Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / February 17, 2019 | Can I Help? - When You Get A Second Chance

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February 17, 2019 | Can I Help? - When You Get A Second Chance · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
0:01
SPEAKER_00: How are you?
0:02
SPEAKER_00: So pumped.
0:04
SPEAKER_00: Such a gorgeous day outside.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: Slipping and falling.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: We're praying for our friend Don.
0:12
SPEAKER_00: My friend Don who fell.
0:14
SPEAKER_00: Really elderly man fell.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: You might have seen the fire truck outside.
0:17
SPEAKER_00: And uh seems okay, but we're praying for him.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: So uh if you're visiting, we're going through the book, a whole book of Isaiah, longest book in number of words, anyway, in the Old Testament, 66 chapters.
0:34
SPEAKER_00: Uh, Can I Help You Look Like You Need It?
0:38
SPEAKER_00: Is the title of this series, it's like God Saying That to Us, and that title is more perfect for this message than any of the previous six messages I've preached on this book.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: And uh we're also doing this uh Isaiah challenge uh during this uh these three months.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: That is, we're reading five chapters a week.
0:59
SPEAKER_00: It'll actually be reduced to about four uh in a couple of weeks.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: But uh this coming week, read chapters 31 to 35.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: If you haven't joined us yet, then you've got a lot of reading to do this afternoon.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: Okay, just speed read.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: You move your finger down, just keep going.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: After a while you'll get it.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: So uh five-daily devotion.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: How many of you are participating at all in this thing?
1:24
SPEAKER_00: Reading or good, great, great.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: I'm not seeing those hands over college building.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: Let's hold them up higher.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: Okay, got it.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, that's the Isaiah Challenge, and this morning's title is When You Get a Second Chance.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: When you get a second chance, sometimes you get second chances in life about major things.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: Uh you get these stories uh of an older couple, turns out, you know, they they they meet at a retirement home, and then they realize that they went to the same high school, and and he's the guy who was too shy to ask her to the prom, and she secretly liked him, and they got married to someone else, and their spouses died, and now here they are in their 80s, and they they I got a second chance, they get married, and and so forth and so on.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: You're looking at me like like that's never happened.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: It has.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: They just don't make Hallmark movies out of 80-year-olds doing that.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: So, or for instance, you know, you you you made a job decision when you were 20.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: You were choosing between a couple of jobs and you chose the one that seemed the best at the moment, either because it paid a little bit more or whatever else, but within a couple of weeks of taking that job, you knew it was a huge mistake, and you wished you'd taken the other job, but you're stuck now.
2:44
SPEAKER_00: But five years later, when you're free, all of a sudden that other job is open and you're able to take advantage of that second chance.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: Now, in a way, you get second chances every single day, not for major things like who you marry or where you're going to work, but you get uh second chance comes to you every morning when you wake up.
3:04
SPEAKER_00: Second chance is about, let's say, how you fulfill your heart's desire.
3:11
SPEAKER_00: We all desire pleasure, we all desire happiness, and we set about fulfilling that based upon our choices, sometimes based upon our addictions.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: And so we have second chances to choose correctly or choose wisely every single day.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna talk about that as well.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna talk about a guy in the Bible named Hezekiah who had a second chance, a major second chance, chose wisely.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna draw seven lessons from what to do when you get a second chance.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: The story starts in Isaiah 36.
3:43
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna go through two entire chapters.
3:45
SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna read every single verse.
3:47
SPEAKER_00: If you have a Bible, you may want to read the intervening verses as I put about half of them on the screen.
3:53
SPEAKER_00: So, by the way, let me just say we have the weirdest thing.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: This is something that happens nowhere else in the Bible.
4:01
SPEAKER_00: In a 66-chapters prophetic book full of like prophecy and so forth, we have dropped into it right sort of in the middle, four straight chapters of stories that look like they came out of Kings and Chronicles.
4:17
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, they do.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: These stories are told slightly differently.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: Two stories about Hezekiah in chapters 36, 37, 38, and 39 of Isaiah.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: These stories are told in 2 Kings 18 and 2 Chronicles.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: So why put these narratives in here?
4:36
SPEAKER_00: Well, there's a the literary reason and a theological reason, and I'm not gonna bore you with the literary reason, but the theological reason will become clear today.
4:46
SPEAKER_00: So I am excited since I love stories so much.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: I'm excited about this sermon and next week's sermon, because I'm gonna preach on 36 and 37 today, on a story of Hezekiah and a huge battle.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: And next week, another the story of when Hezekiah nearly dies.
5:06
SPEAKER_00: And I'm looking forward to preaching those stories, and I think you will too.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: So this story begins this way: in the 14th year of King Hezekiah, King Hezekiah was the best king that had ruled of all 16 kings since David's time, 300 years before, 250 years before, 200 years before.
5:24
SPEAKER_00: I'm figuring out the time period, a little over 200.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: He was a really godly king, he was a good king, he had a bad dad.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: His dad's name was A-H-A-A-A-Z, Ahaz, his name will come up several times.
5:35
SPEAKER_00: He and his daddy ruled for about 10 years together, and then in the year 1770, I mean 715 BC, his daddy died.
5:44
SPEAKER_00: Now he's been king alone, young Hezekiah has, for 14 years.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: Now, when I think of this, I think of a story about the businessman who bought a few who bought a beautiful spray of flowers for a friend of his who's opening a branch office, was having a grand opening of the opening of a branch office in his business.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: And this businessman orders these flowers to be sent, and then he goes to the grand opening and he sees this beautiful spray of flowers.
6:09
SPEAKER_00: He sees his name on the card, he goes, Thumbs up, that really worked well.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: I really like it.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: And then he took a closer look at the card, and he was shocked and horrified to see the card read, Rest in peace.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: He was all right, he was so irate he couldn't hang around at the grand opening.
6:25
SPEAKER_00: He drove down to the floor, started giving the florist a piece of his mind, yelling at him, he said, How could he make such a mistake and so forth?
6:33
SPEAKER_00: He was upset, getting more upset because the florist really wasn't paying attention to him.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: The florist was sort of looking over his head, nodding, so forth.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: He said, What is wrong with you?
6:42
SPEAKER_00: You're acting like this is not a big deal.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: And the florist says, Oh no, I know it's a big deal because I am thinking that right now, somewhere in this town, a person is being buried underneath a card that says, Good luck in your new location.
