The Road to Spiritual Renewal

• View transcript

  The Road Spiritual Renewal

  Download transcript

  Good morning, brothers and sisters. Please turn to 1 Samuel chapter 7. If you have just been here visiting maybe for a few weeks, you may feel today like you're just jumping into the middle of a story or a movie or something like that, and the characters might not be familiar. So since we've been out of Samuel just a couple of weeks, I will try to kind of catch us back up today as we get back into it, and where we are in this wonderful book. As the title of the book, you might guess is about a person named Samuel, and that's understandable. And yet we've said the title really doesn't do it justice. The name Samuel, because the name, even though it sounded like God has heard me. The name itself meant God is my name, and God is the hero of the whole story of Samuel, because it is God who is moving along Salvation in the people of God in Israel all the way to Christ coming the greater prophet, the greatest prophet, the greatest king, the greatest priest that the people of God will ever know. And so Samuel is an important book for understanding just the flow of Scripture, of how God establishes kingship in Israel. Prior to that. Uh, God ruled and reigned himself through his law, and he rose up Levites and priests to offer sacrifices for the people. He rose up prophets like Moses and others to speak to the people, but they never had a king. He rose up judges like Joshua and Samson and Gideon, those who could, uh, keep the peace, if you will. But they never had a king. They never had somebody that. I guess when we think about a king, somebody with absolute power, if you want to call it that. And, this is the book that that changes from a theocracy where God is king over all the people, to that of having a king, an autocracy. And that's where we are getting to in this book. And Samuel is the one that ushers that in. He is the one that is going to anoint Saul, and he's going to anoint David starting in chapter 9 and onward. But for the next two weeks, while we're still in the month of May, we'll finish out 1 Samuel seven today and then eight next week before we take a break for the one service summer and have a guest speaker in here. First week in June, a guy that we've partnered with before, Matt McCarthy of City Light Church in High Point. We helped support that church as it was planted. And then after that, the leadership will do a series on the attributes of God through the month of June, July and into August. And then, Lord willing, and the creek don't rise, we'll be back in Samuel in the month of August and onward. So it's going to hopefully end where we see in the next two weeks, right up to the point where Saul comes around. And these two weeks we actually get the the most attention given to Samuel in his heyday, if you will. So far, we've really just seen Samuel as a young man. We've kind of seen his origins story, but he disappeared off the scene a few weeks ago. Maybe you noticed that chapters four, five and six, he was gone. He was nowhere to be found. Even though we'll see in the text today that he was heard, that though the Word of God had been silent, it says in 1 Samuel four that that there was not there was not a word from the Lord. Sorry. In first Samuel 3:1 as Samuel was just a boy learning under Eli, the Word of the Lord was rare in those days. By the time we get to the end of chapter three, Samuel has grown up from adolescence to a man of God in chapter three, verses 19 to 21. And eventually Eli's going to be off the scene as he is kind of diminishing both physically, but more so his leadership as the priest in Shiloh. And so a transition occurs in the Book of Samuel from Eli's leadership to Samuel's leadership. But yet, as chapter four started out, though the Word of God was coming to Samuel. And it says in first Samuel four one and thus the word of Samuel was coming to all Israel. It's just like that. He's gone. And you would almost expect that. Well, if God is speaking to Samuel and all of Samuel's words are going out to all of Israel, he would have a pretty pronounced role from that point forward. Except that wasn't part of God's plan for Israel to really hit rock bottom, as we have seen in chapters four, five, and six. That he suffered the humiliation of his own apparent defeat, the Ark being taken, Israel being defeated to teach Israel a most important lesson, which is that his glory, his presence with his people, was not going to be confined or localized to the Ark, so that they would actually, over the course of time, have come to put their faith in an ark, in a, in a talisman and a rabbit's foot in a piece of furniture, a really nice one at that. They had lost sight that their hope, their salvation, their deliverance was in God Himself, and they had drifted from that. And so we don't hear from Samuel starting back in first Samuel 4:2 all the way until he comes on the scene today. And he's probably now a mature spiritual man in his 30s. We know from the Levitical law that it wasn't until 25 that a priest could enter into the priesthood, though he was in the Levitical line. Age 25 is when his apprenticeship would start, and then it was usually by age 30 that he would serve in that function. And so years have gone by. And now Eli, is that priest or sorry, Eli is dead. Um, and Samuel is that priest. And it's been 20 years, and Samuel is now doing what he's always done. He's had a word from God, and he's spoken it. But nobody's been listening until we get to chapter seven. The judgment on Israel's rejection of his word has been severe. They were conquered by the Philistines starting back in chapter four. But then it wasn't just severity to Israel, it was to the Philistines. Chapters five and six. As God was showing his sovereignty over the false god of the Philistines, Dagon, he brought curses upon the Philistines in their land to the point that in chapter six they decide to get rid of the Ark and send it back to Israel. And that's where we pick up today in chapter seven, in a little dot on the map called Kiriath-Jearim, a little border town between the Philistines and the Israelites. Nothing significant about this place, and really nothing significant about the people there. Abinadab whose house? It was his son Eleazar, who was tasked to keep the Ark. All insignificant characters, but showing that during this 20 years of darkness, God was working, Samuel was preaching, and it was going to take a while for that preaching to get through to the people, to the point we'll see in the text today where they get back on the road to spiritual renewal. That's what this chapter is about. Israel was in rebellion. The Philistines were licking their wounds. But God is still teaching this lesson. You don't need to get right with a place Shiloh or an Ark, a piece of furniture, or even a person. Eli who has passed off the scene. Or now, Samuel, you need to know God is my name and to get back on the road to spiritual renewal starts with getting right with me. That's where we pick up the story today.  
