Well on Sunday nights we have been working through the book of Nehemiah, and last week we looked at chapter 7, and this week we are up to chapter 8. And we said last week that God rebuilds, in Nehemiah, the walls and the gates through Nehemiah and Ezra and the temple, but that it’s not really about the walls and the gates. Ultimately, the book of Ezra-Nehemiah, which was one book originally, is there because God wants people, God wanted human beings, He loved a people and He brought this people back from their rebellious exile. And in chapter 8, He’s going to bring them all the way back. And Brevard Childs, one Old Testament commentator, said that these moments are the climax of the Old Testament because it’s everything the Old Testament has been working up to – of God saying in the prophets that He would not leave His people in exile but He would save them, He would bring them back to His land, He would redeem them. And in chapter 8, that starts with God bringing His people together around His Word. And so this chapter is all about gathering around God’s Word. Let’s pray, and then we’ll read it together.
Lord, we know that even this passage teaches that we need the Holy Spirit right now, that the Word of God is powerful because of Your Spirit. And so we ask, O Holy Spirit, to come and to meet with us now as we read Scripture. And we ask for this in Jesus’ name, amen.
This is God’s Word from chapter 8 of Nehemiah:
“And all the people gathered as one man into the square before the Water Gate. And they told Ezra the scribe to bring the Book of the Law of Moses that the Lord had commanded Israel. So Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could understand what they heard, on the first day of the seventh month. And he read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand. And the ears of all the people were attentive to the Book of the Law. And Ezra the scribe stood on a wooden platform that they had made for the purpose. And beside him stood Mattithiah, Shema, Anaiah, Uriah, Hilkiah, and Maaseiah on his right hand, and Pedaiah, Mishael, Malchijah, Hashum, Hashbaddanah, Zechariah, and Meshullam on his left hand. And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was above all the people, and as he opened it all the people stood. And Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, ‘Amen, Amen,’ lifting up their hands. And they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. Also Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, the Levites, helped the people to understand the Law, while the people remained in their places. They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.
And Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who taught the people said to all the people, ‘This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.’ For all the people wept as they heard the words of the Law. Then he said to them, ‘Go your way. Eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready, for this day is holy to our Lord. And do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.’ So the Levites calmed all the people, saying, ‘Be quiet, for this day is holy; do not be grieved.’ And all the people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions and to make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them.
On the second day the heads of fathers’ houses of all the people, with the priests and the Levites, came together to Ezra the scribe in order to study the words of the Law. And they found it written in the Law that the Lord had commanded by Moses that the people of Israel should dwell in booths during the feast of the seventh month, and that they should proclaim it and publish it in all their towns and in Jerusalem, ‘Go out to the hills and bring branches of olive, wild olive, myrtle, palm, and other leafy trees to make booths, as it is written.’ So the people went out and brought them and made booths for themselves, each on his roof, and in their courts and in the courts of the house of God, and in the square at the Water Gate and in the square at the Gate of Ephraim. And all the assembly of those who had returned from the captivity made booths and lived in the booths, for from the days of Jeshua the son of Nun to that day the people of Israel had not done so. And there was very great rejoicing. And day by day, from the first day to the last day, he read from the Book of the Law of God. They kept the feast seven days, and on the eighth day there was a solemn assembly, according to the rule.”
This is God’s holy Word.
I once heard a sermon on Nehemiah 8 when I was in seminary where the preacher said Ezra read from the book from morning till noon – that’s about six hours – and he said that means sermons must be longer than they are in our context. And you know, it’s the preacher’s dream to preach on a passage that teaches sermons need to be longer! But we don’t get to do that today because that’s not the meaning of the text here. This is not a prescriptive text for how to do Sundays and everything; it’s descriptive. But you can come to this passage and learn a lot about what it means to gather around the Word of God. And so we’re going to see two things tonight. First, the occasion for God’s Word, and then secondly, the power of God’s Word.
The Occasion for God’s Word
So first, the occasion. Remember that in the Bible there are no chapter divisions originally; those are things that we have added. And so 7:73b, the very end of the last chapter, is really a part of what we just read in chapter 8. It says, “When the seventh month had come, the people of Israel were in their towns.” That’s the beginning of the narrative. And you see it repeats it in 2 – it’s the first day of the seventh month when the people come from their towns and gather together in the square at the Water Gate. And that is very important because the seventh month, the month of Tishrei in the Hebrew calendar here, was on the first day the Feast of Trumpets, and on the tenth day, the Day of Atonement from Leviticus 16. And on the fifteenth day started a seven week long Feast of Booths that we read about at the end of the passage.
