Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / August 9, 2020 | [re]START - Restart Your Life (Connor Kraus)

Transcript

August 9, 2020 | [re]START - Restart Your Life (Connor Kraus) · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Morning, TBC.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: So glad you guys made it in the rain.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Connor Krauss.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: For those of you who didn't know, I have the privilege of working with our awesome students here at TBC.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: And my first question for you this morning is where are my introverts at?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: So all right, the introverts don't normally raise their hands.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's fine.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's sort of their that's sort of their thing.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm I'm kind of an introvert, and uh, if I'm being honest with you, during the stay-at-home order um earlier on, I was, as some people would say, maybe living my best life for a little bit.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: My my social calendar had been wiped clean.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: I was watching the last dance on Netflix, and uh I got to spend like every day with my family.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was it was awesome, right?
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: But after a little bit of time, it started to grow a little stale, and I sort of recognized that I was not made to eat scrambled eggs on my couch.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I was made for more than that.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that I am most effective when I am around other people.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like that is what I was made to do, and that's sort of my purpose.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know about you, but during the quarantine, it seemed like there was sort of a dual narrative that was being set.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: One was how difficult it is and was, and that's certainly true, but the other part was it seemed like there was a large group of people, a really big contingent, who said, you know what, I want to come out of the quarantine better than I was before.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: I want to not only restart, but I want to reassess and re-establish and sort of repurpose my life and make sure that it's something that is better than what came before.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it was the social calendars that got wiped clean or something else.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: But there were maybe it was while we were working on our start uh sourdough recipe and everybody would had all this time to think.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: But a lot of people said, you know what, I want to restart my life.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that that sounds super dramatic, okay?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: So let's, you know, call spade a spade.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: But what I mean by that is when we're talking about restarting our life, I had this idea that said, I want to come out of the quarantine and all of this mess, greater than I was before.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: And if I know myself, what I really mean by that is I want to have a greater relationship with God than I did before.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this morning, we're going to be looking at the book of Ezra and kind of walking through that.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Ezra maybe has some cobwebs on it in most people's uh Bibles, but that's okay because there's some fantastic lessons that we can learn from the Israelites about their restart to their life.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you've read the Old Testament at all, you know that the Israelites sort of had a bad boy reputation as needing to restart quite a bit.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: They um either got into trouble because of their own foolishness or something that was outside of their control.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: But about 2,500 years ago, the Israelites, they were they were in trouble, okay?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And they were in captivity, they had been in captivity for about 70 years.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: And at first they got taken over by the Babylonians, okay?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you know Daniel at all, that is the story we hear about.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Nebuchadnezzar takes over Jerusalem, he destroys it, and he takes back some of the smartest people to Babylon.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: But if you also know Daniel or are well versed on your veggie tales, you know that he also wasn't the most tolerant of other religions.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: But the one thing that the Israelites were able to do is that they were still able to conduct quite a bit of their life outside of religion.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: We actually have found some tablets in Babylon during that time period that describe daily life for many of the Jews.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: It talks about, you know, um trade that is happening with different types of fruits, and it talks about exchanging money for goods and services, and it's there's even some family histories and wills that we've found in these tablets.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so they paint this picture of a life that was somewhat comfortable for the Israelites, except for that one piece that is inextricably tied to the Jews, which is their connection to the temple.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the Babylonians got conquered by the Persians, and we have another piece of pottery.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Don't worry, this is the last slide with pottery.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: I got you.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: You're like, I can only take two and a Sunday, we're there.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: But this one is called the Cyrus Cylinder, and it's really, really important and neat because it tells us the guy Cyrus, the king, um, at the time during the Book of Ezra, it tells us what he was like and a bit of his philosophy for ruling.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And see, the Persian Empire was gigantic, and he knew that really the best way to maintain his rule was to allow other uh faiths to go and pursue and worship their own gods.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so Cyrus, at the beginning of Ezra, allows the Israelites, about 50,000 of them, to go back to Jerusalem.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: And see, there was this restart that needed to happen because they had been away from their home for 70 years.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: And even though there were some who had lived during that entire time, most of them were new.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: They hadn't seen Jerusalem, and they were going back to re-establish their lives.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: And they had maybe become a little too comfortable in Babylon.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: But they had this dedication, this desire that I think we have to re-establish the most important thing in their life, which was their worship to God.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: They left their comfort and went to go and do this.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: So this guy, not named Ezra, okay, he comes later.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: This guy named Shesh Bazar, all right?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: I said that like 50 times before this morning to make sure that I Sheshbazar.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: And if you are struggling, if you are a parent or a grandparent with a grandbaby on the way or something, and you need some ideas for baby names, the book of Ezra has got you covered, okay?
