minute he is shouting, the next he is shaking. One minute faith thrills him, the next fear threatens him. Often we seesaw back and forth between confidence and collapse.
-All of our struggles and all of our victories should have one common purpose and that is to create within an insatiable hunger for God.
-God’s greatest were those whose longing for God consumed them. It propelled them onward and upward to heights that the average never see. What the average did see, through lethargic spiritual eyes, they never had any hope of reaching such a place with God. I never want to be in that category of just marking time with my life.
ll. PRINCIPLES FOR LIVING FROM 2 KINGS 7
-Within the text of 2 Kings 7 are some important principles for us to consider in overcoming complacency.
A. The Setting of the Text
-The area of the text tells a morbid story. There came a time in Israel’s history when Benhadad, King of Syria, surrounded Samaria and was intent on conquering it. (You can read this in the preceding chapter.)
-The city of Samaria had been overtaken by an enemy army and by a famine. The people on the inside of the city were driven by their hunger to become cannabalistic. Their fear exacerbated the whole situation.
-As Benhadad’s army threatened from the outside, they were dying by the droves on the inside of that great capital city of Israel. Benhadad cut off all communication from the outside world.
-But while all of this was going on, outside of the city, ostracized by the city, left to die by the city were four lepers. No doubt, these men had talked over the situation among themselves and obviously it appeared pretty grim for them too.
-It was certain death for them if they stayed where they were. The city would not let them back in because of their leprosy. The Syrian army would kill them if they came in to their camp. So the Bible says that they asked an important question, “Why sit we here until we die?”
-What those four lepers did at that point brings to us some very important principles.
PRINCIPLE # 1 -- It is not how sick you are, but how hungry you are.
-Those lepers had been thrown out of the city for a reason. Their bodies were falling apart at the disease of leprosy. Lepers in those times were looked up with great disdain. They were failures. They were outcasts. They were mistakes.
-But I want to say to you that sometimes failure and frustration are nothing more than the ushers that God uses to bring men into their greatest destiny. Because of their own misfortune, God was about to bless any entire city and save them from a certain death.
-Those lepers could have continued to live just like they always had, hand to mouth, just trying make ends meet. But something called hunger began to stimulate them to dreaming about what God might be able to do if they would go into the army of the Syians.
-These men did not need to take some poison to commit suicide. They did not need to find some cliff to jump off of. They were already far spent by their own starvation. So their situation and their hunger called for immediate action.
-Despite their difficulties, they found something to work with.
Proverbs 23:7 -- “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he. . .”
-God has got a plan for our lives. Daniel brought to life some purpose in his heart and it made all the difference in the world.
PRINCIPLE # 2 -- It was not how many lepers there were but how united they were.
-There were only four of them, but those four decided that together they could shake their world.
-God is always taking small things and using them for His purpose.
The Jawbone
The Little Boy’s Lunch
The Widow’s Oil
The Little Red Cord
-Quit crying about what you do not have and start focusing in on what you have been blessed with.
PRINCIPLE # 3 -- It is not how preposterous the method may be but how powerful the God is.
-Note Gideon’s Army.
PRINCIPLE # 4 -- What God blesses us with, we must take it to others.
Philip Harrelson