6:59
SPEAKER_00: The reason I think of that with the story is that Hezekiah has got to be the unluckiest man, unluckiest king on earth, unluckiest ruler on earth, because he is in a location which is being attacked by the greatest military power in the world at this time, the Neo-Assyrian Empire, historians call it, was uh the greatest military force in the world for 200 years, and we're during those 200 years, and Hezekiah happens to be the king at the very moment that this great military force is coming down to attack his country.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: This is the force of Assyria, presently Iraq, and Nineveh is their capital, and they have this incredible military force, brutal, uh, and they're attacking Judah.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: This is 701 BC, so they come west and then south into what we today call Israel, to the southern part of Israel, which is called Judah, capital of Jerusalem.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: This is where Isaiah the prophet is prophesying.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: This is where Hezekiah is ruling.
7:58
SPEAKER_00: All right?
7:59
SPEAKER_00: So they're attacking.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah is in trouble.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: Gee and General Gene Krauss, an elder in our church for many years and so forth, he's now moved up to Kansas City, told me once the Assyrians, he came back from the Army War College, he said, listen, you're talking about the Assyrians, they invented the organization of the army.
8:17
SPEAKER_00: Their symbol, the symbol of Sennacherib, the symbol of their kings, the symbol of their country was the winged bull.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: They're extremely powerful.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: They invented the army, they're unstoppable.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: And what happens, get ready for a history lesson.
8:28
SPEAKER_00: I love history, I have a purpose in what I'm about to do for the next five or ten minutes as I take you to the British Museum.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: My purpose is to have you feel, have you sense the greatness, the scariness of the Assyrian Empire, and how it was difficult for anyone to trust in God when the Assyrians are coming after you.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: All right, so the Assyrians come down, they go to the coast, to the major highway called the Via Maris, which means by the way of the sea, this highway that leads from Mesopotamia down into Africa.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: They go down this highway, they knock out the Philistines, and they uh they just crush everybody on the highway, and then they decide we are going to, they're coming against Judah, we're gonna wipe out all the walled cities around Jerusalem and then take Jerusalem.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: Just like 20 years ago, exactly, we wiped out the north, ten lost tribes, you've heard them.
9:21
SPEAKER_00: The Assyrians would make you a lost tribe really quickly.
9:24
SPEAKER_00: They defeat you, you're gone, you're dead, you're over, no history left.
9:28
SPEAKER_00: So they're going, we're gonna attack Jerusalem.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: First, we're gonna attack the city of Lakish.
9:33
SPEAKER_00: Lakish, L-A-C-H-I-S-H, a major town, was the one of the major towns in the Old Testament in the south, focusing on this city, because it's the city they attacked just before coming to Jerusalem.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: So here you have in the old days of warfare, you had they had the ultimate weapons, which in those days were chariots and horses.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: Israel had really none of those.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: In fact, in our chapter, uh the the guy's at one point is gonna mock Hezekiah and say, Hey, I'll be glad to give you 2,000 horses, but you know, if you can show me 2,000 men who could ride them.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: They had no cavalry, you know, no trained cavalry.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: So they got the horses they're attacking, but look at how big the walls are, they're 40 feet high, maybe 60, we're not sure, and Lakish.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: And so if you look at Lakish, let me let me set this up for you, how powerful the Assyrians are.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: Lakish, even today, this is Tel, uh the Tell of Lakish, T-E-L is the word for an archaeological mound.
10:32
SPEAKER_00: Look how steep that is.
10:33
SPEAKER_00: It's at the top of a hill, and here is the way the Assyrians or you or I have to walk today.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: It's this narrow little defile with the walls of the city here that towered up, and you go up here, and here is the gate complex, and you could never, in ancient times, never go straight through, bust the gate, go into the town.
10:49
SPEAKER_00: You always had to turn right right there, so that your whole army would be standing there, and the soldiers on the wall could dump boiling tar and fire brands and rocks and arrows and whatever and shoot you down.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
11:00
SPEAKER_00: So, how in the world are you gonna conquer a city like this?
11:05
SPEAKER_00: Uh, the city of Lakish actually, if you look at a view from the top, uh, was had two walls.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: Here's the road we just saw coming up the side.
11:15
SPEAKER_00: Here's the gate complex.
11:16
SPEAKER_00: It had a wall on the outside, then a wall on the inside, so so they could fight you here and they could still fight you here.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: Here is the governor's palace, and so it was a very well-protected fort.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: All right.
11:29
SPEAKER_00: Now, the whole story of the siege of Lakish, I can tell you about, any historian can, because we know more about this than we know about modern battles that date, you know, a thousand just 500 or a thousand years ago.
11:45
SPEAKER_00: Because the a room at the center of the palace in Nineveh was a room dedicated to the siege of this town, carved in bronze, every aspect of the siege of Lakeish, a room at the center of the palace.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: That room was found, discovered in 1850 by a Britisher named Henry Layard, and recognizing that it would be destroyed, he saved it.
12:13
SPEAKER_00: He brought the entire thing back, and it presently sits in one of the great museums of the world, British Museum, one of my favorites, in room 10B, very famous room 10B, in the British Museum.
12:24
SPEAKER_00: And so you go to that room and you see the entire siege of Lakish.
12:30
SPEAKER_00: And now, what I want to do is really quickly, I'm gonna be your tour guide, museum tour guide, and just show you the way the Assyrians fought, how powerful they were, how unique they were.
12:40
SPEAKER_00: You actually get a great picture of ancient warfare.
12:43
SPEAKER_00: The Assyrians were the very first army to have professional military uniforms, shoes, and helmets.
12:48
SPEAKER_00: They were incredibly they used long spears, they had round shields, and they also had, of course, uh wonderful uh uh wonderful archery uh archers, incredible outfit here, long bows, arrows, and then they had uh what they called slingers.
13:09
SPEAKER_00: These are, of course, uh um slingshots, and I have one of the the uh stone balls from another town close by, same to same uh same time period.
13:19
SPEAKER_00: They would carve these hard stone balls, and they're two to three inches thick.
13:22
SPEAKER_00: If one of them hits you, you'd be down for the camp.
13:25
SPEAKER_00: And so here they are.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: This is the beginning of their siege of Lakeish, but as you saw, you have to climb this incline to get up there, and so it's it's portrayed that way.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: You have this hill, and they're going up there.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: Guy in the front has a has a helmet as a shield over to protect them from the stones and all the firebrands and everything being shot down from above as these archers make their way up the incline.