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: But this guy named Shesh Bazar leads the Israelites back to Jerusalem.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's 900 miles, okay?
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's no walk in the park.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: And as they're taking this journey, you can imagine all the time that they've had to think about how they are going to rededicate their lives to God.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what they do first?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing they do when they get back, they rebuilt the altar.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Israel, you have done it.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: You have succeeded because this is not sort of what you are known for.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: And man, you did the right thing.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: You rebuilt the altar.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: It was central to them re-establishing their worship.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so they go into Jerusalem in the ruins of the first temple and they set back up their worship with God.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Not only do they do that, but they start practicing their sacrifices according to the Mosaic law, and then they also celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles, or the Feast of Booths, or Sukkat, all the same thing, which is thanking God for his provision of them during their time in the wilderness.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: So the Israelites, I mean, they nailed this one.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: And as we're going through the book of Ezra here this morning, I've got three questions for you.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because what they did, and as we look back on it, we can learn from it in a positive way, but also as a cautionary tale.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: And not to jump too far ahead, but this is the only positive one that we've got this morning.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: But they rebuilt the altar.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so what was so great about that?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they made first things first.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: They rededicated their lives to God, and they said, you know what?
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: He is central to my life.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: I want to make him the most important thing.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so going back into the ruins and all of this destruction, they say the first thing we are going to do is sacrifice to God.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: So the question that we need to ask ourselves this morning that comes from this is how will I make God first in my life?
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the first question because it's really the starting place.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's the first thing that needs to have that first thing that needs to happen.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: As we're heading into this new life, and I know we're not outside of really anywhere near the cloud of COVID or things like that, but as we're still thinking about a future and saying to ourselves, I want to be closer to God than I was before, this is our starting point.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And hopefully everybody would say, yeah, that's a great idea.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: But you know what, Business Insider and Psychology Today say the number one reason your New Year's resolutions don't work is because they're not specific enough.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so we have to go a little bit deeper than just how will I make God first in my life.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: What we really need is a specific activity with a specific frequency.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I can't tell you what that needs to be for you.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're dedicated to this premise, this idea of being closer to God in the future than you are right now, then you need to figure out what your activity and that frequency will be.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Some ideas are maybe you have always wanted to get that prayer journal and start writing in it.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you want to set up a discipleship meeting with somebody younger or somebody older than yourself, who you can lead or you can be led in faith.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you need to, this is what I did when I was in high school that served me well was I committed to reading one chapter of the Bible every night and slow and steady wins the race.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: But whatever it is for you and your family, maybe it's a devotional time for you.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: You need to figure out an activity and a frequency to do it.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's not, if any of you are office fans, and I'm hitting maybe some of you in here, you can't just declare bankruptcy, right?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: You can't just declare that you are going to rededicate your life to God.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: There has to be action behind it.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: But that's what they did here.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: The Mosaic law for the Israelites, it already had activities and frequencies and circumstances, so they just sort of went back into the flow of things and began that anew.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: But there was trouble in paradise, okay?
