Allen Jackson - Things Forgotten and Remembered - Part 1
The topic for this session is "Things Forgotten and Remembered" and it's something that's been bouncing around in my heart for a bit, and I felt like it was valuable enough to share in a broader way. There are things that are forgotten. Once upon a time, it seems to me, I earned a degree in history and, at the time, it wasn't as clear to me the value that it would have, but as the years have passed and my perspective has changed, I consider it of enormous significance to understand some of the things that have preceded us.
And I can tell you this that in the context of our faith, in the history of the church and the larger history of our faith, that there are practices and beliefs and awarenesses that are lost between generations. What you understand to be fundamental tenets of your faith and the practice of your faith, if not carefully cultivated and extended to those who follow you, are very likely to be lost. I could walk you through many chapters of history. When the church has failed in significant ways, civilizations that have been affected in a positive way by a healthy church have been diminished and regressed as a result of the failure of the church. The failure of the church brings greater suffering to humanity.
Conversely, a strong church, a healthy church, a vibrant church, brings greater hope and vitality in life and freedom and liberty. Those things do not come from politicians, they come from God. We have apologized for too long. So those fundamental tenets of our faith have to be carefully handed down from one generation to the next. And the reality of that is those fundamental things are more caught than they are taught. It's not so much about a lecture or a seminar or a class as it is them being modeled before us by the people who are authority figures in our lives.
It's why it's so important that our faith is a part of our educational systems because our teachers and our professors and our faculty members and our coaches and our school administrators and all of those people who are persons of influence in our lives during those formative years are sharing with us and modeling for us values and worldviews. And if we separate our faith from those environments, our children are growing up with godless influences. It's why schools and universities and places that present themselves as Christian should not do it in a way as of a masquerade: they shouldn't present the Christian faith in some sort of equal platform with other faiths. It's confusing to the students they're teaching.
Our behavior is necessary to support our beliefs if we're to impact the generations who follow us. It's more than theory, it's more than theology. It's how we choose to live. And because we have struggled with this now for some decades, we are experiencing the outcome of a lost faith. I don't believe that is being negative. I don't believe it's a pessimistic view. I think something of an honest analysis of where we find ourselves in the cultural equation and balance can acknowledge when we no longer have a biblical definition of marriage as the law of the land, our faith has lost influence because, for many decades, for centuries, a biblical view of marriage was the law of our land.
Biblical views regarding sexuality, the sanctity of life, equality of one another, have been supplanted by ideas from a worldview very separate from the one that comes from the Judeo-Christian heritage. The importance of truth in our homes, in business, in the public square, in academia, has all but been lost. The value of faith in training our children has been so minimized that we looked the other way when it was removed from the public square in almost all of the places. You don't have to look any further than the way we treat those times when once upon a time we worshiped on Wednesday evening or a Sunday. Those were not days when our public schools and our public institutions programmed against church.
We encouraged families to acknowledge those times for public worship and even in the parts of our nation that we consider to be the Bible Belt where faith holds the greatest influence, at least in theory, those things have been almost completely lost. I believe they have to be reasserted. I believe we have to look at those days and those times and say they're not available for public programming. That does not make me popular, but I believe it. Things forgotten. I brought you some biblical examples. It's not just a rant about current culture. This has been a problem for the people of faith through all the generations. It's the reason there's this constant challenge between wandering from the path and forfeiting freedom and liberty and plunging into seasons of great suffering and anguish. And then from time to time, God intervenes.
People say to me quite frequently that the pendulum always swings the other way. That's bad history. It's bad theology. The pendulum does not always swing the other way. The Roman Empire collapsed largely because of the collapse of the Christian faith. The pendulum did not swing the other way. The dark ages emerged. I can walk you through multiple places. When Jesus stood on the Mount of Olives, looking at the city of Jerusalem, he didn't say, "It'll be okay. Wait a decade, the pendulum will swing the other way". He broke into tears and began to weep mournfully over the city of Jerusalem. He said, "If you would only recognize what would bring you peace, but your failure to do so means judgment is coming. They will dash the heads of the babies in this city against the stones".
The pendulum does not always swing the other way, but it is true that people of faith have difficulty holding course. We're just completing the historical books in our biblical reading. You don't need any more reminder than that. The covenant people of God in Judah and Israel, the two nations after the civil war, have quite a lack of godly leadership and they suffer because of it. In 2 Kings 22 and verse 8, Josiah is the king. He comes to the throne as a young man. And while he's still a young man, he funds the remodeling of the temple. The temple had fallen into such disrepair that the doors didn't work, that there were prostitutes, male and female, as a part of the temple structure and worship.
