When the Cause Seems Lost
Tim Stutler
March 9, 2006
Title:
When the Cause Seems Lost
Text(s):
II Kings 22,23
Topic:
Even when we do everything we can to lead people from sin to righteousness, sometimes the cause seems lost. We can be assured that our efforts for God are never in vain.
Sermon Purpose(s):
1. The hearer of this message should learn a pattern for leading people from evil to a
walk with the Lord.
2. The hearer should be motivated to follow Josiah’s example.
3. The hearer should be aware that all efforts for God do not yield visible fruit.
4. The hearer should be assured that God’s prescribed actions are never followed in vain.
Synopsis of Structural Logic (Organization):
A story to be told.
1. Devotion to God leads to a discovery of His word. 22:1-10
2. Discovery of God’s word leads to denouncing evil.
- In our own lives. 22:11
- In our congregation’s lives. 23:1-3
- In our society. 23:4-20
3. Discovery of God’s word leads to dedication to Him. 23:21-23
4. Dedication to God doesn’t always lead to deliverance. 23:26-30
5. Devotees to God will always receive their due. 22:2; 23:25
Expanded Structure:
Introduction: My full-time ministry began as a music and youth minister at a church in the same town I currently serve in. After five and a half years there I reflected on my ministry and what I had accomplished. Here’s a list of some of my successes…(names changed)
1. Randy and Karah began dating and everyone knew they were having sex every chance they had despite their claims to be followers of Christ.
2. Scott started playing rock music and soon he and his friend Johnny who had joined the group were smoking pot and I had to be the one to confront them and tell their parents.
3. Chris came to Christ at a concert we attended but was full of compromise. He told the youth group that cheating in school was morally ok as long as hey did not get caught. He went off to college and his compromise continued.
4. Mary, a minister’s daughter from another church who was a part of our group, went off to a liberal Christian school and soon turned from Christ.
5. T.J. and Autumn hooked up from our group and soon ran away from home together to Texas while they were both under age. The police had to find them in a hotel together.
6. Amelia thought she was smarter than everyone and she went off and married a jerk and was soon divorced with two small kids.
7. Brad was one of my closest kids. We spent lots of time together and he even preached a fine sermon on youth Sunday. Brad soon started drinking and sneaking out at night with his brother and friends. Soon Brad got addicted to drugs and sex and shot himself in the head in front of his ex girlfriend’s window.
8. Nick came to the church the same time I did. He was from a bad background and was full of anger. He walked off from the group in Washington DC among 20,000 other kids in 108 degree weather. Nick improved much and even lived in my home for 2 weeks while he got his situation worked out. We became very close and I was proud of his progress until he climbed into the car with one of his drunk buddies and was slammed into a hill at 80 mph. I buried him on the day he was to graduate from high school.
Transition: How would you like to have a resume like this? With this resume, would you hire me? I did everything I knew to do. I studied and applied God’s word to my life, I spent time investing it into them. I led them through great times of worship and revival… but in the end, the cause seemed lost.
Trust me; this will happen to you too just as it happened to me; just as it happened to king Josiah of Israel.
Text: 2 Kings 22 and 23
Background:
- Josiah was the sixteenth king of Israel. His father was Amon, an evil king who was executed by his people. Josiah came to the throne at the ripe old age of eight.
- Israel had lived though some good kings but mostly bad. The reforms of Hezekiah had long been forgotten and the evil reign of Manasseh had secured the judgment of God upon Judah. The northern kingdom of Israel had strayed years earlier and were overrun by the Assyrians and all that existed there was a few people who were too poor or old to be taken captive to Nineveh.
- Assyria’s power in the world was waning and a new empire laid on the horizon, an empire foretold by the prophets, the Babylonians.
- Egypt had enjoyed some resurgence and was once again playing her part on the world scene.
- Josiah apparently had some positive influences because by the time he was sixteen he had ordered a remodeling of the temple and had begun to clean up the land from its years of idolatry.
- It was said of him that he served the Lord and never turned to the right or the left.
Question:
Wouldn’t we like that as our epitaph? From his life we discover a pattern for ours that can guarantee the same commentary on us. Follow his story with me.
Read 22:1-10
1. Devotion to God leads to a discovery of His word.
-Josiah’s efforts to renew the temple lead the crew to find the lost book of the law.
-The book had been lost for years and even forgotten about. Can you imagine God’s people losing their founding document and the gracious revelation of God?
-Too often we are guilty of having underappreciated the revelation of God and its value.
ILLUSTRATION:A story is told of a man who loved old books. He met an acquaintance who had just thrown away a Bible that had been stored in the attic of his ancestral home for generations. "I couldn’t read it," the friend explained. "Somebody named Guten-something had printed it." "Not Gutenberg!" the book lover exclaimed in horror. "That Bible was one of the first books ever printed. Why, a copy just sold for over two million dollars!" His friend was unimpressed. "Mine wouldn’t have brought a dollar. Some fellow named Martin Luther had scribbled all over it in German."
The man didn’t have an appreciation of what he had. But Josiah by his working to do what he knew to do, demonstrated an appreciation for the things of the Lord. (from Sermon central)
- Principle: People devoted to God will receive His word.