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because the Israelites, this some 50,000 that went back to Jerusalem, okay?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Jerusalem wasn't empty.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: It hadn't been abandoned the entire time that they were in Babylon.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, the Assyrians, a third people who had conquered them, don't worry about keeping track of this, but the Assyrians, about 300 years earlier, when they had conquered it, they sent some people back to live in the land.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: And those people who they sent back to live in this conquered area, along with the Jews who had stayed behind, they intermarried.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've read your New Testament and you're like, man, why do all these people not like the Samaritans?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: That is why.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because they were people who had intermarried and who had stayed behind and sort of worshiped Yahweh and our Lord, but also like didn't and did other things and worshiped other gods.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: They were sort of phony Israelites, if you will.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: So these people who are rededicated to the Lord, they go back.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: And these phony Israelites, it says in Ezra that they were their enemies, actually, but they come to them.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because uh Sheshbazar had said, okay, the next thing that we need to do is we need to rebuild this temple now.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's not good enough that we just have the altar back, but we need to rebuild the whole temple.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so these great, great, great-grandparents of the Samaritans sort of come along and they're like, hey, I've got a proposition for you.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um we will give you gold and we will give you help and uh we will give you support here if you let us be a part of rebuilding the temple.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so the leaders are really faced with their first crisis, and they say, okay, what are we gonna do?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Are we going to take all of their help that is sorely needed and their money and everything that they can offer, the people who know the land, are we gonna reject it?
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: And they stood strong.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: They stood strong.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: They said, No, you don't worship our God, you worship something else, and so then they continued on.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: They said, We're gonna rebuild the temple by ourselves.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: But the mean girls weren't satisfied, and so they wrote to the rulers, right, because they're still under Persian control.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh Ezra 4, verses 4 through 5, it says, Then the peoples around them set out to discourage the people of Judah and make them afraid to go on building.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: They bribed officials to work against them and frustrate their plans during the entire reign of Cyrus, king of Persia, and down to the reign of Darius, king of Persia.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: I hate it when that happens.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so these people were um they were in opposition to them.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the Israelites, for a numerous uh set of reasons, they stopped building the temple, okay?
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: For 16 years.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so 16 years goes by, and then Haggai, another book of the Bible that maybe needs to be read more frequently, Haggai comes along, along with Zechariah, and he's like, hey guys, how about that temple?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: You were supposed to be rebuilding it.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: This is something that you were supposed to be doing.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: You knew it was a divinely inspired lesson and mission for you, and you've sort of set aside these things.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: In Haggai 1, Haggai's speaking, and he says, These people say, the time has not yet come to rebuild the Lord's house.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: And you're like, well, yeah, okay, there are all these people who are, you know, in opposition to them, they're stopping them by force, they're being difficult.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's probably not the best time to, you know, go on a reconstruction mission.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: But in those 16 years, the Israelites who had had started out so well, something had changed within their hearts, and this became more than a reason and it became more of an excuse.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: It became sort of a platitude that they gave for as to why things weren't happening.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: They said, Yeah, it's just not the right time.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: But Haggai, he's looking around and he says, Well, I see some really nice houses.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses while this house, meaning the temple, God's house, remains a ruin?
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, Man, I'm seeing a disconnect here.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't seem like their opposition stopped you from rebuilding the rest of your town, from you guys making really nice homes for yourself.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: There seems to be some hypocrisy going on here.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: See, what the Israelites had failed to do was the thing that they had started out so well on, they had abandoned it.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: They had started strong and then failed down the back stretch.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: When um before Hannah I moved back to Topeka, we were living in Fort Worth doing some ministry down there, and we had the wonderful opportunity to work with high school students and college-age students.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: And just in the particular demographic that we were in, um, we tended to work with people who were a little bit more well off.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to tell you that there was a difficulty that we found when we were talking with normally parents about their high school kids.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because occasionally, if a kid isn't, you know, coming to youth group or I don't see them a lot, sometimes I will go and just say, hey, you know, how's this person doing?