13:47
SPEAKER_00: And they also have a siege engine, this major siege engine that has protection, and you have archers on a platform behind and inside, and they have uh their own implements as they continue with their wheels.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: This thing's getting, it's an engine being pushed up this incline as they're going up.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: And they can they can attach when they get close a battering ram which knocks down the wall.
14:08
SPEAKER_00: Now, all of the time while this is happening, you have the Judean defenders, you have the Hebrews, the people from Lakish, and they're up here in these towers, okay, and their shields guard them, and they have archers, and they're throwing down these large firebrands that are burning to set the siege engines, you know, on fire, right?
14:25
SPEAKER_00: And they have stones and rocks and arrows and everything.
14:27
SPEAKER_00: They seem impregnable, but they're not impregnable.
14:31
SPEAKER_00: They're, they're, they're, they're in real trouble.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: So, in fact, even as you can see, these firebrands hit the siege engine and set it on fire, you can see that you've got an Assyrian here, and he's the water guy, he's protected, and he's dumping water on the fire, and so they're putting out the fire so the siege engine can keep moving.
14:49
SPEAKER_00: So I'm sorry, this is really detailed, but uh in my next career I'm gonna be a museum guide.
14:54
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
14:55
SPEAKER_00: So, and then you can see they've attached the battering ram here, right there, and they're about to knock down the tower.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: And so you can see some of the Judeans know that they're toast, and so they're fleeing out the back door.
15:06
SPEAKER_00: Okay, you've got two men there, three women, and a couple of children who are fleeing, they're taking their possessions, and the Assyrians let them go.
15:13
SPEAKER_00: The Assyrians are mainly concerned about anybody who's a leader, and if you look like a flunky, they'll let you go.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: And now they've captured the city, and you see the parade of captives.
15:23
SPEAKER_00: Here are the Assyrian soldiers, and here are the Judeans, here are the men.
15:27
SPEAKER_00: Notice they're praying to their captors.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: Some of them are kneeling down, and this is the way the Jews looked back then.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: They, the men, they wore beards and so forth, and they're being taken up to the king.
15:40
SPEAKER_00: King Sennacherib of Assyria, who's been king for four years, loves to lead these warfare things.
15:46
SPEAKER_00: He's a brutal man.
15:47
SPEAKER_00: Here he is sitting on a throne.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: He's got he's got two of his uh servants behind him waving things so no mosquitoes will will get to him or no flies.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: And and here are all the captives being presented to him.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: We'd love to be able to see Sennacherib's face to know kind of what he looks like, but the people that conquered Nineveh, named the Babylonians, they didn't like his looks, and so they took a hammer and his face is all gone.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: So um and and just to say uh what they did is they took all, if they thought you were a leader of Lakish, the executions were absolutely cruel.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: But what's interesting is in that same part of the world exactly today, in the last five to seven years, as the Islamic State conquered and took over one-third of Iraq, same area, ISIS, the Islamic State, performed exactly the same kind of brutal executions, beheadings, impalings, where they where they would stick people today on a uh, you know, up and just stab them and let them hang there for hours to slowly die and flang to death and so forth.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: Just absolutely cruel.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: And they did this partly to scare the people 30 miles up the road in Jerusalem.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: So they would flee and they wouldn't hang around.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so that's why, as soon as the Lakish battle is over, the king of Assyria sends his royal spokesman along with a massive army, we think it's about 200,000, from the town of Lakish to King Hezekiah at Jerusalem.
17:16
SPEAKER_00: He's not going himself right now.
17:18
SPEAKER_00: He's hoping they'll give up.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: He wants to send, he actually sends his top three military officers.
17:24
SPEAKER_00: We actually can see them in the British Museum.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: It has a picture, has a beautiful picture of his number one five-star general, who is one of these three guys that he sends to talk to Hezekiah.
17:37
SPEAKER_00: So they come up to the city of Jerusalem, which in that day was called the city of David, and it looked like this.
17:43
SPEAKER_00: Here's the temple at the very top.
17:44
SPEAKER_00: Here's where Hezekiah had his royal palace.
17:47
SPEAKER_00: Here's a famous place today called Hezekiah's Tunnel.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah is going to build very shortly a tunnel to bring the water in from outside, but this is the pool of water that keeps them alive inside.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: And you can see they also have a double wall here in Jerusalem.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: And this, these these uh the army, I think, camped up here at the northwest side, but the three military officers come here and stand outside the pool, and uh uh they stood near the conduit or the aqueduct of the upper pool by the road to the launderers field.
18:21
SPEAKER_00: If you read the Bible carelessly, you would say that's a throwaway sentence.
18:27
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't matter.
18:28
SPEAKER_00: Who cares which pool it was?
18:31
SPEAKER_00: Who cares about the launderers field?
18:33
SPEAKER_00: But if you read the Bible carefully, you know that this is like a neon sign, that sentence, telling you that a second chance is being given.
18:47
SPEAKER_00: Because Isaiah, 34 years before, was standing with Hezekiah's father Ahaz at this very same place and challenging Ahaz to make a decision about whether to trust God or not.
19:03
SPEAKER_00: Let me show you that passage.
19:05
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, that I told you that's where the pool was.
19:08
SPEAKER_00: Uh, if you've been with me on a tour, you've stood exactly where we're talking about today, right there.
19:12
SPEAKER_00: And this is the place of decision where Ahaz made this incredibly stupid decision 34 years before.
19:20
SPEAKER_00: And now Hezekiah is going to be faced with the same decision.
19:23
SPEAKER_00: Here's the story from Isaiah 7, Hezekiah's father, King Ahaz.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: Now the Lord said to the prophet Isaiah when he was a young dude, go out to meet Ahaz, get ready, at the end of the conduit or aqueduct of the upper pool by the road to the launderer's field.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: Do you see what you've got here?
19:40
SPEAKER_00: You have a pointer back to chapter 7 saying, guess what?
19:45
SPEAKER_00: Second chances rarely come in life, but Hezekiah, you've got a second chance.
19:51
SPEAKER_00: Your father made a terrible decision.
19:54
SPEAKER_00: You have a chance to make a good one.
19:56
SPEAKER_00: In Isaiah 7, God said, Isaiah, I want you to tell Ahaz something.
20:01
SPEAKER_00: So I'm looking at this verse this week in Isaiah 7.