  So follow along as I read 1 Samuel 7, I'll read the first three verses, and then we will walk along the road to renewal the rest of the way. And the men of Kiriath Jearim came and took the ark of the Lord, and brought it into the house of Abinadab on the hill, and consecrated Eleazar his son to keep the Ark of the Lord. From the day that the ark remained at Kiriath Jearim. The time was long. It was 20 years, and all the house of Israel lamented after the Lord. Then Samuel spoke to all the house of Israel, saying, if you return to the Lord with all your heart, remove the foreign gods and the Ashtaroth from among you, and direct your hearts to the Lord, and serve him alone, and he will deliver you from the hand of the Philistines. The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the Word of our God endures and renews us even right now.

  If you read your Bible regularly, you will see a familiar concept. I would argue from cover to cover, and that would be the concept that the Christian life, the life of a person of faith, is a way or referred to as a path or a road. Psalm 1. My favorite psalm I call the Sentinel Psalm because it stands at the beginning of the Psalter, the songbook of the people of God. And at the gates, Psalm 1 stands and says, if you are going to enter into worship of God, which is what the Psalter is there for. If you're going to enter into these gates, you only can take one of two paths. Someone says there's a path of the wicked, and there's a path of the righteous, and those are the only two options. And to the time of John the Baptist. Preparing the what? The way of the Lord, as he was calling the people to repentance in faith. The Messiah is coming into the time of Christ himself. What did he tell people to do? He said to repent and believe and follow me. Be a learner of what I teach. Be a follower of how I live. And then even into the book of Acts, the early church. Before the people were even known as Christians, they were called followers of the way. Used five times in the book of Acts. This theme of the life of faith, of a person of God, a child of God, a disciple of Jesus is referred to as a way or a path or a road. That idea is clear. And that idea embodies both truths you believe that's part of the way, but also practices for how you're to behave, its doctrine and its duty. It's what we say we believe with our mind and heart and soul, but it's seen. It's identifiable on the outside in our actions. It's both of those and that that lifestyle of both what we say we believe and how we behave is what really then encompasses the way of the righteous, the narrow path, Jesus says, that leads to eternal life in him versus the wide road that leads to destruction. And today, the road to spiritual renewal reminds us that all God's people at all times are on a path either following that path wholeheartedly from the inside, but yes, traceable by our steps on the outside in obedience to him. Or we start ever so slightly to do what? Veer to the right, or veer to the left, or sometimes in a state of true rebellion, we just turn and go the opposite direction. But, the call to be a follower of Christ and the fruit that he accompanies a child of God truly is to follow the way to stay on the path. And we'll see today from the inside is where it begins. And when you see yourself even this morning, when you feel like or it seems like or you sense that you have departed from that path, you have to ask yourself, what do I do? How do I get back on the path? In fact, some of you in here might sense that you have lost a relationship with God. He feels distant. He feels silent. You don't know how to hear him anymore. Maybe one way to illustrate that would be to say I feel like I'm lost. I'm talking to Christians. If you're not in Christ today, you're lost. The Bible refers to you as lost, but I'm talking to people in a church who can go through a real experience of feeling like they have lost the way, and they don't know how to get back on the path. In today's text is a story. It's a description of what it looked like, not just for one person. An entire nation of people to get back on the road to spiritual renewal. Maybe we would call that in our time and age, a revival, if you will. The question is how to do it. Well, if that's where your mind is today, you're in, I was I was going to say good company, but actually you're in bad company to start. Because Israel was not following God. They had rebelled against him. They had forsaken the way. They were finding their own way. They were doing, as the book of Judges overlaps into the beginning of Samuel, what was right in their own eyes. But there is good news here in the not good company of Israel, because the road to renewal today, for you and for me, is not an unknown course. It's not a hidden path. Praise God for that. He doesn't try to hide it and disguise it to where you're wandering off in the wilderness, so to speak. You're getting. You're getting lost. And it's getting dark and you don't know where to go. There is a light that you can follow, and the light is the truth of the Word of God, a light unto your path today. So that is the hope any of you have today. If you feel lost, maybe it's been some time. God calls out to you today through his perfect word to get back on the road.  
