There are a lot of misconceptions today about
who God is.
Godless religious society refers to him as the
man upstairs, but sadly, many in the church
view God this way as well.
Many have shrunken God down to man's size.
They put God on man's level, like the
Baptist pastor I heard one day tell his
congregation.
I can't wait to get to heaven, and
the first thing I'm going to do when
I get there is walk up to Jesus
and grab his hand and shake it for
all he's done for me.
That's what the old boy said.
I guess that seminary-trained pastor never read
the passage in Revelation, where the apostle John
has an encounter with the risen Christ, and
he falls down as dead.
No, he's just going to walk up to
Jesus like he would a deacon in the
hallway of church and glad hand him.
We tend to put God on our level
today because we think God is tolerant towards
sin.
We think God won't punish sin, but Jesus
never taught a sin in religion.
Rather, he said, go and sin no more,
lest a worse thing happen to you.
The title of my message today, friends, is
Burning Your Idols, and we will be in
the book of 2 Chronicles, in chapter 29.
You can turn in your Bibles there now,
friends.
In chapter 29 of 2 Chronicles, we find
the religious reforms made by King Hezekiah and
the ensuing revival which followed among God's people.
We will begin in reading verse 5, which
states, Hear me, ye Levites, sanctify now yourselves,
and sanctify the house of the Lord God
of your fathers, and carry forth the filthiness
out of the holy place.
I will pause here, friends.
Here, in this striking passage of scripture, we
see King Hezekiah, as he gathered his religious
leaders together to instruct them to do two
things.
Number one, clean the temple of its idols,
and number two, clean the altar of their
hearts in repentance.
We get a sense of this in verses
15 through 16.
And they gathered their brethren, and sanctified themselves,
and came, according to the commandment of the
king, by the words of the Lord, to
cleanse the house of the Lord.
And the priests went into the inner part
of the house of the Lord to cleanse
it, and brought out all the uncleanness that
they found in the temple of the Lord
into the court of the house of the
Lord.
And the Levites took it to carry it
abroad into the brook Kidron.
I will stop there.
This is what the people of God did.
They searched the temple to find unclean idols,
and then brought them out, took them to
the brook Kidron, and burned them there.
They sanctified themselves, and God brought a mighty
revival under King Hezekiah, because he did that
which was right in the sight of the
Lord.
We need to do the same, to search
our hearts under the bright spotlight of the
Holy Spirit, to see if there is anything
grievous to God in our lives, and then
turn from it, and break from it, in
repentance.
We must hunt out our idols, and through
heartfelt repentance, forsake them entirely, take them down
to our brook Kidron, so to speak, to
our meeting place with God, and burn them
there.
Hezekiah did this willingly, but sometimes we are
so hardened in our sin that God has
to step in and take drastic measures to
get the job done His way, because we
are unwilling to part with our idols.
Sometimes you have to burn something out of
a man.
God had to burn idolatry out of the
Jews in the days of their captivity.
They never touched an idol again after that.
There is a story about the monkey and
the nut.
It seems the best way to catch a
monkey in the jungle is to set a
heavy glass jar on the ground that is
wide at the bottom and narrow at the
top, like a big glass jug.
In that jar you drop a nut, not
just any nut, but a nut that monkeys
like to eat.
Trappers do this all the time.
They set the trap with that nut and
the jug, and along comes a monkey.
He will see and smell that nut and
go to investigating, and then his desire will
make him squeeze his paw into the top
of that jar and grab the nut in
his palm, but he can't extricate himself from
the jar because he won't let go of
the nut, and the only way to get
his paw free again is to let go
of the nut and pull himself free, but
he gets caught by the trappers as he
cannot drag around that heavy jug around the
jungle, and he won't let go of that
nut.
Some of us are like that monkey.
Because of our self-will and self-rule
in rebellion and sin, God will have to
lock us up in such a prison of
affliction that the only way we're going to
squeeze out of there is to let go
of the nut, so to speak, but we
won't do it.
We are more stubborn than that monkey.
We want to hang on to our idols,
even if it means great hardship and trial.
God cannot tolerate sin and rebellion in a
follower of his.
You will either burn your idols willingly, like
King Hezekiah did, or God will have to
burn them out of you.
If you're a child of God, friend, he
will employ the means necessary to make you
break with your idols.
You will either burn them willingly, or he
will have to take drastic measures to burn
them out of you.
He will get the job done one way
or another.
You can't fight against God and win.
You will be broken on both sides, and
get rid of those idols, or there will
be hell to pay.