20:05
SPEAKER_00: And uh I thought, that sure does sound like a sign that's common in Britain, you know, this whole keep calm thing.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: And sure enough, almost word for word as you translate the Hebrew into English, uh Isaiah told Ahaz, keep calm and trust God.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: Ahaz was terrified because a military force from the north, the northern ten tribes and Syria, not usy, were coming down on him and he's going, I can't trust God.
20:35
SPEAKER_00: God's really, I believe in God, but you know, God's sort of distant and he's invisible and he's a nice abstract thing.
20:40
SPEAKER_00: But the thing is, these people have real shields, real swords, you know, real weapons and so forth, and they're going to come down on me, and so I really can't trust God, because I mean you can't grab hold of him.
20:49
SPEAKER_00: You know, God can't really physically depend, you know, defend you.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: And so I really, I'm not sure I can trust God.
20:55
SPEAKER_00: I think what I'll do is I'll send money up to, oh, this nation that's getting stronger called Assyria, and maybe they'll come and deliver me.
21:02
SPEAKER_00: Which of course they did, but then they killed him.
21:05
SPEAKER_00: So Isaiah tells Ahaz, keep calm and trust God.
21:08
SPEAKER_00: So Ahaz takes his son, Shirjasheab, and he confronts King Ahaz.
21:11
SPEAKER_00: He said, Listen, just keep calm.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: Would you trust God?
21:14
SPEAKER_00: Would you, would you look to God to solve your problem?
21:16
SPEAKER_00: And you know what Ahaz said?
21:18
SPEAKER_00: Ahaz basically said no.
21:21
SPEAKER_00: Isaiah said, listen, God says, ask for a sign, anything you want.
21:26
SPEAKER_00: You want call, call cows to fall from the sky and and and fill your cup with milk all by themselves.
21:31
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he didn't say that.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm making stuff up.
21:34
SPEAKER_00: But you, whatever you want, God will do to prove to you that you can trust him.
21:37
SPEAKER_00: Ahaz goes, oh no, I'm too spiritual for that.
21:40
SPEAKER_00: I would hate to, I don't want to test God.
21:43
SPEAKER_00: Basically, as a way of saying, no, I don't believe in God.
21:47
SPEAKER_00: This this is a titanic act of unbelief and doubt.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: And it became a turning point in the in the history of the Middle East, in the history of Israel.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: It was as a result of that, that it had such farm.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Reaching consequences by paying Assyria to come down.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: They came down, they wiped out everybody else.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: We have ten lost tribes today.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: And Judah, you know, was weakened terrifically because Ahaz refused to trust God.
22:14
SPEAKER_00: And he refused to trust God at this precane place.
22:19
SPEAKER_00: Six years a book, uh six years ago, a book was written called Clutch.
22:22
SPEAKER_00: The book was written by Paul Sullivan.
22:24
SPEAKER_00: He interviewed Michael Jordan, he interviewed all of these the Tom Brady types, asking, how is it that some people can hit the free throw to win the national championship, you know, or some people can can throw the perfect pass to win the Super Bowl, and other people choke under those situations.
22:41
SPEAKER_00: They can't think it through, they can't do, you know, can't act well in crisis.
22:47
SPEAKER_00: Well, he says there's basically, he concluded, there's three reasons I find that people choke: overthinking, overconfidence, and they don't take personal responsibility.
22:57
SPEAKER_00: So I'm reading that and thinking, this is this is Ahaz to the T.
23:01
SPEAKER_00: Ahaz overthought this whole thing.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: Trusting God, that's just too simplistic.
23:07
SPEAKER_00: What I need to do is I need to think about all of the other nations around about, and which nations could save me, which people could I count on that would deliver me from this?
23:16
SPEAKER_00: What can I do?
23:17
SPEAKER_00: He was overconfident, so he didn't trust God or trust Isaiah.
23:21
SPEAKER_00: You know, because hey, I'm successful, I'm king, and he wouldn't take personal responsibility.
23:26
SPEAKER_00: He was going to hand off the job of protection to someone else besides himself and God.
23:32
SPEAKER_00: He choked, basically.
23:33
SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah's dad choked.
23:35
SPEAKER_00: Some of you know what that's like.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: You love your dad, you love your mom, you love your grandparents, but there came a decision in their life, and you know that they took the wrong decision.
23:45
SPEAKER_00: They knew better, they'd been raised in the church, but they made a bad decision.
23:50
SPEAKER_00: We all know people like that.
23:52
SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah had a dad who made the wrong decision.
23:55
SPEAKER_00: And that place, the pool that we're talking about, became a place of failure, a scene of failure.
24:02
SPEAKER_00: And now that place has returned.
24:05
SPEAKER_00: Well, what Hezekiah does is he sends out three civilians, his prime minister and his secretary and his treasurer.
24:11
SPEAKER_00: He sends out Eliakim, son of Hilkiah, who's in charge of the palace, Shebna, the court secretary, Joah, the son of Asaph, the court historian.
24:18
SPEAKER_00: It came out to him.
24:19
SPEAKER_00: By the way, we know about a couple of these people, because their names are, you know, on pieces of pottery that we found over in Israel.
24:26
SPEAKER_00: And they come out to this place of decision.
24:29
SPEAKER_00: What we got here is we got three skinny civilians, and then we have three of the greatest fighters in the world, the military people from Assyria.
24:36
SPEAKER_00: So you get the picture here.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: And the royal spokesman, that is the five-star general, says to him, Tell Hezekiah, the great king, the king of Assyria, says this.
24:47
SPEAKER_00: Notice there's only one king.
24:48
SPEAKER_00: Whenever they're in these two chapters, Hezekiah, they avoid calling him a king.
24:53
SPEAKER_00: He's just a flunky.
24:54
SPEAKER_00: Tell Hesi, the great king, the king of Assyria, says this.
24:57
SPEAKER_00: Look, you're relying on Egypt, that splintered reed of a staff that'll pierce the hand of anyone who grabs it and leans on it.
25:05
SPEAKER_00: This is how Pharaoh, king of Egypt, is to all who rely on him.
25:07
SPEAKER_00: God could have said this.
25:08
SPEAKER_00: This is what God says to them.
25:10
SPEAKER_00: Why are you relying on Egypt to save you?
25:13
SPEAKER_00: And the fact of the matter is that same month, Egypt came out and decided and attacked Assyria.