- Josiah’s devotion to God led to a discovery of God’s word in the temple.
- Support: John 10:27, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.”
Application:
1. We live in a society that has lost contact with the word of God
Ill. Most copies of Time Magazine have as much reading material as the NT yet many more people read Time than the NT each week.
Ill. “If the dust were blown off of all the bibles in America we would have a dust storm of catastrophic proportions and the sun would be blocked out and a new ice age would be entered.”
2. As sheep, we must study God’s Word ourselves first. 2 Tim 2:15
3. As shepherds, we must make the word known to those around us as we lead them to the good shepherd. 2 Tim 4:2 “Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching.”
Question:
How many of you want to be like Josiah in your contact with God’s word?
2. Discovery of God’s word leads to denouncing evil.
A. In our own lives. 22:11
- Josiah repented first.
- Support: Matt. 7:3 “Hypocrite! First remove the plank from you own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
Ill. I assure my people that if they are uncomfortable coming into contact with God’s word for a half hour, they should try dealing with a text for two weeks.
- Application: We cannot study the word only to preach, teach it, or simply to enjoy its content. We must allow it to do its work in our lives first.
B. In our congregation’s lives. 23:1-3
- We cannot assume that just because our church considers itself the people of God that we have it all right. Look at Judah’s example. The priests had failed. Josiah called them to return to God.
- Application: Before the church can impact the culture, it must come in line with God’s word.
C. In our society. 23:4-20
- The culture of Judah had set up sodomy booths in the temple; high places throughout the land, idols on the roof of the temple to astrology Gods. They even made their children walk through the fire of Molech. They were no different than the Canaanites who had once received God’s wrath through them for the same acts.
Josiah tore all of these altars and high places down and desecrated them so that they could never be used again. He ground up the metals used in them and put the dust in the river. His reforms clashed with tradition, comfort levels and culture…yet he chose to honor the covenant.
- Point of contact: Is our society any different today?
- We have immorality all around us.
- Homosexuality is celebrated by the culture and some churches.
- Our children have to walk through the fires of drug abuse, rampant sexuality, absentee parents, internet pornography and violence and abuse.
What should we do?
ILLUSTRATION: Frederick Charrington was a member of the wealthy family in England which owned the Charrington Brewery. His personal fortune, derived solely from his brewing enterprise, exceeded $66 million.
One night, Charrington was walking along a London street with a few friends. Suddenly the door of a pub flew open just a few steps ahead of the group, and a man staggered out into the street with a woman clinging desperately to him. The man, obviously very drunk, was swearing at the woman and trying to push her away. The woman was gaunt and clad in rags. She sobbed and pleaded with the drunken man, who was her husband. "Please, dear, please!" she cried as Charrington and his friends watched. "The children haven’t eaten in two days! And I’ve not eaten in a week! For the love of God, please come home! Or if you must stay, just give me a few coins so I can buy the children some…" Her pleas were brutally cut off as her husband struck her a savage blow. She collapsed to the stone pavement like a rag doll. The man stood over her with his fists clenched, poised as if to strike her again. Charrington leaped forward and grasped him. The man struggled, swearing violently, but Charrington pinned the man’s arms securely behind his back. Charrington’s companions rushed to the woman’s side and began ministering to her wounds. A short time later a policeman led the drunken man away and the woman was taken to a nearby hospital.
As Charrington brushed himself off, he noticed a lighted sign in the window of the pub: "Drink Chrarrington Ale." The multi-millionaire brewer was suddenly shaken to the core of his being. He realized that his confrontation with the violent husband would not have happened if the man’s brain had not been awash with the Charrington family’s product. "When I saw that sign," he later wrote, "I was stricken just as surely as Paul on the Damascus Road. Here was the source of my family wealth, and it was producing untold human misery before my own eyes. Then and there I pledged to God that not another penny of that money should come to me."
History records that Frederick Charrington became one of the most well-known temperance activists in England. He renounced his share of the family fortune and devoted the rest of his life to the ministry of freeing men and women from the curse of alcoholism.
Here was a man who confronted with the wrong turned away from it and pursued the right steadfastly in spite of great personal cost.
What about you and I? When we are confronted with our sin are we so grieved that we mourn and tear our clothes? Are we also willing to follow the Lord in holiness of life? Are we willing to dedicate ourselves to leading otheres to do the same?
Principle: Like Josiah, those who are devoted to God and who discover his word should in turn denounce evil in their own lives and in their churches and in their culture.
Question:
How many of you want to be like Josiah in your influence on culture?
Read 23:21-23
3. Discovery of God’s word leads to dedication to Him.
- With the Judeans, it was not enough to eradicate bad habits, but they renewed good habits. They celebrated the Passover and they renewed the covenant.
-Principle: Being a Christian is not all about what not to do but about what to do.
- Point of contact: Our children and our culture and our churchgoers don’t just need to hear about what not to do, they must hear what to do.