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Just want to make sure everything's okay.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Is there anything that we can do to help them grow closer to Christ?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: And what I heard over and over again is like, yeah, you know, football practice just kind of got in the way.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: And we we really want them to be a part of the youth group, but we sort of leave it up to them, and they just haven't decided that it's super important right now.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we they've got a girlfriend and and they're doing good in sports, and we're they're testing for the ACT here in a couple months, and we just want to make sure that youth group is a part of their life.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, okay, you know, that's it's awesome that you are so supportive of your child.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: But the difficulty is that they have stopped making Christ the center of that wheel and instead made him a spoke.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: And their their main goal, and this is true for so many of us, is that God had simply become part of being a well-rounded person.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: He had become sort of a convenient excuse or a reference point and not the thing that we were driving on towards more and more.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like the Israelites here, because they are living around the partially rebuilt temple, and so anytime somebody says, Yeah, how about that, they can look and say, Look, we've got the temple, we're rebuilding it.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Don't say that we're not committed to God.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: But God knew that their hearts was not where it needed to be.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: So the second question that we need to ask ourselves this morning here is, what have I allowed to become greater than God?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: What have I allowed to take that place?
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the tricky part is it's normally not a conscious decision that we have made.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: If we're being honest again, I love honesty, if we're being honest again, mine is anxiety.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and it's not anxiety specifically, but what happens when I get anxiety.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: So what happens when I get anxiety is that um it's hardwired into my brain that I need to work harder and I need to do more things in order to overcome that anxiety.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the case, but that's how I tend to respond to it.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: And when I respond that way, I think of a whole lot of things that need to get done.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: A whole lot of projects that need to be completed that in some way will relieve my anxiety and make me feel better.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: And those projects and those ideas and those things, they end up becoming my priority.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: They take precedence over God.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: And if I'm being very honest with you, those are the times when my quiet time struggles, when my prayer time struggles, when I am not communicating with the Lord like I should be.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so I allow not necessarily my anxiety, but these things that I have made to be more important than Him take precedence.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: And where I start strong, I can fail down the back stretch if I don't give that over to God.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: So the question I think for you this morning is where are you weak?
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not a bad question, it's a helpful question.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because it helps us to look when we're we're planning for the future to sort of buttress those defenses and make sure that we can rebuild them while times are good.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: If you will, dig the well deeper so that when the drought comes, we can still get water.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: We want to focus on what we have allowed to become greater than God so that when it comes up the next time, we don't fail.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that we can continue going back to Him.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: God knows that we have weaknesses, okay?
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: Don't worry, you're not surprising him when you acknowledge it.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so for you, I don't know what it might be.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: It could be a struggling relationship, it could be the need to impress, the need for success, it could be just an uncertain future that we don't really know about right now.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: But there are things that we are struggling with, and they are allowing us to be taken away from God's presence.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: But let's go back to the story of Ezra because there's a third lesson that we need to look at here.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: There's a third lesson that we can learn from the Israelites' return.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: So 58 years has passed.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I know, just like picture it, we're just moving forward, moving forward.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: We're still in the book of Ezra, but 58 years has passed.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: They rebuilt the temple.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: They were encouraged by the prophet Zechariah and Haggai, they rebuilt the temple, and they uh have moved forward, but there is a serious religious and spiritual problem happening in Jerusalem, okay?
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so Ezra, who's still in Babylon, comes along.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: He's a bit late to the party, okay?
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: He's fashionably late to his own book in the Bible.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: He comes in in chapter 7, and Ezra is sort of um uh shown to be this amazing figure, right?
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: Anytime that you see genealogy in the Bible attached to somebody, you should pay attention because the re or the writer is typically trying to tell you something very important about who that person comes from.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because, especially in Israelite culture, where somebody comes from has a lot to do with their purpose and their meaning to the people.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so, wouldn't you know it?