25:20
SPEAKER_00: And Jerusalem's going, yeah, go, go, come on, wild cats, beat him, you know, whatever.
25:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they're just cheering, you know what?
25:27
SPEAKER_00: Assyria swats Egypt away like King Sennacherib swats a fly off of his beard and then stepped on him and crushed him.
25:37
SPEAKER_00: In one battle, one simple battle, Assyria slaughtered Egypt.
25:42
SPEAKER_00: The same month.
25:43
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
25:45
SPEAKER_00: So then the three, E, S, and J, said to the royal spokesman, please speak to your servants in Aramaic.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: It became the language, the lingua franca in Israel during Jesus' day, but at this point it was a royal language only, Syrian Aramaic.
25:59
SPEAKER_00: Please, you're talking in Hebrew, please speak in Aramaic, since we understand Aramaic, it's a royal language.
26:04
SPEAKER_00: Don't speak to us in Hebrew with an earshot of these people right behind us on the wall.
26:10
SPEAKER_00: Please, you're scaring them.
26:11
SPEAKER_00: But the royal spokesman replied, Is my master sent me to speak these words to your master and you, just to you guys, and not to the men who are sitting on the wall who are destined with you to bad stuff?
26:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, let's get away from that.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: So uh, if you were reading beyond me, so who are, you know, everybody's destined to die and uh and uh whatever.
26:29
SPEAKER_00: And uh so he says, you know, this is what this is, is this is Assyrian trash talk, but it's also psychological warfare, right?
26:39
SPEAKER_00: And so now the royal spokesman calls out loudly, in Hebrew, so everyone can understand, listen to the words of the great king, the king of Assyria.
26:47
SPEAKER_00: Don't let Hezekiah, not King Hezekiah, just Hezekiah deceive you, don't let him persuade you to rely on the Lord, saying, the Lord will certainly rescue us.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: This city won't be handed over to the king of Assyria.
26:57
SPEAKER_00: Hey, has any one of the gods of the nations rescued his land from the power of the king of Assyria?
27:02
SPEAKER_00: No.
27:02
SPEAKER_00: So, will the Lord rescue Jerusalem from my power?
27:05
SPEAKER_00: No.
27:06
SPEAKER_00: Then E.
27:07
SPEAKER_00: S.
27:07
SPEAKER_00: and J came to Hezekiah with their robes torn and reported to him the words of the royal spokesman.
27:14
SPEAKER_00: I've shortened those words, four arguments bang, bang, bang, bang, psychological warfare trying to terrify the city of Jerusalem and make them just give in so Sennacherib won't have to fight.
27:26
SPEAKER_00: And now Hezekiah has come to his second chance.
27:30
SPEAKER_00: He's in the same spot his dad was.
27:33
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
27:34
SPEAKER_00: Right?
27:35
SPEAKER_00: It's a similar crisis.
27:37
SPEAKER_00: What do you do?
27:39
SPEAKER_00: Once in a while, in a major part of your life, maybe a financial part, some other part, you get a second chance.
27:50
SPEAKER_00: What do you do in that situation?
27:56
SPEAKER_00: There are two times in which trust in God is absolutely critical.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: One is when you're in such a crisis, let's say diagnosed with heart disease or cancer, health crisis.
28:10
SPEAKER_00: One, financial crisis, everything, you're about to lose everything.
28:14
SPEAKER_00: A marriage crisis, everything's about to fall apart, right?
28:18
SPEAKER_00: In those crises, you rarely get a second chance.
28:21
SPEAKER_00: And the question is, are you gonna trust God in those crises or are you gonna manipulate them yourself?
28:28
SPEAKER_00: There is another kind of second chance, however, that we get, and it happens every single morning when you wake up.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: And that is the decision you have to make every day as to whether or not to trust God to satisfy your needs.
28:46
SPEAKER_00: God over here saying, Trust me, I promise I'll give you the desires of your heart if you'll simply trust me.
28:51
SPEAKER_00: And you're going, but you're invisible out there, you really don't meet my sexual needs, my relationship needs, my other my happiness needs.
28:59
SPEAKER_00: I really need to go this direction.
29:02
SPEAKER_00: So as a result, you have the world, even of Christians, turning away from trusting God and instead trusting in something they can see, or a piece of technology they can hold on to, or a car that they can drive, or a house, or a relationship, that man, that woman, that child, and placing everything on them rather than trusting in God, and every morning, thank God, you get a new choice, you get a second chance to trust God for human flourishing, for your happiness and satisfaction and contentment in life.
29:40
SPEAKER_00: Do you believe God will give you the desires of your heart?
29:43
SPEAKER_00: Or do you turn the other way, like Ahaz?
29:45
SPEAKER_00: So Hezekiah, in the same spot as his dad, in a similar crisis.
29:50
SPEAKER_00: Let me show you the seven things that happen in chapter 37.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: First, when King Hezekiah heard the report, he tore his clothes, he put on sackcloth, public repentance to show everybody, and he went to the Lord's temple.
30:05
SPEAKER_00: His dad didn't go to the temple, his dad didn't go to Isaiah, Isaiah had to come to him.
30:10
SPEAKER_00: His dad would go the opposite direction.
30:12
SPEAKER_00: His dad, Ahaz, would say, Well, God's a great idea, but he can't, he's not really there.
30:18
SPEAKER_00: I can't grab hold of him.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah goes, I'm I'm going to the Lord.
30:22
SPEAKER_00: Number one, break the cycle of unbelief.
30:26
SPEAKER_00: And some of you have come out of a family or come out of a situation where there's a sort of a cycle or a scene or a dungeon of unbelief, and you've grown up in that, you've lived in that.
30:37
SPEAKER_00: Maybe part of it is your own choice.
30:39
SPEAKER_00: It's time for you today, now that you have a second chance, to break the cycle of unbelief.
30:44
SPEAKER_00: And that's the first thing.
30:45
SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah thinks, you know, I love my dad Ahaz, but frankly, frankly, he was a man of unbelief.
30:52
SPEAKER_00: This time, I'm going to trust God.
30:54
SPEAKER_00: And you make that resolution, this time, I'm going to trust God.
30:58
SPEAKER_00: In the book Clutch, the last chapter answers the question, how is it that you're how do you become clutch?
31:04
SPEAKER_00: And his answer is you focus on fundamentals.
31:07
SPEAKER_00: I was looking back at Ken Berry, who even when I talk with him about how he coaches, and his son's now a coach of baseball, always focusing on the fundamentals.
