After a prayer we'll sing that doxology, Ascribe
Greatness to Our God the Rock.
His work is perfect and all His works,
His ways are just, that's 18 in Songs
of Fellowship.
But first a prayer.
Father we do just bring to you this
service today.
We thank you for who you are and
for what you've done for us and the
possibilities of the Lord's day as God comes
amongst His children and speaks through His word
and later in the day enables us to
remember the death of our Lord Jesus.
Now whoever we are and whatever's brought us
into this lovely sanctuary this morning, we pray
that you will meet with us.
We commit ourselves to you, the ministry of
today amongst boys and girls and young people,
the fellowship over at Maybridge and all the
communities of Christian people in this town.
Will you bless and get honor and glory
to your name for Jesus' sake, Amen.
Now Ascribe Greatness.
Son of God,
not just the cross, also His mighty resurrection.
Likewise you can make, you can never make
too much of that.
Go then to 2 Chronicles in chapter 14.
We'll not read all these three chapters.
I'll give you a synopsis in terms of
the readings and try and fill in, in
my attempt to address.
Verse 2, chapter 14, 2 Chronicles.
Asa did what was good and right in
the eyes of the Lord his God.
He removed the foreign altars and the high
places, smashed the sacred stones and cut down
the Asherah poles.
He commanded Judah to seek the Lord, the
God of their fathers and to obey his
laws and commands.
He removed the high places and incense altars
in every town in Judah and the kingdom
was at peace under him.
He built up the fortified cities of Judah
since the land was at peace.
No one was at war with him during
those years, for the Lord gave him rest.
Let us build up these towns, he said
to Judah, and put walls round them with
towers, gates and bars.
The land is still ours because we have
sought the Lord our God.
We sought him and he has given us
rest on every side, so they built and
prospered.
Verse 9, Zerah the Cushite marched out against
them with a vast army and three hundred
chariots and came as far as Marisha.
Asa went out to meet him and they
took up battle positions in the valley of
Zephathah near Marisha.
Then Asa called to the Lord his God
and said, you've got the NIV, read this
with me.
Lord, there is no one like you to
help the powerless against the mighty.
Help us, O Lord our God, for we
rely on you and in your name we
have come against this vast army.
O Lord, you are our God.
Do not let man prevail against you.
Now we'll go on with me reading into
the fifteenth chapter.
The Spirit of God came upon Azariah, son
of Obed.
He went out to meet Asa and said
to him, listen to me, Asa and all,
Judah and Benjamin, the Lord is with you.
When you are with him, if you seek
him, he will be found by you, but
if you forsake him, he will forsake you.
For a long time Israel was without the
true God, without a priest to teach and
without the law, but in their distress they
turned to the Lord, the God of Israel,
and sought him, and he was found by
them.
In those days it was not safe to
travel about, for all the inhabitants of the
lands were in great turmoil.
One nation was being crushed by another and
one city by another, because God was troubling
them with every kind of distress.
But as for you, be strong and do
not give up, for your work will be
rewarded.
When Asa heard these words and the prophecy
of Azariah, son of Obed the prophet, he
took courage.
Verse 7 of chapter 16, another prophet features
on the scene.
Hanani, the seer, came to Asa, king of
Judah, and said to him, Because you relied
on the king of Aram and not on
the Lord your God, the army of the
king of Aram has escaped from your hand.
Were not the Cushites and Libyans a mighty
army with great numbers of chariots and horsemen?
Yet when you relied on the Lord, he
delivered them into your hand.
For the eyes of the Lord reign throughout
the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are
fully committed to him.
You have done a foolish thing, and from
now on you will be at war.
Asa was angry with the seer because of
this.
He was so enraged that he put him
in prison.
At the same time, Asa brutally oppressed some
of the people.
The events of Asa's reign from beginning to
end are written in the book of the
kings of Judah and Israel.
In the thirty-ninth year of his reign,
Asa was afflicted with a disease in his
feet.
Though his disease was severe even in his
illness, he did not seek help from the
Lord but only from the physicians.
Then in the forty-first year of his
reign, Asa died and rested with his fathers.