Imagine drifting so far from a biblical perspective on how to worship God, that the orchestration of faith has grown to include prostitution, which means there's a whole priestly class that are embracing that. There's a whole structure who are benefiting from that, who are profiting from that. And this young person comes to the throne and, as he begins to mature, he says the temple has to be brought into repair. One of the ways we can understand the value we attach to our faith is how we invest in those places where we worship. I'm not raising money for buildings today. I'm not above that, but I'm not doing that today. But I'm always been grateful to the group of people who worship here that you've been willing for the places where we worship and the way those spaces are maintained to be an expression of the honor and the dignity that we intend to direct towards our Lord.
But when he orders the remodeling of the temple, they find hidden in the wall, the book of the law, a scroll with the law of Moses in it. Not only have they lost it, they have forgotten that it existed. So how do you get to a place where there are temple prostitutes as a part of the order of worship, daily sacrifices and prostitution. Passover and prostitution. The day of atonement and idol worship all rolled into one. How do you arrive at such a place? Because you've lost the perspective that the Word of God brings to us. It's worth asking to what extent does the Word of God inform our cultural decisions amongst those of us who worship?
Well, they find the book. It's in 2 Kings 22:8: "Hilkiah the high priest said to the secretary, 'I've found the Book of the Law in the temple of the Lord.'" "We've found the Book of the Law". How far off the path do you have to be, to forget you had a Bible? More than a little bit. And these are the covenant people of God. But it's not a one-time episode. In Ezra chapter 9, Ezra is a priest and after the exile, most of you know the general history, it was 721 BC when the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel. The southern kingdom, Judah, survived for about another 150 years, but the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem. And for several decades, kind of the elite layer of Jewish society were exiles in Babylon. They were slaves in Babylon.
Babylon fell to Persia and there was a Persian king who allowed the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple. You know the story of Nehemiah, Esther. Well, Ezra is the priest who was engaged in restoring worship for the exiles when they return. He has a platform built in Jerusalem from which he reads the Book of the Law. We didn't have printing presses yet. The people didn't have their own copies. They couldn't go online and read it on their phones. Cell service was not great when the exiles returned to Jerusalem. So Ezra has a platform built, but when he comes back, he finds that the people living there are ignoring the law.
Now they still have the odors of Babylon about them. They're more familiar with Babylonian holidays than they are with the holidays they used to celebrate in Jerusalem. They're more familiar with the Babylonian menu than they are the menu that they had had in Jerusalem. And they understand that they've been slaves in a foreign land because they disobeyed the principles of God. It's a very fresh memory to them. And Ezra returns to find the people living in disobedience. They have forgotten. And that's what's in your notes. It's Ezra 9:1: "After these things had been done, the leaders came to me and said, 'The people of Israel, including the priests and the Levites, have not kept themselves separate from the neighboring peoples with their detestable practices.'"
Please understand, that is very plain English. He said not only the people but the priests. The Levites are the ones entrusting with leading public worship. In the New Testament, the Levites were the ones that were in control of the temple. They're the ones with the care and responsibility of the tabernacle. The priest and the Levites have not kept themselves from the detestable practices of the pagan nations. And this is Ezra's response: "When I heard this, I tore my tunic and my cloak, and I pulled hair from my head and my beard, and I sat down appalled. Then everyone who trembled at the words of the God of Israel gathered around me because of this unfaithfulness of the exiles. And I sat there appalled until the evening sacrifice".
Why is he appalled? Why such a significant reaction? Because he's lived in Babylon and he knows why they were there. And he said, "If we continue this behavior, we will stay there". See, we have almost totally lost the sense of a just God. We have lived for so long marinating in this idea of a God of infinite mercy and infinite grace that the idea that God would intervene with judgment seems something that would only happen to someone else. We're so intimately aware of our own personal conversion and our personal salvation and so smug within that, that we don't imagine that God would do anything but wink at our indiscretions.
I would remind you that the people involved in the exile, the people from whom the city of Jerusalem was torn from their grasp and their children slaughtered, were the covenant people of God. They offered sacrifices daily. They celebrated the right holidays. They kept Kosher, they observed Sabbath. They read Torah in the synagogue. But they were guilty of compromise to a degree. And then God said, "I can't allow it because you're destroying the generations who follow you".
You see, one of the great assignments of our lives is to live our faith in such a way that the generations who follow us can inherit not only the idea of our faith, but the practice of our faith. Things forgotten. Lest you think it's only an Old Testament issue, in Galatians chapter 1 and verse 6, Paul has been instrumental in seeing the church in Galatia, Galatia is a region, be formed and come into existence and he's been gone from them from a matter of months. And he says, "I'm astonished that you're so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel". He goes on to say, "If anybody presents to you a gospel other than the one I did, may they be cursed".
But he's writing to a church, to a group of people who began at the foot of the cross, being freed from their sins through the shed blood of Jesus, and they're turning from the essential nature of that to what Paul calls another gospel, a false gospel. He tells Timothy, he warns the churches when he left the Ephesian believers and the elders in Ephesus, he said, "I know that when I leave, there will be false messengers come amongst you like ravenous wolves". You understand, I hope, that there are many false gospels prevalent today. They're a part of formal religious worship and formal religious structures. They have fancy language and fancy names and schools of thought and theological training, seminary support.