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: Ezra gets his own genealogy, and he is traced all the way back to Aaron, Moses' brother, the guy who sort of was the OG, the original priest of the community, and the one who first established, Moses revealed it, and Aaron helped establish the Mosaic covenant to the people, the Mosaic law.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so Ezra, it comes in as this figure is introduced in the reading as somebody who's going to come in and correct what's going on.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: If the first trip to Jerusalem was more of a material rebuilding to get the temple back up and these sorts of things, Ezra comes along as a spiritual help to them.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: But when he gets there, there's a huge, huge problem.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not just apathy any longer, like we just looked at.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's it's much more central to who the Israelites are.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: When Ezra gets there, somebody comes up to him and he says this the people of Israel, including the priests and the Levites, your leaders, have not kept themselves separate from the neighboring peoples with their detestable practices like those of the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebuzites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians, and Amorites.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you're like, wow, that's a long list.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for keeping track of all of that.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Them.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: He was a little nosy.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: He wanted to know who everybody was marrying.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: But this is a huge deal, okay?
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because well he keeps going.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Let me finish.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: In Ezra 9 2, he says, they have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and their sons and have mingled the holy race with the peoples around them.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the leaders and officials have led the way in this unfaithfulness.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: You're like, that sounds bad.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's really bad for five reasons.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: One, God had specifically said to not marry the pagan nations around Israel.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, you need to remain pure, and that is how you do it.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: First one, off the list.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, if I can go back here, all of these people, if you right, if you're really knowledgeable at all of your Old Testament, they are like sworn enemies of Israel.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: You look at who they're fighting in the battles, it's these people.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: So not only have they married the pagan uh peoples around them, but they have married like their sworn enemies.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: That was no, no, number two.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: Number three is that their leaders were the ones who had sort of led the charge in this.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: The priests and the Levites, the ones who should have known the law the most, they were like, yeah, but she looks really nice.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: So that was number three.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: Number four is that it says that they were led into detestable practices.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: Could have another slide up here about that.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: Don't want to um talk about that too much, but let's just say that we have both biblical and extra-biblical evidence that the practices of some of these people involve things like child sacrifice and blood rituals, okay?
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: And they were drawing the Israelites into that.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: Fifth, and finally, is that this should have been a huge wake-up call.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: And Ezra, who knew history, probably was, you know, writhing in pain because they were just repeating the history of Solomon.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: So Solomon, uh, Saul, David, Solomon, right?
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: Solomon, the wisest man in the world, but his big downfall was that he had married foreign women, and those foreign women, he had married foreign women, and they had led him into these pagan practices.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so Solomon wasn't able to remain pure any longer, and eventually God takes the kingdom away from him.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: He takes it away from the line of David, and the kingdom of s is split, and a whole lot of other things that led to all this capture and captivity stuff in the first place.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so Ezra comes along and he's like, Man, don't you see the problem here?
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: You're just repeating history and you're going back over and back over your same mistakes.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: Don't you get it?
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: Don't you understand how big of a deal this is?
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: And other secondary irony, you guys don't like these Samaritans.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, like, you're kind of doing their thing, but anyhow.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: So Ezra comes along here and he has a really difficult decision because he's come in, remember, he has been introduced in the story as almost this um ironic, mosaic figure.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, he's got authority.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: He is respected by his peers, and his job, led by God's will, is that he needs to restore faithfulness in the community.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so the difficult decision that he makes is that the leaders of the Israelites, the ones who had led them into this trouble in the first place, that they need to divorce their wives, that they need to split up these families.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it's really harsh judgment.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it's something, it's kind of a difficult passage to read because you're like, man, this seems like such an extreme measure.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: But it had gotten to such a point that nothing besides pure removal and breaking apart was going to save the Israelites not only from their current sin, but from future sinfulness as well.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was the only way that it could happen.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so this difficult thing was removed.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like a cancer, it had to be excised and it had to be taken out, and it was painful, but it was necessary.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: So the third and final question I have for you this morning is what must I surrender for a greater faith?
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: What must I surrender for a greater faith?