In some sense, this was like the Jewish New Year at this time. It was very important. It was a month of festival, and on the very first day of the month was always the Day of Trumpets, even though we read that nobody had kept it since the time of Joshua; the text says “Jeshua” – that’s Joshua, from the book of Joshua. And nobody had kept it, it says. But this is the first day of the month and Leviticus 23 says on the first day of the seventh month keep the Feast of Trumpets. The Feast of Trumpets is when they were commanded to gather together all the people and to blow the trumpet and God says it is a holy gathering where no one can work. And in fact, on the seventh month of the seventh year, every seven years at the Feast of Trumpets, is where they would pronounce all debts cancelled. We need to bring that back! Every seven years. And so it’s a couplet of sevens – seven and seven. And that’s the expression of the fullness of creation, the fullness of the way things should be – on the seventh month of the seventh year all debts are canceled; everyone is free. And that’s harmony. That’s things the way they should be – God’s people in God’s land, renewed, living life under God’s Word. That’s the picture of what salvation really means in the Old Testament.
And so here, they’ve been in exile for a long time and God has brought a people back and He’s built walls and gates, but today, Nehemiah 8, or 7:73b, that’s day one of the new life of Israel in the land. The Feast of Trumpets – it’s the seventh month of the seventh year. It’s day one. This is like a spiritual New Year’s Day for them. It’s starting over; it’s starting fresh. And what do you do on spiritual New Year’s Day? Well, the priest, who is the teaching office; priests not only made sacrifices but they were like the ministers. They would open God’s Word. They would preach from God’s Word on the Sabbath. He gathers the people together and they unroll the Torah, the Law, Genesis to Deuteronomy. Verse 3 very literally says, “He read in it,” because it’s not just, “He read from it,” because it was a massive scroll – the entirety of Genesis to Deuteronomy. And it says that for six hours he read from it. Now you can’t read the whole Torah, the whole Law, in six hours, so he was probably selective. But you see down in verse 18 that when they decided on the fifteenth day to follow the Feast of Tabernacles that they read from the Law, every bit of it, for seven days until it was finished. And this is not, the preacher can’t say we need to preach a six hour sermon, we need to preach longer, because this was a once a year moment; this was a renewal moment, a covenant renewal time. And this is day one of the renewed life of Israel. God’s people in God’s land, revived underneath God’s Word.
And so let’s take stock here. It’s the Lord’s feast day, it’s the Lord’s feast day and the teaching office of the congregation gets up in a wooden pulpit it says, that they built, and he opens the book and in verse 6 it says that he prays for what’s about to happen and says, “Lord, will You bless this?” And they say, “Amen, Amen,” meaning, “We agree. We come underneath this book, underneath the Word here. We’re submitting to it.” And we learn in verse 7 it’s not just reading but that the Levites actually go out and explain it. And then in verse 8 there’s a word there that can be translated in multiple ways but verse 8, “they explained it clearly.” It really means, “they translated it,” because the people had been in exile so long they didn’t know Hebrew anymore. So most of the people only would have spoken Aramaic and so the priests, the teachers had to translate it and then it says they went passage by passage and interpreted it.
The Preaching of God’s Word
Does that sound familiar? This is preaching! This is an Old Testament moment of standard, basic preaching. This is what, when the people of God were trying to get revived and start day one again under an image of salvation in the land of God, they said, “We’ve got to gather on the Sabbath Day, on the feast day of God, and we’ve got to preach God’s Word.” And this is preaching. We say we do this. We do this 104 times a year here at First Pres. And we might say, “Why do we do this?” and “Why do we center our lives, the cycle and schedule of the Christian life around this?” And we don’t have to leave the Old Testament to get an answer to that. It’s always been that way. Hughes Oliphant Old, one of the scholars that studies worship throughout history, he says that preaching was the cardinal characteristic of Jewish worship from the time of the Torah going forward. And in Deuteronomy 31 verse 12, God says, “Assemble the people on the Sabbath, men, women and children, and all the foreigners residing in the town, so they can listen to the Word of the Lord and learn how to fear the Lord and follow it carefully all the words that God has spoken.”