31:16
SPEAKER_00: And then when you get in that crisis point, what happens is you rely on the fundamentals.
31:20
SPEAKER_00: And this is what he said after he talked with uh Michael, you know, with MJ and all these other guys, he found out that whether it was in sports or whether it was some of the biggest deals made in business, they focused on the simple fundamentals, the things that got them there.
31:33
SPEAKER_00: And that's what happens in Isaiah.
31:36
SPEAKER_00: God says, you know what?
31:38
SPEAKER_00: I have a fundamental.
31:39
SPEAKER_00: And my fundamental is simply this.
31:41
SPEAKER_00: It's, trust me, it's the one thing that matters.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: There's no place, by the way, that I know of.
31:48
SPEAKER_00: How old am I now?
31:49
SPEAKER_00: How long have I preached the Bible?
31:50
SPEAKER_00: I was realizing this week there's no place in the Bible where you have such a long span, 33 chapters in a row, with only one theme.
31:59
SPEAKER_00: It's caused me some difficulty as I write five new devotionals a week, because I recognize that the answer to every single one of these chapters, from seven through 39, is God saying in a hundred different ways, would you please trust me?
32:12
SPEAKER_00: Would you would you quit worrying, quit going hither and yon, quit trusting in that nation, quit trusting in the technology of horses and chariots, quit quit going everywhere else but me.
32:22
SPEAKER_00: Just trust me.
32:25
SPEAKER_00: As Christians, we think that's a nice, you know, sort of a statement.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: It's a nice feeling, but we really can't grab hold of it.
32:31
SPEAKER_00: God says, yes, you can, you can grab hold of it.
32:35
SPEAKER_00: That's my one thing, that's my fundamental.
32:37
SPEAKER_00: I'm calling on you to trust me.
32:39
SPEAKER_00: You trust me every day to give you the desires of your heart, the happiness you long for.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: Don't go down those other roads of pleasure, right?
32:50
SPEAKER_00: Honestly, I'll do it for you.
32:51
SPEAKER_00: And when it comes to the big things, especially the crises, trust me, even number three, if you haven't in the past.
32:58
SPEAKER_00: And now we have to admit something, which Isaiah doesn't admit, something he leaves out, which Kings and Chronicles include, and that is it wasn't just Hezekiah's dad that didn't trust God.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah himself in his recent past didn't trust God.
33:15
SPEAKER_00: 2 Kings 18.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah himself, just in recent years, chose.
33:20
SPEAKER_00: Seeing Assyria coming, he sends a messenger to the king of Assyria saying, hey, I'm sorry, uh, what can I do to make you like me?
33:29
SPEAKER_00: And the guy goes, send me all your money.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah boxes up all his money instead of trusting God and sends it to him.
33:35
SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah himself chose.
33:37
SPEAKER_00: And so the message is, you know, break that cycle of unbelief around you.
33:42
SPEAKER_00: Number two, determine I'm gonna trust you, Lord.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: Number three, even if you haven't trusted him in the past.
33:49
SPEAKER_00: And Hezekiah, verses two and three, sends these guys to the prophet Isaiah, the same three E S and J.
33:57
SPEAKER_00: And he says, hey, listen, Isaiah, today is a day of distress, rebuke, and disgrace.
34:02
SPEAKER_00: It's as if children have come to the point of birth and there's no strength to deliver them.
34:06
SPEAKER_00: It's like it's like my me in Jerusalem, Isaiah, we're like a breach baby stuck and don't have the strength, they can't get it out.
34:13
SPEAKER_00: And now we're either gonna die or else we're gonna require some kind of amazing deliverance, okay?
34:19
SPEAKER_00: Because we can't stop here.
34:21
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's either I'm helpless.
34:23
SPEAKER_00: He's basically saying, Isaiah, I'm absolutely helpless here.
34:28
SPEAKER_00: And Jerusalem is like a baby that's gonna die unless something gets done.
34:32
SPEAKER_00: And then he says in his next word, perhaps, he's he says something I just love, and that gives me point number four of the seven.
34:40
SPEAKER_00: Trust humbly, trust humbly.
34:43
SPEAKER_00: He says, Perhaps, or in your translation it may be, it may be that the Lord your God will hear all the words, the mocking words of the royal spokesman, whom his master, the king of Assyria, sent to mock the living God and will rebuke him.
34:57
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you will, maybe you'll save me, perhaps you'll do this.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: I'm praying that you will.
35:03
SPEAKER_00: Very much like about a hundred years from now, you're gonna have Daniel's three friends, Meshach, Shadrach, Abednego, are gonna stand there as the fire of he furnaces in front, and they say, We believe the Lord will deliver us, but even if not, they're humble.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: Even if not, we'll still trust him.
35:20
SPEAKER_00: And Hezekiah is going, you know what?
35:22
SPEAKER_00: I'm begging for deliverance.
35:24
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna trust you.
35:27
SPEAKER_00: Even if you choose in this case not to deliver me, trust humbly.
35:31
SPEAKER_00: So that's what they said to Isaiah.
35:33
SPEAKER_00: And he said back to them, Tell your master, Lord's, the Lord sees what you're doing.
35:37
SPEAKER_00: The Lord says, Don't be afraid because of the words that you've heard, words which the king of Assyria blasphemed me.
35:44
SPEAKER_00: I'm about to put a spirit in him, and he's gonna return to his own land where I'm gonna cause him to fall by the sword.
35:51
SPEAKER_00: So now we move away from uh Hezekiah doing the right thing, deciding to trust, and Isaiah's promise that the Lord is gonna deliver him.
35:59
SPEAKER_00: We move back outside the walls, and you have these three military officers, and they're going, man, he's blowing us off.
36:06
SPEAKER_00: And so they go back to King Sennacherib and they're saying they're gonna go tell him it didn't work.
36:11
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's very much like remember the story, I had an uncle named Tom who, 18 years old, died in World War II.
36:16
SPEAKER_00: He died in the Battle of the Bulge.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: He went just before the end of the war, fought under General Patton, and he died in early 1945.
36:24
SPEAKER_00: The bull, the Battle of the Bulge was so named because the Germans in the last year of the war thought that they could still win the war.
36:32
SPEAKER_00: They were developing the V-2 rocket, and they were up in Belgium, and they thought if we just blast through and split the Americans and the British and make it to Antwerp, Belgium, then by then they will be so disorganized we can get the V-2 rocket finished, we'll destroy the British with our V2 rocket, a couple of V-2 rockets, and the Americans will go home.