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this one, this is the one that might hit the closest to home.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because there are probably I don't know, I can definitely look into my life, particularly at certain points of my life, but even now, there are things that I know that I need to get rid of.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: There are always ways that I'm trying to grow closer to the Lord.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: But this word surrender, I wanted to use it intentionally because I don't mean like wave the white flag.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's not what we're talking about here.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: We're saying that we are choosing something specifically that we give up because we recognize that it has become an obstacle to us growing deeper in our fellowship with God.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the probably, if we've been living with it for a long time, it has been exhausting.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: When I went uh with the youth group along with a bunch of our leaders to uh Lost Valley this past spring, we take the we call them Poatmobiles.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: They're not the people movers, though, the 15 passenger vans that you guys see out in the parking lot.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: We take them to Colorado, and those things are built like wind sails, okay?
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have ever driven out across western Kansas, you know that there is wind, and you know there's lots of wind.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: And this particular last spring, there was a, I don't know, gale force winds happening.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so we left at 6 a.m.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: in the morning.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm bleary-eyed.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: I was totally safe to drive, don't worry.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: I maybe shouldn't have included that.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: But we're ready to drive, okay?
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I am I'm not exaggerating with you.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: I have the steering wheel at like a 40-degree turn the entire way.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: The wind is so strong that this is the only way we are we are like maintaining our path on the road.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: And after a couple of hours, I can normally drive for you know, like four or five, I don't know.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a decent road tripper.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: After like two or three hours, we had to pull over.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, I am exhausted.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: I can't keep doing this.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: And my arms were tired, I was so tense because I'd just been fighting against it for so long just to maintain this path.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that that is how a lot of us feel internally about our fight against this world and our relationship with God.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe on the outside we are we are maintaining this path on the road, we haven't swerved off or anything like that.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: But on the inside, there is such a fight going on, such an intense struggle that we just feel so exhausted.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have the energy, it feels like, to continue in our relationship with God because we have just allowed this thing to stay for so long.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think for you, if you're looking for something, maybe something hasn't come to mind yet for you about what you need to surrender so that you can have a greater faith.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: I would encourage you to think kind of like Ezra did.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: All right, this divorce needed to be happened, or this divorce needed to happen because not only would it prevent sin now, but it was going to prevent future sinfulness of the Israelites.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was going to continue to propagate.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so something needed to happen in the moment.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: But once you do these things, okay, let's say you answered all these questions for yourself, and here they are, all three of them.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: How will I make God first?
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: What have I allowed to be greater than God?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: What must I surrender for a greater faith?
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, it doesn't mean the journey's over yet, right?
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: Our our relationship with God hopefully looks like um a bull market in the stocks, right?
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: We go up and down, but gradually we're increasing.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so it doesn't mean that we're never going to struggle or we're never going to fail.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, 1 John, it says that those of us who claim to be without sin, man, we are just liars.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: So God knows that we're going to struggle.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: God knew that the Israelites were going to struggle.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: But what did he not like?
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he didn't like that the Israelites were making excuses.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: And he didn't like that they were giving lip service to him, but weren't actually living out a faith that was deep and that was meaningful.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: So if you desire like I do to have a deeper relationship with God in the future than you do currently, if you're coming out of this, you know, quarantine thing saying, you know, maybe there are some things and areas where I can grow, I hope that you answer these questions.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to know a good place to start, I would encourage you to go back to the prayer of Ezra.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have time to include it, but it's amazing.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: There are a couple places in the Bible where we are treated to like full-on prayers by the closest people to God.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: And this prayer from Ezra in Ezra 9 is amazing.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: He goes in as the leader and he says, I have not married a foreign wife.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't say that.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: He's not like you guys.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: But he says, My people have failed.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: We have failed.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so he acknowledges the sin.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: He thanks God for his grace and his mercy.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: He asks for forgiveness from the sin, and then he commits to change.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: Immediately after the prayer is when he says, Okay, we need to work out this divorce thing because that's how we're going to move forward.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: He acknowledges the sin, he thanks God for his grace, he asks for forgiveness, and he commits to change.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: So this morning, I think that's a really good starting place, no matter where you're at in your journey.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this summer too, it was kind of a messy time, right?
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: We all get that, right?