And when you come to the New Testament, when you come to a place like Luke chapter 4, Jesus steps into the synagogue on the Sabbath Day and He takes out the scroll, the Torah, and He unrolls it and He reads from it and He preaches, He teaches on the Sabbath Day. And He is doing nothing other than obeying exactly what God commissioned for His people to do regularly all the way back in the Old Testament. And this is so important to see. It’s so important to even preach a little bit about preaching because there are thirty-three different words in Greek in the New Testament for talking about God’s Word. And sometimes they are translated as “preach” or “teach” or “proclaim” or “counsel;” all sorts of ways they are translated. And we have words like “pneutheo,” which means to sit down with a friend and use God’s Word to give them counseling in their life. And we have words like “lalein” in the New Testament that is just talk about God’s Word in normal daily life with people. It’s a dinner table type word. You’ve got to be talking about God’s Word at the dinner table. And there are thirty-three different words for how you could talk about God’s Word in normal life in the New Testament.
And Old Testament, New Testament, there is a universal command that we are called as the people of God to bathe our speech in daily life under the authority and commission and with conformity to God’s Word, to the Bible. And in the Shema, the famous text of Deuteronomy 6, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one” – remember what that command is about? It says when you are teaching and raising up your children, write the Word of God on their hearts. And when you sit down, talk to them about God’s Word. And when you are traveling, it says talk to them about God’s Word. And when you’re lying down and when you rise, talk about God’s Word. In other words, it’s saying, always, in every situation you are in, talk to your kids about God’s Word. Raise them up on the Word of God.
And so it’s a mistake, then, it’s a mistake, then, to think on the one hand that Sunday pulpit preaching, the ministry of the Word here, is the only ministry of the Word of God. We know God works the Word into our lives in all sorts of ways – through conversation and counseling and small group Bible study and meeting with people, day in and day out; we’re called to all of that. But at the same time, Nehemiah 8 is here and it teaches what the rest of the Bible teaches, and that is that on God’s feast day when God’s called, teaching officers, the ministers, gather together with the body of Jesus Christ, that that moment, that preaching, the feast day of God, the Sabbath Day, is the formal ministry of the Word of God and the Bible does present it as qualitatively different, as a command that we are all called to come under. “Do not neglect the assembling, the coming under, the coming together on the Sabbath Day of the Word of God.” And you say, “I know that. I’m here right now.” And I say, “Yes, that’s what the Bible teaches and we’re doing it.” But this passage helps us understand why.
We see actually down in verse 13 on the second day the heads of the fathers’ houses of all the people, with the priests and the Levites, came together to study the Word of God. On day one, there is a Sabbath convocation, and on day two, many of the people go home and a lot of them stay to study the Bible. And those are different. In the first, you’ve got preaching, and in the second, you’ve got a Bible study. And they are doing both and they are distinct, but they are together. And the Reformation, the Protestant Reformation that we are born from in many ways, was built on that distinction and on the necessity of both. The reformers wanted to say that we’ve got to have God’s Word preached on the feast day of God, on the Sabbath Day of God, and then at the same time they were coming to say the Bible has got to be for everybody. The Bible can never only be the property of scholars and pastors and teachers, that every single Christian has got to be a person of the Book. We are people of the Book.
What is Preaching?
And so on the one hand, we can never neglect the assembling, the preaching; it’s so critical, even from the time of the Old Testament. And at the same time, we have to say what one scholar says about this – Adams, he writes about this. “The church’s ministry should be pulpit centered but not pulpit restrictive.” The church’s ministry has got to be pulpit centered but not pulpit restrictive. Now that means, quickly, we have to ask very briefly, “What is preaching?” And again, it’s right here in Nehemiah 8 when they gather under the Word. It’s right here. We could boil it down to two things, to two parts of what we do when we come together here. And we see it – Ezra unrolled the scroll, he read it, he translated it, and he explained it. The first thing for preaching to be preaching – it has to be expositing the Word of God.
And you know, that sounds commonplace, but in 1592, William Perkins, who is one of the second generation reformers, wrote a book called, The Art of Prophesying – preaching is what he meant – and the very first sentence that he wrote, then, was, “The Word of God alone is to be preached.” That was the first sentence he said. And the reason for that is because in his day, to Perkins, what he heard was that a lot of sermons would read a Bible passage and then they would move on to talk about various things, different topics, important things; not bad things, but he said they never actually explained the passage, they never actually explained the text. And one of the things that the reformers said is that real preaching has got to exposit the text. It’s got to present the text and explain the text. And he said in his day, people thought the Bible was boring and needed a whole lot of help to gain interest in people’s lives and heart. And so they would do other things besides talk about what’s there in the text. And he said, no, it’s not preaching unless it’s expositing the Word of God.