I want to address you in this series
from 2 Chronicles on when success turns to
failure.
I'm using the overhead projector because that will
help us at least this morning with such
a large span of Scripture to just home
in on the main points.
There are three or four snapshots that you
get of Asa, this king of Judah, in
these three chapters.
You get the snapshot when he's right at
the beginning of his reign, verse 2 of
the fourteenth chapter.
Asa did what was good and right in
the eyes of the Lord his God.
You get another snapshot in his fifteenth year
when we read in the fifteenth chapter that
Asa was determined to do those things which
were pleasing to the Lord.
Look at the fifteenth verse of the fifteenth
chapter.
They sought God eagerly and he was found
by them, so the Lord gave them rest
on every side, a comment that refers to
the king and to the benefits of his
reign.
But then in the thirty-ninth year of
his reign you discover things start to go
somewhat off course, and Asa does not respond
to what he knows to be the will
of the Lord.
Thus the prophet Hanani in the seventh verse
and onwards chastises him, and in the ninth
verse says, The eyes of the Lord range
throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts
are fully committed to Him.
You have done a foolish thing.
And the last snapshot, in the forty-first
year of his reign, we read in the
thirteenth verse, Asa died and rested with his
fathers, and just prior to that we're told
that though he was ill and his disease
was severe, verse twelve, he did not seek
help from the Lord.
It's not a word that's in the English
dictionary because it's slang, but it's a good
word.
It's the word stickability, and it's a word
that's basic, I think, to the teachings of
the Old Testament and the New Testament in
terms of what God wants from you and
from me, my dear friends.
We're looking into the book of Chronicles not
because we've got a particular fascination for Old
Testament history, but simply because God has ordained
that records of men's lives be encapsuled in
these Scriptures so that you can learn from
their strengths and also from their weaknesses.
Now our Lord Jesus, when He was on
earth, talking about ideal discipleship, makes reference to
the man who puts his hand to the
plow and doesn't look back.
Such a man is fit for the kingdom
of heaven.
He gets the congratulations of the Savior.
He also says, He who endures to the
end shall be saved.
And all that has a lot to do
with stickability.
So, here's a rating, one to ten.
One, no stickability at all.
I'm not talking about perspiration.
There's a lot of stickability in the congregation
at this point in that area.
Ten, high stickability.
Where do you rate yourself?
Where are you?
Have you been at point ten and slipped
back to point five?
Are you at point five and possibly slipping
back to zero?
Well, that's the sort of challenge from the
Word of God for you this morning as
we discuss this business about turning success into
failure.
Generally we think people learn from their failures
and move to success, but in this instance
it was the reverse order, unfortunately.
Now from the second verse, or if you
please, from the first verse down to the
eighth verse of the fourteenth chapter, you find
that Ezra exercises, when he becomes king of
Judah, a surprising prudence.
Prudence means discretion.
Surprising, well, if you check the twenty-first
verse of the thirteenth chapter, you'll discover that
his granddad did not exactly help him.
I mean, he had fourteen wives, and twenty
-two sons, and sixteen daughters.
And if you drop down the chapters to
the fifteenth chapter, you'll discover that his grandmother,
Nacah, she also wasn't very helpful to the
young Esar as he developed, as he grew
up, because she had made some obnoxious idol,
she'd placed it in the temple area, and
this obscene thing became the focal point of
worship.
So when I tell you that when Esar
became king he exercised a surprising prudence, that's
what I have in mind.
He like many of us was perhaps enthused
when he was called into the service of
God, and a clean sweep occurs, as in
the fifth verse, he removes the high, he
removes the high places and incense altars in
every town of Judah.
You see, there there was a great deal
of idolatry, and idolatry is something that's offensive
in the eyes of God.
And idolatry didn't start with the Old Testament
or the New Testament, it's still with us
today.
There are people who make their bank balance
their idol, their television their idol.
Anything that takes priority over against God is
in effect your idol.
But Esar sweeps these things on one side,
and he is given ten years rest.
Look at the sixth verse, as he becomes
the king of Judah, the Lord gave him
rest because of his prudence.