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody was living under a rock.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: This summer was a little difficult.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it was particularly difficult for us in the student ministry because like our busiest time of the year is during the summer.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we had a lot of things going on, but we um we couldn't have done it without our summer interns.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: And things were messy for us at times, but they were fantastic.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so as we close out this morning here, um, I would love for you guys to watch a video that we've made, a short video, um, letting you get to know the interns just a little bit better, what they did during the summer, um, sort of how I feel about them, uh hint in hint, I like them.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: And uh then after that, I'll go ahead and close us out.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: So why don't you go ahead and turn your attention here and watch this video?
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_05: Hi, I'm Anna Dexter, and I took a gap year to be part of the Air Force.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_05: So this fall, finally, I'm going to be going to Manhattan Christian College as a freshman, and it is my first summer interning.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: Hey guys, I'm Drew Will.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a sophomore at Manhattan Christian College, and this is my second year interning with DC.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_03: My name is Brody Lumpkins.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_03: This is my first summer interning, and in the fall, I will be returning to Manhattan Christian College for my senior year.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_04: My name is Emily Kaufman, and I will be a senior at Indiana Wesleyan University, and this was my first summer interning.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_06: My name is Anna Holloway.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_06: I attend Calvary University, and this is my second year being an intern.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_02: My name is Connor O'Boyle.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a senior at Kansas State University and Manhattan Christian College, and this is my first year as a summer intern here at TBC.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, the biggest challenge I faced was recognizing that a lot of times as leaders, we've been in a similar experience to the kids a long time ago.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_04: So we use our wisdom to help them and lead them.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_04: But with COVID, we are experiencing it all at the same time.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_04: And it had to like bring in this level of humility of saying, wow, like this junior high kid might be doing something better than I'm doing in this time of COVID, and like how can I learn from them and how can I use them to lead other kids in this area.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_03: I think the biggest challenge that I faced and the rest of the interns faced was not having the events and the hangouts that the previous summers had, like going to camps and things like that.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_03: So coming up with videos like the not so late show for the students that feel like they're involved with the interns and having events that separated them enough to follow along with the COVID regulations and have a good time still.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_02: Definitely the teaching part of the internship because I haven't really taught as much as some of the other interns.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_02: And it was just a really great experience to get some first-hand experience in front of the students and be able to, you know, just give them a lesson and listen on the feedback that I got and just improve, hopefully, in the future in that area.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_05: So I would say that I've experienced the most growth this summer in leadership or like taking initiative because a lot of times there would be uh tasks that uh needed to be accomplished, and we needed someone to step up and say, like, you know, I'll do that.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: My favorite memory from the summer was at Gage Park at our volleyball game, and we were sitting at a picnic table, and Zach Stockton and Isaiah Thurman challenged me to a rap battle, and I kind of shrugged them off thinking that it'd be kind of just funny and lighthearted, and they actually turned out to be really, really good at rapping.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_03: So, my funniest interaction with students this summer was probably the first event that we had at the Will's house, and we had a wrestling competition on the trampoline.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_03: And all the kids were super creative.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_03: They came up with wrestling names like Dark Chocolate and Shiny Mayo, and they had these moves like the chocolate bomb, and they would try them on Connor, and they worked on the kids perfectly.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_03: But when they do it on Connor, it would it would just it was hilarious because Connor wouldn't move or budge at all, and it was it was hilarious to watch a little kid jump up on giant Connor and he just stands there still the way it is.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_05: I definitely remember hearing stories from that.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_05: I would say that mine, um, I invited a couple of kids to make breakfast with me one morning before uh we were supposed to be into work.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_05: And I was so excited, I thought the recipes were easy enough.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_05: And um, to my surprise, we start making things and I opened the oven to see if things were cooking properly, and a huge cloud of smoke comes out.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_05: It escalates so much that uh the fire alarm goes off, and uh at the end of our interaction, the fire department was there.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_05: Everyone is safe though, so breakfast went awry.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we had the annual kickball tournament at Summer Sizzle on the last night, and I'd like to give a shout out to Bambi's mom, aka Beetlejuice.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_04: I was able to coach that winning team for the Red Warriors.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_04: They were amazing.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_04: I just gave them motivational speeches, they did all the work, but yeah, it was pretty cool.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_03: One thing that I learned about the uh students and want TBC to know is that they're super creative.