A recent preaching book that the people who are learning to preach at RTS read, it goes so far as to say that a preacher should not preach about what God has laid on their heart that week, but about what God actually said in the text. He goes so far as to even say that, that it’s about expositing God’s Word. The law of exposition tells us today that sometimes even we have to preach about preaching, even if it’s not the first subject we would preach about if we had the choice. But it’s right here in Nehemiah 8 and so we have to talk about it.
The second element – and this is what Calvin says – Calvin says that, “Preaching is to love God’s Word and teach it,” exposit it, “and to love people.” And he’s taking that from 1 Corinthians 1:24 where Paul says, “I came to preach Christ to Jews and to Greeks.” In other words, he’s saying, “I preach the Bible to Jews and Greeks,” meaning it’s not preaching unless we know that there is a people to preach to and they live in a space and a time and a particular place and that they live in a culture. And so preaching is the exposition of God’s Word contextualized for a specific people in a time and place that seeks to cut down to the very heart, to the bone and marrow. And that means for it to be Christian preaching it has to preach Christ. When you look at the Reformed confessions, if you look at our confessions, they will go so far as to say that when God’s people are gathered on the Sabbath Day, the feast day of God, gathered together under the Word, obeying the command to not neglect that and the Bible has been translated and preached and exposited and applied, that that is the deliverance of the very Word of God. The confession goes so far as to say that. And that means it is powerful!
The Power of God’s Word
Now the second thing, and the question here – and it’s right here in our passage – we have to ask is, “What is so powerful about it?” So secondly, the power of God’s Word. And there’s two elements here to pull out, and really they’re number one and most important, what God does. And then secondly, very secondarily, what we do. So let’s see that here.
What God Does
Why did God command in Deuteronomy 12 and why do we see it in Nehemiah 8 and in 1 Timothy 3 to tell us to preach? Why did He put this at the center of what we do here in ministry? And one of the reasons for that is very practical, and that’s that most people in history could not read texts. Very very few people in history by percentages were able to read a book. And us moderns are novel in that way. And so gathering together and having someone read God’s Word was so critical because there was no other way to get it.
And so there’s a practical element but there’s also a theological element. And that’s places like Hebrews 4:12, that “the Word of God is living and active,” that God comes “in demonstration of the Spirit and power,” 1 Corinthians, and does not leave His Word void. God always does something, we’re told in Scripture, when we gather together and do this. That He never leaves us empty; that He hardens and He softens but He doesn’t do nothing. He is always doing something.
Let’s be very Presbyterian for just a second and let me just read exactly what our catechism says about what’s going on right now when we do this. “The Spirit of God makes the reading, but especially the preaching of the Word an effective means of enlightening, convincing, humbling sinners, of driving them away from themselves and drawing them back to Jesus Christ.” Now there’s lots of things God’s Word does to us, but I want to highlight a few that are right here in Nehemiah 8 very quickly as we draw things to a close.
George Whitefield, when he was asked by a man once, “Can I print your sermons?” during the Great Awakening, he said, “You’ll never be able to put down the thunder and lightning on the page.” And he said that because you’ve got to be embodied, you’ve got to be there; God does something in person underneath God’s Word that’s unique. And here’s what we learn from this passage. There are so many more things we could say, but the ones that are right here, let me highlight three of them very briefly.
The Word of God Brings Unity
The first thing we see in verse 1 is that the Word of God brings unity. It says here that, “the people gathered as one man.” It could be translated, “as one mind into the square,” and they altogether yelled out, “Bring out the Book!’” And the Word of God brings unusual, uncommon unity. That’s one of the things God does when we gather under His Word. Paul, in the New Testament, talking about this same thing, says that when we gather under the Bible there is, in the Church, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female.” And he’s not saying that to obliterate distinction and culture, race, gender, or anything. What he’s saying, to put it crudely, is that many of us would not naturally be friends. We wouldn’t naturally spend time together! But God’s Word brings unusual, uncommon unity. Many of us who would not very likely be friends in normal circumstances sit here tonight and say, “Brother,” and say, “Sister,” to one another. And that’s the power of what God does through His Word. And we’ve got to be aware that that’s true all across the city. Every single person who gathers underneath the Word of God, we say, “Brother,” we say, “Sister.” Every single person who believes the Gospel underneath the authority of the Word of God, we say, “Brother;” we say, “Sister.” All across the city. All across the world.