  So where do you start? Well, part 1...point 1 is the road to spiritual renewal. Always, always, always starts with repentance before God. That's the first movement of this text that teaches us how to get back on that road. The road to spiritual renewal starts with repentance. And you may say what Adam reminded me, what does repentance mean? Well, it's a word for turning in the Old Testament. A very simple word to turn. You could probably put two and two together, right? To turn away from whatever path you are on, whatever sin you were following, whatever desires of your own heart, and turn to God. In the New Testament, it's a term related to a change of mind, as in you're thinking was this way and now it's going to be that way. And both of those represent repentance. The way back to the road, you do need to change directions, metaphorically speaking, but it is a change of mind, isn't it? I mean, right now, what is the Word of God attempting to do to you right now? It's the truth of God, and it's meant to convict you. It's meant to prick your conscience. Or if you are so far gone, pummel your conscience to wake you up from whatever slumber you've been in. So you go, wait, I. I need a change of mind. I don't know what I've been thinking. So first and foremost would start with that. The preaching of the Word of God is meant to get to your heart, but it does go through your mind. You hear it, and you have to sit under it and say, is this true or is it not? But not just evaluate. Is it true or is it not? Is it true or is it not towards me, the listener? Is God speaking to me? And he is, because you're under the authority of His Word. That is repentance. That is the basic picture of repentance in the Bible. And we're going to see it fleshed out in in three ways, described in this first section of verses 1 to 7.
  So let's pick up the story the road to Spiritual renewal. First, Israel was lost. We said that verses one and two, the ark is in some podunk town in Israel, on the border with the Philistines, but nobody wants to go near it for 20 years. It says, verse two, it's been in the house of Abinadab. They consecrated his son Eleazar, who his name does mean God is my help and he is there to protect the Ark because they still have some respect for it. But yet there's no reverence that leads them to say, in 20 years, maybe we should think about restoring it. Nobody does that. Maybe it's indifference. Maybe it's fear. We don't know. But sometime in that 20 years where it's sitting there and ignored and Kiriath Jearim, the time was long, the writer says. 20 years. And yet at the end of this time, there's a pulse on Israel. What does it say? All the house of Israel lamented after the Ark. Is that what it says? They limited after Shiloh. They missed Eli. No. The reason we know this isn't crocodile tears. This isn't pseudo repentance because it says in the text they grieve. They were sorrowful after Yahweh. That's something only God can do. They missed God on this path that they had been on, lost for 20 years and more. They started to miss God again. They missed him personally. They didn't miss the Ark. They missed God. They grieved that they had lost a relationship with him. Why are they interested now? We don't know. It could be, humanly speaking, that the faithfulness for the last 20 years, when we last left off with Samuel at the end of chapter three, when the Lord is revealing himself to Samuel by the word of the Lord, and the word of Samuel is going to all Israel, all the while all this action is happening in chapters four, five, and six, with war and destruction and the Ark stolen, and it destroying the Philistines and it coming back. All the while there's Samuel behind the scenes in obscurity, being faithful with the Word of God. Nobody's listening. But his word doesn't return void, does it? It's being planted, and he just keeps doing what he was called to do in obscurity. He's not in the limelight. He's in the shadows. But now he steps on the scene because there's what appears to be a heart of godly sorrow, not worldly sorrow. It doesn't say Israel was just lamenting because they were losers. They were under subjection to the Philistines. It says they were sorry because they missed God. So what was Samuel's message? In the silence. He spoke to all of Israel, saying, if this is real. If with all your heart this is real, this is on the inside. This is in your gut gnawing at you. You miss God. You grieve the loss of a relationship with him. You are God's covenant people and you have no idea what that looks like anymore. If from your heart you want to return to the Lord, you're going to do these things. That's repentance. If it's real, Israel. And if it's real for you today, if you're sitting there and you're like, you know, it's been 20 years for me. Maybe you're a fellow Gen Xer like myself and you peaked in your faith 20 years ago. Your 20s were great. You were on fire for the Lord. You were in college. You were part of some fellowship. It was alive. It was active. It was amazing. But it's been quiet. That can happen. It could be five years ago. I don't know how long that silence is, but you know it, don't you? You know what it's like to feel distant from God And the problem with Israel up until this point is they had localized a relationship with God. What do I mean by that? They had thought it was at the Ark, or it was back then, or it was in the good old days. We do the same. We think, oh, it was if I could just get back to where I was in 2005, I was at Grace Community Church. Personal reformation for me, discovering expository preaching under John MacArthur. Oh, it's was I alive and on fire then? If I can only get back there. We don't get back anywhere. It's over. The fruit remains. Praise God. We don't live in the past in our faith, but we do live out of it, my friend. And if that faith is real, if it was not just a facade. If it was not just putting your hope localized in a person or a church or an experience. But if it was the real thing, that's what you long for. God. But you could easily misinterpret and think it was the preacher and think it was the place and the time. And so you're just blown back and forth, trying to grasp at something, to find that meaning, to find that reality. And you try all these different things and you're trying everything but God. It's him you want, isn't it? But when you localize, that's what Israel had done. And so he let them come. They'd be broken down to very nothing. They have nothing except the Word of the Lord that now has pricked their conscience and moved their hearts. And Samuel comes and says, oh, if this is real in you, if with all your heart, because that's what God wants from you. He's always wanted that Israel. Deuteronomy 6:4-5. Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one, and you are to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. That's what a relationship with God is, and you've lost it. So if you want that back. If you want back on the road to spiritual renewal, this is what repentance turning back to him is going to look like. Three things. Remove the foreign gods. Direct your hearts to the Lord and serve him alone. Now I want you to be careful with that because I'm not giving you a prescription for repentance. I'm describing what happened then and there, and the effect of it, we will see, was legitimate. It describes in that time and in that place what Samuel, who received the word from God and spoke it to them, what he said. Israel, if you want back on this road to renewal, if you want revival in your own heart and as a nation, here's some things you're going to need to do. And here's some things we all need to consider because we could be anywhere in the scope of this. But we trust that the Spirit of God can speak to your heart this morning. What does repentance look like? The first thing it looks like is turning from sin. That's what I interpret. Remove the foreign gods and the Ashtaroth from among you. It's turning from sin. It's turning from idols of the heart. Now in their time, they were real idols. We don't have the same today. Maybe you do. As in, over the course of your spiritual journey, you've, you know, kind of gotten bored with Christianity and checked out other faiths, false gods, not the real thing. So there's a there's a general call here to remove the foreign gods, as in, did you forget commandment number one Israel, Exodus 23. You shall have what? No other gods before me, in front of me. In front of me? Not so much, I think. Order of. Okay. One, two. No, it's just you and me. That's a relationship. You love me with everything in you. Nothing gets between us before me. And you've let something get before me. That's how we can be the same as them, can't we? We let something get between us and God, steals our heart away from him. Steals our heart. It's not merely a hobby. It's not merely an interest. It's not merely. It's stealing your heart. It's getting in there, and it's getting between you and God. And you have to remove it. To repent is to turn to God. Is is to say, I've got to deal with this sin that is keeping me from a relationship with God. Because he demands my absolute allegiance to him and affection for him. That's all wrapped up in that call in Deuteronomy 6:4-5. Complete allegiance to him. Hear, O Israel, I am the one God, the one true God. But he also wants your total affection, doesn't he? All your heart, all your mind, all your strength. He wants all of you. What else would a loving God want? A jealous God want some of you? What do you want from your spouse? Some of their affection or all of it? I'm just okay with some of my spouse's affection. I don't need it all you want all of it? Anything less than that we call adultery. Some other person gets in between. You know, that was the word God used in the Old Testament spiritual adultery. When Israel went after what? Foreign gods and in the spirit of the age. Then it happened in Israel's time, going after other God's Book of judges into this time. It happens today. The spirit of the age. You know, there's a lot of different ways. We're all on a journey, right? From the lips of what some call in the secular media, the the head of the church of Christendom, Pope Francis, now dead, said this years ago, Pope Francis representing Christendom again in the eyes of the media, all religions are paths to God. God is for everyone. Therefore we are all God's children. But my God is more important than yours. Is this true? There is one God and religions are like languages. Paths to reach God. Some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian. That's the spirit of the age. There's multiple ways. Either way, you're going to be fine. In the end. You have to what remove, at least in your thinking, a change of mind? That's not true because Jesus demanded ultimate allegiance, the exclusive path to him, the way, the truth and the life. It's strictly from the Bible. There's no messing with it but a Pope who, so to speak, speaks for the church has greater authority than the Bible can say something as heretical as that. Never removed from his office. That's the first step back to God. It's a change of mind in repentance that you can't have any gods before him. But look at the next thing they were to do in this turning from sin, this removing the foreign gods. He gets specific. He calls out Ashtaroth, who was a fertility goddess, Baal's wife. We meet her back in the beginning of the book of Judges in chapter two, verse 13. And Samuel not only calls out the general rejection of any false gods, any other gods, he knows something about these people. Maybe he's watched it for two decades. Go on. Corrupted religious practice that was associated with Ashtaroth had to do with sexual immorality, cult practices that linked ecstasy and religion and pleasure. And it was a particular