I think that one of the missing factors
in the lives of many people today is
entering into the rest of God.
That doesn't mean having a snooze on a
Sunday, even when somebody is preaching.
What it means is being peaceful in your
heart, being able to cope, as some of
those dear Russian people I was with, with
Rowena last Sunday in a church almost packed
with basically older people, being able to rest,
though many of them had run seventy years
on this earth and had known the horrors
of two world wars and the problems of
communist philosophy being worked through in their society.
And yet you discover that they had entered
into the rest that God grants.
Now when you feel restful, when you feel
peaceful, that's a time to stock up on
your spiritual reserves as politically Asa used the
opportunity to make himself stronger militarily.
Verse 8, Asa had an army of 300
,000 men from Judah equipped with large shields.
He decided that he would use these ten
years of tranquility to make the land as
firm and as strong as it could be.
The land is ours, he says, verse 8,
because we have sought the Lord our God.
Verse 7 rather, We sought him and he
has given us rest on every side, so
they built and prospered.
One of the things I thank God for
was that when I was a kid my
parents sent me to Sunday school and in
our Sunday school you had to learn the
good old authorized version of the Bible.
Not all of it by heart, but chunks
of it.
And I've never forgotten those earlier days and
the memory that I still have of the
authorized version as built into my mind and
hopefully worked through in degree in my personality
were the truths of Scripture, build and prosper
during days of calm and tranquility.
That's what Asa will teach us in terms
of our Christian discipleship.
He exercises a surprising prudence.
But then I argue he demonstrates a recurring
principle.
Now what is that?
Well, when things have been going quiet for
a while, God in His grace, even though
you perhaps don't think it is grace at
that point, allows things to come that completely
ruffle the surface, that cause the sea that
was at calm, that was becalmed, to become
tempestuous.
Now you'll remember that with the disciples of
our Lord.
On occasions they had this particular problem to
cope with.
What was He training them for?
Well, the day when He would be removed
from them.
When they wouldn't have the sort of rest
and calmness of knowing the physical presence of
Jesus and things got tough.
Well, our Lord teaches them on two or
three occasions during His public ministry that as
the sea gets, and the waves get high
and the winds come in strong, so the
man who is called to belong to Him
is still to cope and to be able
to persevere during difficult days because of those
blessings that He has harnessed and taken into
the fiber of His personality during the days
of calm and ease and quietness.
Now, for Asa the problem was a man
who boasted with the name of Zerah, Zerah
the Cushite or Ethiopian, verse 9.
He was the bully of the Middle East.
In fact, here is, if you like, a
sort of anticipation, or to put it another
way, what you've had during these past few
days with Kuwait and Iraq is a replay
of this.
Zerah comes into the land of Judah and
he's got a vast army.
If you check the NIV's footnote at the
bottom, you will see that the army actually
numbered one million.
Whether that's a literal number, I think perhaps
not.
I think it's perhaps hyperbole.
In other words, it's used symbolically to describe
that it was a mammoth number of people
that Zerah brings into the land of Judah
and threatens Asa the king.
And the bottom line is this, how will
he cope?
How do you cope when difficulty comes your
way?
When like Pastor Lamb in Canton, you don't
know whether the next day will bring news
that you are going to be executed or
not.
Not many of us are tested like that,
but we are tested, aren't we?
Sometimes it may be defection in our family
circles.
Perhaps our dearest and most loved leaves us
or plays fast and loose with us.
Perhaps the whole of our world seems to
collapse in terms of materialism and the loss
of goods and jobs and so forth.
Many of you have known that.
Now here is the challenge.
How do you cope in that situation?
Well, how does Asa cope?
Now it's interesting that Asa has good theology.
Look at verse 10.
He doesn't just sit in a rocking chair
and allow Zerah to come in.
He knows the nature of the problem, but
he goes out to meet him.
And I like this next expression, they, the
king and the people, took up battle positions.
But realizing the enormity of the problem, verse
11, Asa comes towards the Lord and he
cries and here is a little bit of
intercession squeezed into the narrative, which is actually
one of the finest prayers in the whole
of the Old Testament.