The Word of God Confronts
Now the second thing we see here is that the Word of God confronts. And down in verse 9, when he reads the Law they wept; they could not stop weeping. And they had been in exile for generations and they’re cut to the heart because they know that they have not kept the Word of the Law. They’ve not been servants of the Word of God as God taught it. And when you come under God’s Word and your heart is soft, the Word of God always exposes. It always comes in the power of the Spirit and cuts down to the heart, to the division of bone and marrow. It’s been doing that for all of history. In Genesis chapter 3, after Adam and Eve had sinned, God came down. And what did He do? He spoke. He spoke. His words came forth and He said, “Where are you?” And they hid from Him – why? Because they knew they were naked; nakedness was not as much about clothing as it was about God could see what they had really become. And when the Word of God goes forth and we come underneath it, we are exposed; we are cut to the heart. And if often does, the power of the Spirit often brings tears when we really consider where we are and what we are and what we’ve been before the Law of God when it’s read. One theologian puts it like this. “When the Spirit blesses the preaching of God’s Word, the thoughts of God triumph over all of our thoughts.” It overwhelms us. It turns us away from ourselves. No matter how long we are Christian in this life, mature or immature, when we come under the Word of God, it provokes confession. We are forced. We are exposed.
The Word of God Brings Strength
Thirdly and lastly here, the Word of God brings strength. You see it down in verse 10. They say, “You’re weeping, but don’t weep.” One of the things that you’ve got to do, people of God, on this new spiritual birthday of ours that we’re having right now, Israel, is that you have actually got to listen and obey. And God says in the Law, “On the Feast Day, don’t weep! Rejoice! Celebrate!” And so they say, “We know you are cut to the heart,” but in a pastoral tone, “stop weeping, because today is the day of festival.”
And then the very famous line in verse 11, “The joy of the Lord is your strength” – the one we could have preached the whole sermon on. But think about this line for just a second – “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” What is it saying? It’s saying that God’s joy is my strength. And so I have to ask then, “What is God’s joy?” And in the context of this passage, “What is God’s joy?” We said it last week. God’s joy is that He delighted to bring a rebellious, wayward people back to the land. He wanted them. He wanted to save them. Jerusalem wasn’t about Jerusalem. Jerusalem is not about laws and gates. His joy was His people, human beings that He loved and wanted, to bring them back and to save them. And it’s saying there, “Israel, if you know that God delights in you, that is your strength. That is the ground of your strength.” And you say today, we say today, “Does God delight in me?” And one of the things I mentioned just last weekend at some dear friends, that are here tonight, wedding, from Hebrews 12, we have an answer. Hebrews 12 says that for the joy, for the joy that was set before Jesus, when He was hanging on the cross being murdered by creation, that there was a joy set before Him. That’s what it says. And what was it? He looked down the aisle of the hill of Golgotha and the great groom saw His bride. And that was His joy as He endured the shame and punishment of the cross. The reason He could endure was because He looked down and He saw His bride.
And if you believe in Him tonight, you are His bride. And so you can say, “The joy of the Lord is my strength and Jesus Christ tells me that I was His joy when He was hanging on the cross, that He was thinking of me, that He wanted me, that He was there for me. And that’s my strength.” And if that’s true, then what you can say, what you can say, if that’s the foundation of your life then you can say, “No matter what circumstance comes my way, I’m going to be okay. I can have strength in any circumstance because I was Jesus’ joy when He was hanging on the cross. He saw me.”
What We Do
Now finally – and we’ll close with this – what do we do? And I’m just going to rattle these off, and they’re right out of the passage again. That’s the sum of the demonstration of the power of God when we come under the Word of God, but what do we do? There’s something that we’re called to here. How do we respond? And we’ll just take two minutes and rattle these off. They’re right here in the text.
We Have to Take Initiative
And the first one says that we have to, in verse 4, take initiative. They actually had built a pulpit beforehand. Maybe this is the moment that the pulpit emerges in history; the reason we have one of these right here. I’m not sure about that, but they prepared for this. They built a pulpit beforehand and it says that it was the people that shouted, “Bring out the Book!” They knew who they had been and they took deep initiative to get under God’s Word, both on Sunday, on the Sabbath, the feast day, and in their daily lives. And the simple application here is that we are being called tonight to take initiative for our own spiritual revival, for our own revivification, our coming back to life, every week, every day under God. We can’t be passive. We have to be active. We’re called to get under God’s Word, to take initiative here.