curse. It was a plague on Israel. And he called it out because that's what repentance does. It's not okay to just be vague, you know, just you just got to you got to walk away from sin. It's what are the sins that are keeping you from God? What specific sins? Ashtaroth is named because it, according to Samuel, was their best beloved idol that they were wedded to. And as Matthew Henry writes about this, true repentance strikes at our darling sins. You ever call your sins a darling sin, the kind you love that you don't want to let go of? And he says, true repentance will strike at darling sins with a particular zeal and resolution to put away that sin which most easily besets us. So repentance that leads to spiritual renewal starts with seeing your sin more clearly and feeling the guilt of it, and rejecting the gods of our age that get into our mind, but also the idols of our age that work their way into our hearts. And I don't know what those are for you. If it's the great grandchildren of Ashtaroth, they could be the gods of sexual immorality. They are for many. The things we let our eyes see, the jokes we find appealing, the crude, the filth, pornography, living together, not married and just thinking those things that are clearly outlawed in Scripture I'm okay with. It's the great grandchildren of this false goddess that says, I can have my pleasure and God at the same time. And he says, no, I demand total allegiance to me, and I want all of your affection. So turn. Now, in that turning, we get to the next one. You direct your heart to the Lord. This is repentance described because repentance is turning from sin, which we just covered. And what, as you turn from sin, who do you turn to? You turn to God. You just don't turn to nothing. I mean, some people do that. They want to clean up their act. Maybe they see the consequences of their sin and they're convinced, I can't keep doing this. It's ruining my life. I'm getting fired from my job. Uh, it's estranging me from my family. I'm going to get kicked out of the house. Um, so they turn from sin, but they don't turn to God. They don't direct their heart to God. And we must. We must, or else something else will come in and do even worse damage, whether that be legalism. Now I'm just going to clean up my act and earn my way to some righteous path or just further libertinism which is I got rid of that sin. But now. Hey, that's not I got that. Let me try this other one here. So you turn from sin, you remove these false gods, these idols of the heart, and you turn and direct your heart to God. This is all in the heart, in repentance. It's heart work this morning. It's not merely to remove the sin, it's to seek the Lord. Pursue him again. 200 years ago, famous Christian dead guy Puritan Thomas Chalmers wrote a powerful defense of this truth in an essay called The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. And this was his thesis. Such is the grasping tendency of the human heart that it must have something to lay hold of, and which, if wrested away without the substitution of another something in its place, would leave a void and a vacancy as painful to the mind as hunger is to the natural system. That's essentially what's being described here. You can try to turn from a sin and remove an idol, but if you do not direct your heart to God, Israel, something else will fill that void. Because we read in the scriptures, God has made us in his image, designed us for relationship with him, put eternity in our hearts. And you cannot just say, I'm going to remove this, this thing from my heart. I'm going to bear down and get rid of that sin because I see its consequences, and I don't like them, and I'm busted. And I'm sorry about getting busted. But if you don't direct your heart to the Lord, you've made no progress. You've got to direct your heart to the Lord. Chalmers was saying that if you're not going to continue to love the world and its sinful pleasures, you need to fill it with a love for God and His joys that he alone can give. Otherwise, you'll be back where you  started, and maybe worse off. The expulsive as in you can move this thing out with a greater affection. Parents were challenged to do this with our kids and their appetites. That's how I'm going to translate Puritan language into modern terms. Your kid wants to eat candy all the time. Ice cream on top of ice cream, gummy bears, chocolate syrup. You go to that sweet frog place. Gross stuff like sweet things that go together. Chocolate syrup and M&Ms. Sour candy and fruit. And my kids love it. If I just say, hey, no, I'm not going to just let you live off of sugar, but they're actually hungry. What do I need to do? I've got to feed them something. Broccoli. Usually doesn't work. Barbecue chicken, pulled pork, a steak, if they're lucky. Because they're hungry and hungry people will eat. You'll find something to eat, won't you? And when you drift from God, when you go on another path, what are you doing other than saying, I was hungry and I followed my appetite because he wasn't enough. So you remove the bad thing you shouldn't be eating. It's not good for you, but you got to fill it and feed yourself with something that will satisfy. How does Christ describe discovering the kingdom of heaven? It's like a guy who he goes out searching for this one thing, for this one pearl, and he finds a better one and a bigger one, and he goes all in for it. He sells everything he has for that one. That's finding Christ the greatest joy you'll ever find. We can drift. We could forget how good it is to taste and see the goodness of the Lord. So he calls us back from the heart. Those really are the inside work. And then the thing you would see for sure on the outside, this last piece of it, is it moves the will to action. It goes from this mindset change. That is right. I can't go on living for these things of the world. I must turn from them. I must direct my heart to the