36:52
SPEAKER_00: And so they easily burst through the front lines in early 1945, which is when my 18-year-old uncle died.
36:59
SPEAKER_00: And but the second and third lines of the Americans held and they sort of bulged back.
37:04
SPEAKER_00: So you had this sort of a bulge, okay?
37:06
SPEAKER_00: And it just hung there around this little uh around this little town called Gaston.
37:11
SPEAKER_00: You've probably heard of this.
37:12
SPEAKER_00: And now the Nazis, the Assyrians, let's call them, you know, they're fighting against this town and they can't, and they're wasting time, they're wasting valuable days, and then it turns into weeks, where they can't overcome this town, and they think psychological warfare is the way to go.
37:26
SPEAKER_00: So they send some of their top people and they ask for a parley with the General Terry McAuliffe, you know, who's uh who's who's who's in charge of our troops over there, and they try to plead with him to give in in the same way that Rab Sheka and those three military officers did with Hezekiah.
37:43
SPEAKER_00: Anybody know the famous one-word reply that Terry McAuliffe gave them?
37:48
SPEAKER_00: Nuts, N UTS, which wouldn't mean anything today.
37:51
SPEAKER_00: We go nuts.
37:52
SPEAKER_00: Today we'd say uh forget about it or dream on or go get a life or something like that.
37:57
SPEAKER_00: But that's what Terry McAuliffe said, and so they retreat and and the town held on and uh and and uh backup troops came and Germans lost the war, as you know.
38:08
SPEAKER_00: So the same thing happens, they're going back to King Sennacherib and they're saying, basically, Hezekiah said nuts to us.
38:15
SPEAKER_00: And so they find him, he's now battling against a little town that's part way to Jerusalem called Libna, all right?
38:22
SPEAKER_00: And so the king of Assyria says, okay, let's try one more ploy.
38:26
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna write a personal letter and scare Hezekiah to death.
38:30
SPEAKER_00: So he sends messengers to Hezekiah with this letter saying, don't let your God, or whom you on whom you rely, deceive you by promising Jerusalem won't be handed over to the king of Assyria.
38:41
SPEAKER_00: Look, you've heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all the countries.
38:43
SPEAKER_00: They completely destroyed them.
38:44
SPEAKER_00: Are you gonna be rescued?
38:45
SPEAKER_00: Did the gods of the nations my predecessors destroyed, rescue them?
38:49
SPEAKER_00: So what's Hezekiah gonna do?
38:51
SPEAKER_00: Moment of decision here.
38:53
SPEAKER_00: Moment of decision.
38:54
SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah took the letter from the messenger's hands, read it, and what did he do?
38:58
SPEAKER_00: He went up to the Lord's temple and he spread it out before the Lord.
39:03
SPEAKER_00: Wow, and prayed to the Lord.
39:07
SPEAKER_00: Now, here this is what I love.
39:09
SPEAKER_00: This is this point number five.
39:11
SPEAKER_00: You you talk to God who is who is for real.
39:16
SPEAKER_00: You know, many people don't trust him because they don't feel, they feel like he's this abstract out there, but you think he's so real that if you get the letter, you know, kicking you out of the job, or you get the divorce letter, or you get the letter from the from the doc saying you're gonna die of cancer, whatever, you lay that sucker out before the Lord and let him look over your shoulder and talk to him about it because you believe he's real.
39:38
SPEAKER_00: This is not a game to you.
39:40
SPEAKER_00: You're not trusting someone who's distant and is far away, you're trusting someone who is right there.
39:44
SPEAKER_00: Hezekiah spread it out.
39:45
SPEAKER_00: What?
39:46
SPEAKER_00: Before the Lord, as though the Lord's right there with him, looking at it.
39:50
SPEAKER_00: So you talk to God as if, as if, he's real.
39:55
SPEAKER_00: Of course he's real, but you'll never trust in a God that you don't believe is real.
40:00
SPEAKER_00: And then he prays the prayer of all prayers, Lord of armies, Lord of hosts, God of Israel, enthroned between the cherubim, you are God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth.
40:11
SPEAKER_00: You made the heavens and the earth.
40:14
SPEAKER_00: Listen closely, Lord, here.
40:16
SPEAKER_00: Would you open your eyes and see this letter here?
40:18
SPEAKER_00: Hear all the words Sennacherib has sent to mock the living God.
40:24
SPEAKER_00: He's mocking you, Lord.
40:26
SPEAKER_00: Notice, enter into God's desire to uphold his reputation.
40:31
SPEAKER_00: Because that's what this is about.
40:33
SPEAKER_00: This is a war between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.
40:37
SPEAKER_00: God really cares who wins that war.
40:39
SPEAKER_00: God cares about his reputation, his honor, and his glory.
40:42
SPEAKER_00: You enter into that desire, you share that desire, you say, Lord, is it true that the kings of it is true, the kings of Assyria have devastated all these countries and their lands.
40:51
SPEAKER_00: They threw their gods into the fire.
40:53
SPEAKER_00: But listen, Lord, I know this.
40:54
SPEAKER_00: I know they were not gods at all, because they were made from wood and stone.
41:00
SPEAKER_00: Now, Lord our God, save us from his power so that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you, Lord our God, you alone, enter into God's desire to elevate his name, to highlight his glory, to defend his reputation.
41:19
SPEAKER_00: That's what we and others are going to be singing about and crying about for all eternity.
41:24
SPEAKER_00: Why wait till then?
41:26
SPEAKER_00: When crisis comes in your life, enter into his desire right now.
41:33
SPEAKER_00: So Isaiah is in Kuch with God.
41:36
SPEAKER_00: God immediately, God hearing Hezekiah's prayer, talks to Isaiah, who sends a message to Hezekiah, the Lord the God of Israel, says, Because you prayed to me about King Sennacherib of Assyria, this is the word the Lord has spoken against him.
41:51
SPEAKER_00: Who is it you've mocked and blasphemed, Sennacherib?
41:54
SPEAKER_00: Against whom have you raised your voice and lifted your eyes in public?
41:57
SPEAKER_00: Against the Holy One of Israel.
42:01
SPEAKER_00: And because your raging against me and your arrogance have reached my ears, I will put my hook in your nose and my bit in your mouth, and I'll make you go back the way you came.