We Have to Fight for Attentiveness
Secondly, of four. We have to, in verse 3, also fight for attentiveness. Verse 3 says that they stood up for all six hours. We don’t do that, but they were so attentive! They took attention to God’s Word! And proper attentiveness to God’s Word is so difficult today because we live in an age of screen time, and screen time means the reduction of the ability to listen well over long periods.
We Have to Adjust Our Posture
And so the third thing, I think, helps us here – third of four – and that’s that we have to adjust our posture in the face of God’s Word. You see that they stood and they bowed and they said, “Amen, Amen,” and they lifted holy hands. And I’m not saying that’s prescriptive, though we could use a dose of it now and then – lifting holy hands. But they did it. The point is that we’ve got to take a posture of prayer and worship and preparation as we approach God’s Word. And that’s what they did here. There’s a philosopher in the middle of the 20th century named Hans Georg Gadamer. He was a philosopher of texts; he studied a philosophy of texts. He was a professional literary interpreter, if you will. And this is one thing he says, very practically about this. “What one has to exercise above all else in the interpretation and formation underneath a text is the discipline of the ear,” he says. And he writes that in a visual culture, we naturally develop inattentiveness with regard to our ears. Do you struggle to pay attention sometimes to God’s Word? I know I do! And it’s because of, often, our habits. And this is calling us, “How can I reset? How can I seek attention? How can I say “No” to things in my life and declutter my schedule to have space to give attention to God’s Word? Or how do I prepare on Sundays for receiving God’s Word? Do I read it beforehand? Do I pray beforehand? Do I come ready? Do I come with eagerness and earnestness and some unction that this is what I want; that this is what I came here for?”
We Have to Seek Personal and Corporate Reformation
And then finally and lastly, we learn here that we have to seek personal and corporate reformation at all times. In verse 14 at the very end, they came back for the Bible study, the small group Bible study if you will, and they read from the Torah and the learned about the Feast of Booths, that feast that they were to start keeping on the fifteenth day of the month, Tishrei. And they realized, “We’re not keeping the feast and nobody has kept the feast since the time of Joshua!” And immediately they said, “Get the people out. Gather the sticks and the leaves. We’re going to keep the Feast of the Booths.” The Feast of the Booths was about remembering what God had done in the wilderness, bringing Israel. And they saw themselves as the product of a new exodus, coming out of the land of exile, into the land of salvation.
But the point is, when they were convicted they said, “We’ve got to reform!” When they came across something in the Scripture that said, “I am not conformed to this. This is God’s Law and I’m not conformed to it,” they repented and they said, “We’ve got to change right now!” And how often have we heard God’s Word, how often have I heard God’s Word preached or taught in a small group or talked about something with a friend at a lunch and said, “Man, I needed that. I needed to hear that,” and then I come back around some months later and I realize that I didn’t change at all? I didn’t seek change. I didn’t seek reformation on the very thing I needed that God’s Word confronted me about. And this is a challenge here that they immediately sought reformation in their personal and their corporate life. We need to lean on the cross and seek reformation at all times. And one author says it this way. “The Biblical text needs to be applied by each person and each generation and every situation without falling into legalism.” Paul says, Paul says to the preachers, “Preach the Word,” and James says to all of us, “Become doers of the Word.” Be conformed over time.
We’ll close with this. Responding in this way means always reforming to say that I want to be shaped more by God’s Word than by my feelings and by the culture around me. And that means we have to be in constant self and cultural evaluation, up against the Word of God. One theologian puts it like this, and I’ll give him the last word – “In our hearts and in our lives, our professions, our businesses, our homes, our community life, in our works of mission, in our local church ministry, all of it, this Word, the thoughts of God, is to be applied, worked out, and made the very rule of our entire lives.”
Let’s pray together.
Father, we ask now that the Spirit would come and do the work of making Your speech, Your thoughts, Your Word, the very rule of our lives. And we ask, Lord, that You would show us the ways that we are not conformed to Your Word, Your Law. We lean on Jesus Christ who took joy in us at the cross. We rest in the forgiveness we have in Him and we ask, Lord, that You would change us. And we ask for this in Christ’s name, amen.