Lord. And then from that good, good root produces this third thing serve him alone. Get after it. It moves your will to action. You want to worship him. You want to serve him. You want to live for him. And you're satisfied in that. That's the path back. Now, again, I said, I didn't want to try to make this some formulaic thing. So, Adam, can you just lay out these steps today? I first have to remove the idols, and then I have to direct my heart. And then now give me six things to do to serve the God. Maybe it could work that way. Or maybe just in this moment of hearing the Word of God and your mind being convinced you're on the wrong path and you need to turn back. That's just it. And automatically the Spirit is convicting you of the sins that you need to repent of and confess and find forgiveness and healing, and let God then lead you to what? Where can I serve you, Lord? How can I serve you? He can do that for you right now. That's the path back. That's turning back to him. A change of mind about our sin, a change of heart in our desires and the fruit of good works. Service to God from a transformed mind and heart. Heart work on the inside. Removing those idols of the heart. Directing our heart towards the Lord. But on the outside serving him. You see it, otherwise it just doesn't add up, right? It's all lip service. We can say, oh, yeah, I'm convinced of that. I have a change of mind. It got me thinking this week about an article I read about a change of mind. Uh, this summer is the 50th anniversary of cinematic masterpiece known as Jaws. And the headline as I'm thinking about repentance and change of mind, the headline read Man Attempting to swim around Martha's Vineyard where Jaws was filmed, hopes to change minds about sharks. An endurance athlete is hoping to change minds about sharks by swimming around Martha's Vineyard, just in time for the 50th anniversary of Jaws. British South African swimmer Lewis Pugh was the first person to complete long distance swimming in every ocean of the world. Kudos, Lewis. Good for him. He's a great endurance swimmer. Um, but he says on this swim, it's very different. We're talking about sharks all the time, joked Pugh, who will, as usual, wear no wetsuit. Just trunks and a cap and goggles. So they're building Pugh up as this wonderful champion of great white sharks. Who is going to change our minds that they're really wonderful creatures who we should throw our children into the water and let them grab on the fin and and ride with them like the dolphins and floss their teeth because they're so friendly. Right? That's what the article would lead us to believe. Pugh is undertaking the challenge because he wants to change public perception around the at risk animals, which he said were maligned by the blockbuster film as villains. So this article goes on. It's a 12 day swim. It's 62 miles, and he's doing it all the while this summer in Martha's Vineyard, where there'll be celebrations around the movie Jaws. So I get it. He's striking while the iron's hot, and I'm reading that article and I'm going, yeah, maybe. Maybe my mind is changing to towards great whites. This this guy has inspired me. And then you read towards the bottom of the article, he emphasizes that the swim is not something non-professionals should attempt, which made me wonder about how do you become a professional of doing something so dumb? He's accompanied. Here's the here's the catch. He's accompanied by safety personnel and a boat and a kayak, and uses a shark shield device that deters sharks around him with an electric field without harming them. It all add up, does it now? If you were so convinced that these kind creatures just want to snuggle you, they weren't looking to bite. They just want to gum you a little bit. You would swim with no shark shields and no boats. Wouldn't you? Doesn't add up. You can't just say it's a change of mind, but your actions betray you, don't they? That's repentance. Now, granted, we want to encourage faith, don't we? When somebody says they're repentant, we want to believe it with all our heart. But we also time and truth go hand in hand. There's something that needs to be seen. That's the fruit of it. And the fruit of a repentant life is that we would obey God. And they did. Look at the end of this section. The sons of Israel did exactly what Samuel said, because they truly from the heart were broken. And they removed the Baals and the Ashtaroth, and they served the Lord alone. They did exactly what Samuel, by way of God, told them they needed to do. For the first time in a long time, they were on the road to renewal again. Samuel said, gather now, this was the sons of Israel, the house of Israel he had been speaking to. They were doing what he said. And then he says, we need to throw a worship service. So gather all Israel to Mizpah and I will pray to the Lord for you. We're going to consecrate this moment. So verse six, they gather, they pour water out on the ground, that in the scriptures can be symbolic of repentance and change. Lamentations 2:19 arise, cried aloud in the night at the beginning of the night watch. Pour out your heart like water before the presence of the Lord. That's what that was symbolizing. It was this pouring out. We're done with ourselves. And they fasted, maybe symbolic of we don't need the pleasures of the world. We can feast on God. And then the most important thing. The ownership. What do they say? What every truly contrite sinner from the heart would say. We have sinned against the Lord. That's on us. And Samuel judged the sons of Israel at Mizpah. So this scene ends. Amazing, doesn't it? I mean, if you've been with us for the last few months from the beginning, this is a far cry from what Israel had been doing. And, oh, if it could just end there. Hollywood ending. Samuel's out of the shadows. Israel's repentant back on the road to spiritual renewal. But it never goes that way, does it?  