We call them many things. Liberation theology. It's a Marxist theology. It's replaced the essence of the cross and the need for the redemptive work of Jesus with a construct around social economic reform. We have a social gospel that turns the church not into an instrument of transformation but into an instrument of civic good. We've become very little different from the civic clubs. I'm grateful for what they do and the good they do in our communities, but they're not proponents for transformation. They're not advocates for good and evil, right and wrong, a biblical worldview or a biblical perspective. We have a happy gospel that predominates, that we can't imagine a God who would want anything more than us to be happy.
And the Bible tells us that God's desire is that we would be holy. I'm not opposed to happiness, but I will not worship at the altar of happiness. Most of the best things in life are not on the other side of happy. They're on the other side of difficult. C.S. Lewis wrote a bit about this, things forgotten. Some of you have read the Narnia tales. The first book in that series is "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," and the land of Narnia has fallen under a curse. They're stuck in an eternal state of winter. No growth, very little life. They're just sustaining. They've lost sight of a path towards freedom. They've lost the imagination even of what that looks like. It requires the sovereign intervention of God for them to resume that, for them to refine that.
Well, we're in a place I would submit to you where it seems like something has captivated us. A generation or two before us, whether that would be our parents or our grandparents, I don't believe if you could awaken them from the place they are, that they would even recognize the circumstances in which we're living. They wouldn't believe it if they heard it. And we have watched it. It's so awkward to acknowledge that on our watch, we find ourselves in this place, but there's no way out of this until we acknowledge that it has happened on our watch.
And I wanna remind you of an aspect of our faith that I think has been all but lost, not in words, but in practice. I wanna take the minutes we have left and I have a few, to talk about worship, praise, and thanksgiving. And technically, they're different. But for the sake of this presentation, I'm gonna treat worship as the center of that. We'll come back another time and parse them a bit more carefully. But I wanna suggest to you that worship is not random, that worship is not self-described, that you and I don't have the privilege of saying, "This is how I worship, and you can worship how you wanna worship, and you can worship however you choose".
See, we've let so much liberty and so much personal preference and so much individuality find its way into our concept of God that we think we can define how we approach God. That's not an idea derived from scripture. Worship should not be considered casual or about personal preference. We've imagined that worship may be conducted almost randomly. I would submit to you that it's a very intentional thing, that it's as intentional as a surgical procedure. That worship should be as intentional as preparing a meal. And I don't mean by that, that that's insignificant, but I think we all understand the meal wouldn't be particular appetizing if you just threw anything you wanted to in the pot.
Worship should be as intentional as the application of makeup. I don't have a lot of personal experience with this, but I'm an observer, and it seems to me to be very intentional. And it can be learned, it can be routinized. I have observed, it can actually be applied while driving a car, and I'm gonna suggest before we're done that you can worship the Lord while you drive your car, but it's not random or accidental. It's very purposeful. Worship provides a perspective for our lives and our existence. It establishes priority and the absence of worship tends to create the idea and to give momentum to the idea that I am the measure of all things, that what I want and what I think and what I feel should predominate.
Worship disrupts that I-centric equation and builds into my daily practice and thought the concept that there is something greater than me, and I will yield to that. Genesis chapter 4, which is very near the beginning of the book. And we have said many times that, as the book of Genesis opens, we're introduced to the fundamental big rock ideas of scripture. And one of them has to do with worship. It's a familiar story, I suspect, to many of us. It's the story of Cain and Abel. Two brothers, one's a farmer, one's a shepherd, and they bring their offerings to God. We can read it.
"Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel brought fat portions from some of the firstborn of the flock. The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was angry, and his face was downcast. And the Lord said to Cain, 'Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.'"
Now, this challenge is some very contemporary ideas regarding worship. You can't just worship how you choose. God had presented to Cain and to Abel his pattern for appropriate worship. The Bible teaches us without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin. So it's very early in the narrative, we're being directed towards animal sacrifice.
Cain ignores God's perspective and he brings the fruit of his labor in the way he wants to bring it. He could have easily secured a lamb. I don't think he was a vegetarian. He had a brother that was in the sheepherding business, but he chose to bring the offering he preferred, to ignore the counsel God had given him. And when it wasn't pleasing to the Lord, he was mad at God. Again, I think it's very important to note that we don't dictate the terms of worship, that God tells us how we approach him. It's important to always remember, there is an omnipotent, an all-powerful, an omniscient, all-knowing Almighty God.
Father, I thank you that you're the head of the church, that you called it into existence, and you put us in this unique season of history. Now give us the wisdom to respond with both the love of Christ and the boldness of your truth. I thank you for it, in Jesus's name, amen.