Ill. A lady in my church sent me a nice letter of encouragement this week. She said that a class that I taught that surveyed the Bible in one year awakened in her a love of scripture and that love moved her to
-Point of Contact: Perhaps that’s why ministries that simply preach about the good habits of Christian living have become so popular. People are hungry to hear how to live the full life that God has prescribed. Though these ministries too often avoid Josiah’s actions of denouncing evil, they capitalize on the fact that too many ministries never lead people to replace those bad habits with good.
- Application: It is not enough to only battle evil, we must replace bad habits with good and we must teach others how as well.
Question:
How many of you would love to lead your people in such awesome times of worship and obedience?
Read 23:26-30
This passage runs the whole story right into a wall. This isn’t how we have been trained to think. This story has a bad ending. We need to know today that…
4. Dedication to God doesn’t always lead to deliverance
- Josiah’s devotion to God, his discovery of God’s word, his denouncement of evil and his dedication to doing what was right was rewarded with an apparent defeat.
- His sons did evil.
- His reforms were short lived.
- His nation soon received the judgment on Manasseh despite the justness of Josiah.
How many of you want to see these kinds of results in your life? Not many, I’m sure!
We are forced to ask ourselves this question: “If Josiah’s efforts to a cursed nation were a lost cause, then why should we work to redeem a cursed world?”
For years I lamented this scripture passage. I was frustrated that though Josiah had done it all right, his efforts seemed lost. I loved this king for his stand for God, I almost named my son after him. Yet, all that he did for God did not seem to matter.
However, recent study has shown me that it Did! Follow me.
Read 22:2; 23:25
5. Devotees to God will always receive their due.
- Josiah was mourned by his people and even lamented by Jeremiah who wrote a now lost lament for him.
- He was remembered as one of the greatest kings in Judah’s history by both the narrators of Kings and Chronicles.
Looking beyond the scope of this text we can find some amazing facts that may explain why the narrator said Josiah was so great!
- His efforts against the Egyptian ruler Necho helped to fulfill the prophesied judgments against Assyria whom Necho was going to aid against the Babylonians. It was not the will of God for neither Assyria nor Egypt to be in power in the world. Babylon was God’s chosen means of judgment and provision for Judah.
- Never again do we see the altars that Josiah destroyed plaguing Israel.
- Never again have God’s people been without His word.
- After years of prophetic silence the prophets Jeremiah, Zeph. , perhaps Nahum and Habakkuk began their ministries under his reign.
- Even His death was an act of grace from God. Paul said, “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.
- Yes, and even his faithfulness played a part in God’s judgment on Judah…sometimes our part in the story is the same.
- Josiah’s actions secured the remnant, the true Israel, sometimes our part in the story is the same here too.
Were the reforms of Josiah a lost cause? Most certainly not!
Principle: We can be assured that our efforts for God are never in vain.
How?
- Support: 2,000 years ago on a Friday it looked like the cause was lost. They laid the disfigured body of Jesus Christ in a borrowed tomb. But three days later, the world would know that in him there is no lost cause. He rose from the dead and is the first fruits of those who will likewise rise. Therefore men, we can be assured that…
o Romans 8:28 “All things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose.”
o Galatians 6:7 “God is not mocked, whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap…if a man sows to the spirit from the spirit he will reap eternal life.”
o 1 Cor 2: 9 “No eye has seen and no ear has heard nor has there entered into the heart of any man what God has prepared for those who love Him.”
Ill. That youth group I told you about earlier now has seen Randy become a pastor, Chris who gave me major Youth Pastor headaches is now a youth pastor (vengeance is mine declares the Lord!). Scott who smoked pot is going to the mission field. Steve is now a missionary in Romania. Rebecca is a faithful wife and mother raising her children in church. Melody is doing the same. T.J. and Autumn broke up and the Lord is working in their lives. Many of those kids are headed in the right direction and God has allowed me, years later, to see it
Not all will see their fruits of their labors but all labors for Christ bare fruit now or eternally for the sower:
Ill. As Nate Saint and Jim Elliott looked into the eyes of their murderers must have thought that they too had failed, that the cause was lost. But we know today that the cause was not lost. Many have been inspired by their story to take up their cause for Christ. The very men who killed them now share around the world the testimony of forgiveness through Christ that they received from Jim and Nate. The story has spawned several books and a recent movie.
Application: When the Cause seems lost don’t give up!
- When you invest your lives in your kids and they seem to walk away from God and you, don’t give up! The cause is not lost.
- When your family disowns you for your faith…don’t give up…the cause is not lost!
- When our marriage is in turmoil and we cannot find our direction, don’t give up…the cause is not lost!
- When we try to convince our friends that they are going in the wrong direction and they refuse to listen, don’t give up! The cause is not lost.
- When we preach or teach or evangelize our guts out with no evident response, don’t give up…the cause is not lost.
- When we invest our lives to improve our church and nothing seems to happen, don’t give up the cause is not lost!
- When we invest our lives trying to redeem a culture that turns a deaf ear, don’t give up…the cause is not lost!
Through the resurrected Christ we can be assured that no cause for Him is lost. “Behold I am coming quickly and my reward is with me!” When the cause seems lost…Don’t give up.