  Number two on the path. The road to spiritual renewal strives toward dependence on God's help. It would appear that the deed is done. Everything's good. Celebrate good times tonight. Except for this is a prime time for the enemies of God to strike right after this great moment of revival. Bible. Renewal. Reconciliation to God. Enthusiasm for him. They get attacked. Can you relate? Can you look back at times of renewal in your own life? Times of listening to a sermon, times to be determined and zealous for the Lord? Maybe it was just last Sunday. Kurt's sermon inspired you. I'm going to apply that. I'm going to do that. And then you got home and got in a blow up argument. You got fired the next day, there's some trial was brought upon you and had nothing to do with sin in your life, and you just got knocked back completely, right? This happens to God's people. Who's in control of it is the question. So the text makes it seem like, hey, the Philistines heard all Israel, all Israel, the sons of Israel are gathered to Mizpah. And it's been 20 years. They've had their thumb on them. They have been subduing Israel and the lords of the Philistines went up against them. They must have thought, hey, we don't know. We don't really care what they're doing. We just know it's no good if they're all gathering together. So let's get the troops together. Let's go attack! WouldIsrael budge? Would they depend on God to help? See, here's the test. I mean, they did all the religious stuff, didn't they? But now this is where your faith has to get up and walk, doesn't it? Out there. So the sons of Israel said to Samuel, don't cease to cry to the Lord our God for us, that he may save us from the hand of the Philistines. Oh, what is changed in 20 years? Where was their hope before? It was in the it of the Ark back in chapter four, verse three. Let us take to ourselves from Shiloh the ark of the covenant, that it may come among us, and deliver us from the power of the enemy. Who are they trusting in now, 20 years later, they're trusting in God. I'm not saying anything about the Ark. They say, Samuel, would you pray? Oh, get on your knees in that moment and pray. That's dependence. Would you pray for us that he would save us from the hand of the Philistines? They didn't come up with some cockamamie scheme like they did at the beginning of chapter four, when they came back wiped out by the Philistines. And we need a new plan. We need something like a magic ark to deliver us. And they get demolished even worse. No, they just say we need prayer. We need God to save us. And they didn't stop there. Samuel, in his role as priest, now takes a lamb and sacrifices it and cries out to the Lord on behalf. And here's the action. It's just breathtaking. Samuel is offering up the burnt offering and same time the Philistines are drawing near to battle. Could you picture it? Thousands of Israelites praying, crying out to God. Samuel's making this sacrifice and they could hear the hooves of the horses coming. Think they were scared? Absolutely. They were scared. But where was their trust this time? Their trust was in the Lord. Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth and destroyer of these little bitty Philistines. They're just a minor problem. They don't know how the story is going to turn out, but they were told they're acting in faith. Why do I say that? Because back in verse three, the last thing that was promised is if Israel you with all your heart, remove the foreign gods and direct your hearts to him and serve him alone, God will deliver you from the hand of the Philistines. God didn't wait very long to test that, did he? He doesn't wait very long in our lives often. You think? Why would he do that? That sounds kind of cruel. No. It's brilliant. It's brilliant because when are you at your strongest? When you've just admitted your weakness, when you've repented, when you've turned back, you're actually where... You're at your strongest. You're not at your strongest when you think you're at your strongest. You're at your weakest because it's in you. But when you've repented, when you've abandoned all hope in yourself, and you've said, I am determined, Lord, to be loyal to you and faithful to you and follow you, and I trust in your promises. What an opportune time for your sovereign God to design what looks like an attack. In this case, it really is. Who's in charge here? Philistines led by demonic forces. Yeah, they're doing what they would, of course do. They're going to try to crush them out. And God's saying, here's the chance, Israel, you have not succeeded in decades in defeating anybody. But now that I have your heart again and you're trusting in me, you're depending on my help. What am I going to do? The Lord thundered with a great thunder on that day. So the Philistines are charging in, the war horses are coming, the spears are drawn. And on that day against the Philistines, God thunders out of heaven. Psalm 29. The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars. It thunders from on high. It's over the waters. And you know what it's like when thunder hits in the middle of the night. You wake up out of a dead sleep. Multiply that times a hundred here. These Philistine soldiers were wide awake, and they were bloodthirsty. And he stops them in their tracks and they run. Now, here's the cool thing about God. You're like, hey, wouldn't it have been enough for him to just bring down some fire and brimstone and smoke 'em out? And Israel could just, like, get up from prayer and be like, oh, that was great. All in a day's work, guys. No. He wants to produce even more faith in them. So he scares the Philistines. And then verse 11, the men of Israel. And that that weakness they had before of trusting in themselves and their own strength and the Ark. They go out and pursue those Philistines and strike them down as far as they could run. He wanted to get more faith out of them, like he wants to do with you and me in these moments. If you ever want to see that that idea of God's sovereignty and our responsibility working out in real time, you have it right here in verse 11. The work wasn't done. You know what? Because they're not only believing in the promises of God delivering them from the hand of the Philistines, they're also remembering going back to Joshua. They were to what? They were to rid the land of all of God's enemies. And now they're doing it again. They're walking by faith. They're back on the path. It wasn't just a one time repentance. This was striving towards dependence on God. And Samuel as a good shepherd to them and a leader of the people. He says, all right, let's memorialize this thing, takes a stone, sets it, sets it between Mizpah and Shen, and names it Ebenezer. That's rich. Why is it rich? Where was the place they got wiped out three chapters ago? 30,000 of them, Ebenezer. A place that meant God is my help. A stone of help. And he says, you know what? That was us. But we don't live in the past. We live out of the past. That was us when we lacked faith, when we didn't go to God for help, when we localized what we thought God could do in an Ark. And now we see that it's about him. Our relationship with him. Repentance to him. Direction of our heart towards him. Serving him. Praying to him, fighting with him. So let's call this place Ebenezer. Isn't that our lives? Who we once were? But now we're a new creation. And any time we look back, we don't go back. We look back and we say, that was me, but that's not me now. And when you do that in those moments of faith, when you keep track of those moments where you said, I could go back right now, I could lack faith, I could go back to that sin I could get. And you say, that's not who I am. So raise up an Ebenezer in your life. Keep a journal of it. Share it with people. Teach your kids. Parents. Why do we repent to our kids? One we want to model what repentance looks like. Don't expect them to do it if you don't. But then you talk to them about it. You tell them as they are ready to hear it, who you were and who you are now, to give glory and praise to God, not to yourself. That's real then. Otherwise it's fake. It's that religion of the Pharisees. The hypocrisy we talked about a few weeks ago, isn't it? I just I'm a parent with a mask. The dad that never messes up. The father that leads in repentance. The mother that leads in repentance. The parents that show repentance. The grandparents that do it. The disciplers that do it. That's going to ring true with them. But faking it won't. Not for a second. So this is the real thing. God keeps his promise. Verses 13 says The Philistines were subdued. They didn't come anymore within the border of Israel. The hand of the Lord was against the Philistines all the days of Samuel. I mean, now that's a great ending, except it's not.