Thank you brothers who helped us in prayer
earlier on.
Prayer can be brief and sometimes it can
be prolonged.
Well here is brevity if you please.
Lord, there's no one like you to help
the powerless against the mighty.
Help us, O Lord, our God, for we
rely on you, and in your name we
have come against this vast army.
O Lord, you are our God.
Do not let man prevail against you.
This king has sized up a political problem
in terms of a theological dimension.
You say, there you go again, using your
big words.
What do you mean?
Seventy years ago, the British Museum, Karl Marx
is pushing his pen.
He gives the world das Kapital.
Lenin is influenced by what he has to
say.
Vladimir Ulyanov, the Russian name of Lenin, talks
about religion being the opium of the people,
looks for a day when religion will be
taken from the surface of the world, and
he seems to harness all power.
And the microscopic church in Russia has to
say, O Lord, you are our God.
Do not let this man prevail against you.
You see, the problem is not just political.
Neither is the one with Kuwait and Iraq
and the whole of the Middle East theater.
Don't you understand?
Are you so simplistic as Christian people that
you've got no conception of this great sovereign
God working out His plan and purposes?
You'll have the nations as the dust in
the balance.
He will have these proud men as grasshoppers
before Him, says the prophet Isaiah.
And here is this King Esau demonstrating this
recurring principle in his life that when God
brings testing, it enables a man who has
become mature to rise to the heights of
his maturity and to relate his problem to
the sovereignty of God.
Work through your Christianity, my friends.
You ask why on a hot Sunday we
look into the Word of God?
Because here is basic wisdom without which you
will be impoverished in your life.
Here are principles bound up for those who
have zeal in unpackaging them that will bless
the ones who make these discoveries through time
and on into eternity.
Esau exercises a surprising prudence.
He demonstrates a recurring principle.
God was involved in this problem, in this
political difficulty.
God did come to the aid, and this
magnificent army of zero was routed by the
force of the living God.
But then Esau experiences, along with the rest
of the children of Judah, a sensational reversal.
You say, what do you mean?
Well, you've got to get the back cloth
of history before you can really come in
close to this point.
Drop into verse 3 of the 15th chapter.
In fact, I think we'll go on further
to verse 5, which discusses the economic conditions
of the world in these days.
If the Times or Independent or Guardian or
what have you, newspapers, have been about in
those days, this is the sort of comment
that they would be making.
In those days it was not safe to
travel about.
All the inhabitants of the lands were in
great turmoil.
One nation was being crushed by another, one
city by another.
The reason for this anarchy, this international disorder,
is again theological, because God was troubling them
with every kind of distress.
You see, that was the sort of situation
prior to Esau coming to the throne.
So if ever a man needed to be
informed of and commit himself to the belief
in the sovereignty of God, it is Esau.
What is the most desperate situation that can
ever hit a nation?
Well, it's not the stock market plummeting downwards.
It's not the freezing of oil supplies.
The most difficult situation for any nation to
deal with is when God goes silent.
Did you hear that?
Martin Luther, on an occasion when he was
very troubled, he said, be not silent before
me, O my God.
Send me swords, send me pestilence, send me
disease, but God be not silent to me.
When God is silent, the world is in
trouble.
Verse 3, chapter 15, for a long time,
Israel was without the true God, without a
priest to teach, without the law, without God,
without a preacher, without the Bible.
I argue that that is the most serious
condition that any nation can find itself under.
But the teaching is this, that when a
nation comes to the end of its own
resources and turns to the Lord, they discover
that God is prepared to turn to them.
It's what one theologian calls the mirror theology.
Here is a man turning to the Lord,
here is a people turning to the Lord,
and they discover as they look in the
mirror that that's always been the attitude of
God.
They seek out God and are found by
God.
The last part of verse 4, do you
know what, now some of you don't know
me at all, others of you do, and
I address my remarks basically to the latter,
because you have twenty years here at the
tab to judge me by.
If I was not the pastor of Worthing
Tab, but just was a resident in Worthing,
do you know as a Christian person what
I would look for?