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_03: They found ways to take the things that we didn't think would be interesting and turn them into a highlights of the events and hangouts that we did.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_06: What I want TBC to know about the students is that they really care.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_06: They care about coming and learning, but they also care about each other.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_06: And you see multiple instances of them reaching out to one another and caring for one another, and that's really cool.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: The biggest thing that I appreciated about our intern team this year was definitely the wide range of abilities and talents that we had.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: So some were better at being creative and making creative events and ideas, while some were much better at the logistical planning and the practical side, organizational.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, definitely going off of that, like my weaknesses were counteracted by the strengths of someone else.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_04: And so where I fell short, you know, the rest of the team could bring that back up together.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_04: So we just worked really great together and we created, we really were like the body of Christ with all of all of our gifts and strengths.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_02: One of the lessons I probably learned the most this summer was while we're all in this crazy time and just being intentional and flexible, especially with the students, because the time that we have together is just so valuable.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_02: We wanted to make the most of it for them as we can.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_06: I learned that God just uses every season of your life to grow you and push you.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_06: Being a second-year intern, I thought that all the growing was last summer, but I think I grew and learned even more this summer.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this summer was pretty interesting.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we were all going through our own difficulties, but student ministry, the summer's our biggest time of the year, and we have our biggest events of the year.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: And these interns, they took the challenges and they took the obstacles more than really any other intern group has had to deal with.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: And they exceeded.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: They went above any expectations that I had for them.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: They met with so many students.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: They were creative, they were intentional, they were focused on the mission that we have to leading people to life in Christ.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: And as the interns head out for the summer, back to their own different lives, not here at TBC, I'm gonna miss them because I really leaned on them a lot this summer.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: Lori and I both did.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about pivoting quite a bit.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: There were a lot of plans that needed to change halfway through the summer, halfway through an event, even.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm really going to miss them because I learned a lot from the interns this summer.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: I really learned a lot from their resiliency and their desire to just pursue excellence even when the outcome wasn't always guaranteed.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think we can learn a lot from these summer interns, even though they're heading out the door.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the interns were awesome.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I hired them, but the interns were awesome.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: They're fantastic.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'll just say it one last time.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: If if you if you feel led at all to bless the interns with a gift, uh, we've got some baskets at the back with little hearts on them that Lori made, they look wonderful.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, or you can do it online.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: If you'd like to do there, you can go through the website or the app and pick the drop-down menu that you'd like to give to the intern summer fund.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: But setting that aside, um, I just wanted to close with this.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to encourage you.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the um the lesson of repeating history and the lesson of maybe you repeating history doesn't have to be your future.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you've struggled before with a lot of these kinds of things about growing deeper in your relationship with God, know that your future, by God's grace, doesn't have to be your past.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just I want to encourage you because sometimes when we talk about the Israelites, it's maybe more like lessons learned from what not to do.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: But your future is something that is up to you and God.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just want to encourage you in that and know that you can have, you can come out of this quarantine greater than you were before, and with a deeper fellowship with God than you had before.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: Remember Ezra's prayer.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: Acknowledging the sin, thanking God for his grace, asking for forgiveness and committing to change.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: Would you guys bow your heads and pray with me?
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, we thank you for today, and God, we most of all, we're thankful for Christ.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_00: That through him we have the forgiveness of sins, that we can come to you and know that we are truly clean.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: God, that's an amazing and a wonderful gift that I don't know if we'll ever fully comprehend this side of heaven.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: But God, we ask that as we walk forward, you would give us the strength through the power of your spirit to follow your will.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: And God, to just help us to grow deeper in that fellowship and that relationship that we have always heard about.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, please help help us to abide by you and to live a life that is honoring and glorifying to you too.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: God, give us the strength when we struggle.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it's in Jesus' name we pray.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: Have a great Sunday.