  We got a couple more verses 14 to 17. And this is this is where we stay now. We've gotten back on the path. We're dependent in prayer. But we need his Word. We need to stay submitted to his Word, brothers and sisters. And that's what we see in 15 to 16. I'm not just making this up. In fact, God wants to really seal it into my and your mind so much. It's repeated three times. It's the theme of the postscript on the story of Samuel, the prophet in the prime of his life, when he was doing his best work, repeated three times. Verse 15, he judged Israel. Verse 16 he judged Israel. Verse 17. There he judged Israel. Are you getting the point? And what was the primary means of Samuel's judgment as prophet? The Word of the Lord came to him. And from Samuel it went to all Israel. That's staying in submission to the Word of God. The heart of his spiritual leadership was speaking on behalf of God. He's a 2 Timothy 3:16 guy. All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, training in righteousness. That's what he was doing all those years. To all Israel, just riding around a circuit preacher, it says, going around to Bethel and Gilgal and Mizpah, and then even in his home. Everywhere he went, the word of God went. That's how you stay on the path. It starts with repentance. It starts with your heart being directed back to the Lord. It proceeds in dependence, in prayer. But oh, how we stay under it through the Word of God. Imagine this a sermon on turning back to God. And what do we need? The means of grace. The word in prayer. Is it complicated? It's not really. But is it hard? Absolutely. To stay on the path, as Samuel displays even here, it's just long obedience in the same direction under the faithful teaching of God's Word. Samuel's kind of a picture to me of how the Word of God works in our conscience. It rides around and at every stop, at a lie, at an error, at a temptation. He rides around and he says, no, that's not what you're going to do there. No, Adam. Reform your ways. Adam. Repent of that. It rides around in my conscience, constantly reminding me of God's expectation to live for him only and entirely his. That's why you need the Word of God, friend. Personally, yes. But corporately, in a local church, the accountability of the church. We learned this last week. Kurt ended with it. Biblical preaching, biblical fellowship. Biblical shepherding. Why? So all of those means to the one great end of keeping the Word of God. What? Over you and around you and underneath you. Protecting you. Keeping your conscience sensitive, not calloused. So whatever fresh commitment you have made to God today, mark an Ebenezer in your soul. This, like Samuel's end, is a plodding perseverance, not some sentimentalized Christian experience that we could conjure up today, here now and gone tomorrow. That's what Israel did. They localized it. They just wanted the experience. They wanted the high. They wanted to get back to the feel. And it wasn't there. It was in steady, faithful, dependent submission to God and His Word. It's the same for us. So find a home and a faithful church. Build your life in submission to the Word of God. The road to spiritual renewal today is one of repentance and dependence and submission. There's no other way besides that. If you're not in Christ today? You have to turn to God. The only difference... I mean, you could have listened to this whole sermon. And the only difference all. Everything I said, turning to God, repenting, directing your heart. All of it. The only difference is you're not returning. You're turning. You get that? For the first time, turning to God, realizing you were headed in the opposite direction in unbelief. Your primary thing you turn from if you're not in Christ this morning and you know it is turning from your unbelief. Now, could there be a host of sins in your life that need to change? Yeah. Welcome to real life. Ask any Christian in here that doesn't change. As Luther said, the Christian life is one of repentance all the time. We're always turning from sin, aren't we? I mean, has any Christian in here discovered any different way to live the Christian life besides turning away from sin and turning to God? But for you that aren't in Christ this morning, the primary thing that you turn from is unbelief. Not really believing that you're the sinner that needs saved and Christ is your only way. That's what you need to do right now is call upon him. Return to God. Seek him. Serve him. Depend on him, submit to him, and love him. It's all about wholehearted devotion to him. Let's pray. Father, we thank you this morning for your Word. Thank you for first Samuel 7, a wonderful picture of you not giving up on your people. When it looked like to them maybe that you had for 20 years. But you used that time of silence and darkness and distance to soften them, to bring sorrow, and that godly sorrow that led to repentance and led to earnestness, led to prayer, and submitted to your word is in one beautiful chapter in the Bible, the picture of our lives. We thank you for that. Use your Word to work, Spirit for salvation, for the lost, and for strengthening of your saints. Amen.