It would be Sunday by Sunday to come
into a church, I'm not necessarily saying the
tabernacle, though I would choose the tab inasmuch
as I always delight to hear my colleague
Tim Saunders preach.
I would want a church where I was
constantly being reminded and sometimes disturbed by the
Word of God.
Let me illustrate my point.
A young couple that I married years ago,
I remember wrote to me, this is my
London days, they wrote to me when I
was down in Worthing telling me a little
bit as to what had happened in their
lives, and the girl went on to say,
we are being stretched under the ministry of,
and I named the pastor.
Now that's a good old-fashioned phrase, to
be stretched under the ministry.
You see I congratulate this young woman, she
was about twenty-five at the time of
writing to me.
She wanted herself and her husband constantly to
be brought face to face with the living
Word of the Lord.
You do need that my friend.
You do need to try and concentrate to
the Word of God being proclaimed and then
to modify your behavior as a result of
hearing that proclamation.
That's why you need to be consistent in
church attendance and listening to men who are
prepared to take the Word of God in
the Old Testament and in the New Testament
and blow the critics.
Say this is God's Word for the twentieth
century and it is so important that you
hear it as individuals and the nation hears
it as a whole.
Well you see here's the great reversal.
Israel for a long time had been without
the true God, without a priest to teach,
and without the law, but, verse 1, the
Spirit of God comes upon Azariah son of
Oded.
He goes and he talks to Asa.
And as a result of hearing the Word
of God, verse 8, the king takes courage
and the reforms that he has instigated he
now deepens so that his reformation begins to
affect the fabric of Israel society, of Judas
society, to the extent that even his grandmother,
or mother if you're reading it in the
authorized version, Maka, is castigated by her son
or grandson because of this obnoxious, obscene idol.
The Word of God comes and there is
a reversal in the whole life pattern of
Judah.
And that's what I would love to see,
wouldn't you, in this country?
Oh, I do hope you'll come out this
evening because I want to tell you of
a country the like of which I've never
been in before.
And God knows in His grace and with
your kind permission, I've traveled in many areas
of this world, but never, never come across
a land so ripe for the gospel.
Asa takes courage.
He repairs the altar that had broken down
in front of the portico of the Lord's
temple, verse 8.
He gets things right, not only in his
own life, but throughout the nation and in
his family life.
And that is so marvelous, and no wonder
that Asa is so acclaimed by God and
by Israel at that point in his ministry.
And we read in the nineteenth verse, there
was no more war until the thirty-fifth
year of Asa's reign.
Asa experiences a surprising prudence, demonstrates a recurring
principle, experiences a sensational reversal, and now, and
sadly, portrays a tragic decline.
Chapter 16 will tell you all about it.
I don't understand how men can preach the
gospel of God around the world and suddenly
in their old age defect.
It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.
Some of you remember Don Hattersley, the man
who most impressed John Macara when he first
came to this church.
If I remember John's testimony right, John said,
I want to be like that man.
Now, he was a man who maintained an
enthusiasm.
From one to ten, he hit ten and
stuck.
But there is a possibility, I speak tenderly
to all the people, there is a possibility
that at the end, because the devil has
special pressures for older people, that you can
retreat and drop back from the position that
you had known earlier in your life.
It was around the thirty-ninth year of
the reign of Asa that he got himself
into trouble.
And if you want to analyze his problem,
well, really it's quite absurd.
You see, from the first verse of the
sixteenth chapter, you've got spelled out the fact
that he has a difficulty similar to what
you discovered in the eighth verse of the
fourteenth chapter, namely a foreign army came into
Israel and he was afraid, into Judah and
he was afraid.
Now, the incredible thing was that the temptation
to be afraid earlier in life was much
greater because the numbers were far superior.
You see, this is like comparing a whale
to a small fish.
He's not been afraid of the major, then
why should he be afraid of the minor?
Now, some of you older friends will know
this, and as I say, I speak with
tenderness in my heart.
Sometimes as the years go by, the problem
that you could have coped with last decade
and got into proportion now seems to be
mountainous.