42:12
SPEAKER_00: And therefore, this is what the Lord says about the king of Assyria, he will not enter this city.
42:18
SPEAKER_00: He will not shoot an arrow here, or come before it with a shield, or build up a siege ramp against it, but will go back the way he came, and he'll not enter this city.
42:26
SPEAKER_00: It's the Lord's declaration.
42:28
SPEAKER_00: Guys going, uh, Lord, they're only a few feet away out there, 200,000.
42:34
SPEAKER_00: They're uh got the siege engines ready.
42:36
SPEAKER_00: You're telling me they're not going to attack?
42:39
SPEAKER_00: You're telling me they're not gonna come up the ramp?
42:42
SPEAKER_00: Really?
42:43
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that takes some kind of faith.
42:47
SPEAKER_00: But if you prayed that way, watch for God to work.
42:51
SPEAKER_00: And the angel of the Lord went out and struck down a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians, and when the people got up the next morning, there were all the dead bodies.
43:03
SPEAKER_00: So King Sennacherib of Assyria broke camp and left.
43:07
SPEAKER_00: He returned home and lived in Nineveh in one day, decade.
43:10
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, he goes home to Nineveh and he commissions his best artists to make one of the central rooms in his palace the siege of Lakish.
43:20
SPEAKER_00: You think he would have done that if he'd have defeated Jerusalem?
43:23
SPEAKER_00: Heavens know.
43:25
SPEAKER_00: In the siege of Lakish, he writes this thing in his journal saying, and I shut up Hezekiah like a bird in a cage in Jerusalem.
43:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, big whoop.
43:36
SPEAKER_00: You couldn't get into the cage.
43:38
SPEAKER_00: You wanted to kill the bird, but that's become a very famous line.
43:42
SPEAKER_00: And so he has to celebrate Lakish rather than Jerusalem.
43:46
SPEAKER_00: And one day, while he's worshiping a decade later, in the temple of his god Nizrach, his son struck him down with a sword, escaped to the land of Arat, fulfilling God's promise.
43:56
SPEAKER_00: And then his son Ezra Hadan became king in his place.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: Watch for God to work.
44:01
SPEAKER_00: Can I summarize this quickly as I conclude?
44:04
SPEAKER_00: And that is sometimes you get a second chance in really important things.
44:10
SPEAKER_00: And every morning you get a second chance when it's not really a crisis, but when it comes to will you trust God to give you the real desires of your heart.
44:23
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're like Hezekiah, you'll make the decision to break the cycle of unbelief that has raged around you in the past.
44:30
SPEAKER_00: You'll decide you're going to really trust him, even if you haven't always trusted him in the past.
44:37
SPEAKER_00: And you'll do it humbly, recognizing that he's sovereign and he can do it in any way he wants.
44:44
SPEAKER_00: But you're going to do it on the basis you're going to go to him in prayer as though you know he is real.
44:50
SPEAKER_00: And you're going to lay out the letter, lay out exactly what you want and ask him as he's right there looking over your shoulder to take a look at that.
44:58
SPEAKER_00: And you're going to talk to him on the basis that you share his desire that his reputation be elevated.
45:07
SPEAKER_00: And then you can lean back and relax and watch him work.
45:19
SPEAKER_00: Parents asked the boy, eight-year-old, if he'd pray over lunch.
45:23
SPEAKER_00: He said, No, thanks.
45:25
SPEAKER_00: Please.
45:26
SPEAKER_00: He said, No.
45:28
SPEAKER_00: No, I don't want to pray.
45:30
SPEAKER_00: And his mother said, but hold on, I don't understand.
45:34
SPEAKER_00: We always pray at home.
45:35
SPEAKER_00: You pray at home.
45:36
SPEAKER_00: He says, Yeah, but that's at home.
45:37
SPEAKER_00: This is grandma's place, and grandma knows how to cook.
45:45
SPEAKER_00: Sorry about that, but what we do is we tend to trust based upon based upon what we know is true.
45:52
SPEAKER_00: And we trust when we feel helpless.
45:59
SPEAKER_00: So um we need to trust instead every single morning, and we need to trust God in crisis situations.
46:09
SPEAKER_00: One more story.
46:10
SPEAKER_00: One more story before I ask Amanda to come and sing this perfect song.
46:15
SPEAKER_00: She and Jeremiah.
46:16
SPEAKER_00: So a tour bus is close to home.
46:20
SPEAKER_00: And uh tour bus full of tourists is heading down, it's a narrow mountain road, and it's heading down the side of this mountain, and there's a cliff on the other side, and so forth, and it's going paint, it's going really slow.
46:31
SPEAKER_00: Tour bus full of tourists and so forth, it's going really slow.
46:34
SPEAKER_00: But then all of a sudden, the bus driver and the passengers begin to smell this odor, and they realize that it's the brake pads against the drum that are burning up.
46:45
SPEAKER_00: And they keep smelling, and all of a sudden the brakes give way, and all of a sudden the bus starts going faster and faster, careening around the corner, and uh and you've got people screaming, and it appears at any moment that the bus may go over the side of the cliff, and somehow, because of his skill, bus driver's able to get the bus down uh to the bottom of the hill, and all this time, all this time, well, people have been screaming, and some people fall on the floor, and so forth.
47:09
SPEAKER_00: There's little boys, little boy's been to the very back of the bus, and he's been lying there, he's been fast asleep, and they get down to the bottom and they're all celebrating, and a man wakes up to the boy and he says, Wow, did you miss it?
47:18
SPEAKER_00: You know, it was terrifying.
47:20
SPEAKER_00: We we thought we were gonna crash and so forth.
47:23
SPEAKER_00: And yet you're so calm you just stayed asleep.
47:26
SPEAKER_00: And the boy said, That's because the bus driver is my daddy.
47:31
SPEAKER_00: And so, in your life, as you go through crises, some of them every single day, you will trust if you recognize something that God is real, that he's your daddy, that he'll take care of you, but you've got to trust him to do that.
47:45
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
47:48
SPEAKER_00: Father, we do trust in you, though the world just swarms around us, though the Assyrians attack.
47:56
SPEAKER_00: And though it appears sometimes as though you're far away, we ask you for the strength to recognize that we're helpless, that we cannot connive our way out of difficulties, but we must lean back and trust you because you love us, because you're our Father, because you promise you'll take care of those who trust in you.
48:15
SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
48:16
unknown: Amen.