This is why we need to pray for
older friends as we beseech their intercessions on
our behalf.
And so Asa, he uses the ingenuity of
the years, but it's a secular ingenuity.
It's not something that has been given him
by the Lord.
He does a treaty with another king and
so on.
The historical details are really quite irrelevant.
The principle is this, that eclipsed in the
mind of the aging Asa is the God
who has been faithful yesteryear.
So what does God do?
Well, in His mercy He sends a prophet
to speak to him, verse seven.
And unfortunately, Asa becomes the first king of
Judah ever to incarcerate a prophet because he
didn't like what the prophet had to say.
The eyes of the Lord, verse nine, reigns
throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts
are fully committed to Him.
You have done a foolish thing, and from
now on you will be at war.
So what does Asa do?
He increases his foolishness.
He's angry with the seer.
He's enraged.
He puts him in prison.
Do away with the dreamer.
You get rid of the dream.
That was the folly of Jacob's brothers, of
Jacob's sons.
Here is Joseph.
Let's put him in prison.
We'll not bow down to him.
What he says of the Lord is untrue.
Silence him and you'll silence the revelation.
Isn't that absurd?
You cannot silence the Word of God.
You cannot chain the Word of God.
You couldn't do it in China.
You can't do it in Russia.
You can't do it in Israel or Judah.
So Asa is angry.
But God in His mercy, and I use
that word advisedly, He allows a sickness to
come to Asa.
God will sometimes chastise His children.
I have no truck with the theology that
says that God does not punish.
He does punish.
But He doesn't punish as though He's a
tyrant or a savage, wanting to inflict pain.
He causes difficulties to come into life often
in order to get His children back into
line.
So this Asa has diseased feet.
And instead of going to the God who
can heal every disease, He turns to physicians,
probably just quackery.
In those days, He did not seek help
from the Lord, but only from the physicians.
Then in the 41st year of His reign,
Asa died and rested with his fathers.
Success turning to failure.
But it's no, there is no reason why
it had to be like that, nor why
it has to be like that for you.
I preached an address which is a balance
on this one some two years ago at
the time.
Change but not decay.
And I brought to you Israel, Jacob, the
final moments of his life as he recovered
his spirituality.
And as he went out into the brightness
of God's tomorrow, as a man full of
faith.
Revelation 21 talks about the overcomers.
This is what God wants you and me
to be.
Those who will overcome.
How do you overcome?
How do you remain in faith?
By taking heed to the word of the
Lord.
By listening to the prophets and to the
preachers.
By coming before the Lord and making Him
the priority of your life.
By cleansing yourself continually of those idols which
would otherwise infest you.
I'm not saying that Asa wasn't saved.
I think he was.
But I think that he left an unhappy
testimony right at the end.
So let's learn from this negative example.
Seize onto what was good in the earlier
years of his life.
And for us and all the people especially,
may the last part of your life be
the best.
As one poet once said, speaking of old
age, all the sugar is at the bottom
of the cup.
Let's pray.
Loving Father, we thank you for your word
tucked away in the dusty corners, and for
this sterling truth for us to live by.
Bless everyone here, Lord.
Some folk have had a rough ride in
the last few months, maybe years.
Some, Lord, have perhaps felt guilty at times
where they've been in the tab because it's
been pointed out that you did a lot
in early years and middle years and now
they're letting go somewhere.
Lord, may the word not just come as
discipline, but as balm.
Because you show in your mirror theology that
when a man seeks for you, he discovers
that you've been seeking for him.
You're always waiting.
You're always the God of Asa, ever wanting
Asa to return, ever wanting us, however crippled
our feet, however diseased our hearts, to come
back to you.
We thank you that you're a gracious, compassionate
God, the Father of all mercies.
We, your humble servants, entreat you for your
forgiveness and ask that as for us, the
following days of our lives may be lived
in such a fashion that when eternity dawns,
we'll hardly notice the difference as we pass
out from this world into the immediate beautiful
presence of our Lord God.
Grant it and throughout eternity to you be
all honor, praise, and glory.
Amen.
Let's stand and sing the Lord's Prayer.