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Last week, we looked at a specific passage in the book of Jeremiah.

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We looked at Jeremiah chapter 23, and we thought about God’s Word, how God’s Word is like a fire, how it is like a hammer.

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We talked about how the Word of God is powerful, how the words on the page, when you read the words in your Bibles, it’s just as powerful.

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It has just as much authority as when God spoke at the very beginning, when he spoke: Let there be light, and there was light.

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The power of creation is literally in the pages in front of you.

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We applied that passage both to ourselves, to how the hammer of God’s Word smashes the rock of our stony hearts, how the fire of God’s Word enlivens us as Christians to live for him.

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That’s what we looked at last week.

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I told the story about that Peruvian pastor, Martin, who, when he was sitting in church with his New Testament, he would weep because he had no book of Jeremiah in his New Testament.

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And so I want to continue these same themes, in a way.

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I want us to think about the preciousness of God’s Word today some more.

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When we hear stories like the one I told about Martin weeping or any of those other testimonies I got in Peru, I talked to those pastors in Peru, we can hear stories like that and we can be moved emotionally.

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When we come to God’s Word, if we read it, we can be moved emotionally, but if it doesn’t change something in our lives, we haven’t allowed it to work.

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We want our lives to change.

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We want our lives to be better.

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We want God to move in our hearts, in our lives, so that we can be more like him.

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And so I want us to think about the preciousness of God’s Word today in a way that makes us change, that makes us improve, makes us more like Christ.

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Let me pray for us, and then I want to talk about the background of Jeremiah.

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Last week we talked about a specific passage in the book of Jeremiah, but I think what we need to do is think about the context, the world in which Jeremiah lived.

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Let me pray for us first, and then we’ll explore some of that.

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Father, we ask you this morning, as we come to you, we come to you humbly, recognizing the power of the word of God, the power of your words.

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Help us to treasure it.

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We want to treasure your word this morning and allow it to work in our lives and our hearts.

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We ask this in Jesus’ name.

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Amen.

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I don’t have a specific text this morning, so we might jump around a little bit.

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But first, before we look at any specific passages, I want to talk about the world in which Jeremiah lived.

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So we looked at that passage in Jeremiah 23, but if we don’t understand the world in which Jeremiah lived, I think we’re missing out on a lot.

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So the story of Jeremiah begins many years before Jeremiah was even born.

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So as you know, the kingdom of Israel split.

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So after David and Solomon, the kingdom of Israel splits in two.

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You have Jeroboam and you have Rehoboam.

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And Jeroboam forms that northern kingdom.

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And what he does is he institutes idolatrous worship practices.

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He builds golden calves.

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He sets up an altar to worship God, but not in the way that God has prescribed.

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I don’t know how you can set up golden calves to help you with your worship if you know anything about the Bible or the Exodus or any of your own history, but that’s what he did.

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No doubt he thought that that represented God in some way.

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Maybe they said, well, we’re not worshipping these calves.

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They’re helping us worship the true God.

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But it was not the way that God had instituted his worship.

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God has prescribed his people to worship him in a specific way.

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And what Jeroboam did was idolatrous.

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And what the Bible says is that he leads that entire nation into evil, into idolatry for the entire time that that northern kingdom existed.

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The kingdom is wiped out because of the evil instituted at the very beginning.

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Jeroboam does this.

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So the kingdom splits.

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It’s close to 300 years.

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It’s 200 and some years before Jeremiah.

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So we’re celebrating our 250th year as a country, as the United States of America.

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And just think about on everything that has happened in this country.

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You have to take classes in U.S. history in order to really understand the intricacies of everything that has happened.

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And you read Wikipedia and you’ll be surprised at some of the things that’s happened in this country, or Grokipedia or whatever you’re reading for your information online.

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But think about that.

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Between Jeroboam at the beginning and Rehoboam in the southern kingdom, more than 250 years takes place.

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That’s the entirety of the United States.

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And so a lot of things has happened.

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One of the things that happens at the very beginning, when Jeroboam sets up his golden calves and his altar and everything, a prophet comes.

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We don’t know the prophet’s name.

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It just says that he’s a man of God.

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And he comes and he pronounces judgment on the worship that Jeroboam sets up, this idolatrous worship.

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He pronounces judgment on the worship, on the nation.

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He pronounces judgment on the altar.

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Maybe we’ll read that passage a little bit later.

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But that’s one of the things that happens at the very beginning.

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About 240 years after that, well, in both kingdoms, the northern kingdom of Israel has no good kings.

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There are no good kings in Israel.

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In the southern kingdom of Judah, there’s seven or eight, depending on how you count goodness.

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Usually you talk about eight good kings in Judah.

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But there are more than 150 years of evil kings in the southern kingdom of Judah.

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And one of the most evil kings was Manasseh.

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This is around 240–250 years after Jeroboam.

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So, really close, getting pretty close to when Jeremiah was alive.

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He’s not alive quite yet.

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So you have this evil king, Manasseh.

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He’s probably the most evil king in the kingdom of Judah over this entire time period.

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His reign was filled with idolatrous, even satanic worship practices.

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The worship practices, the things that he did, were so abhorrent to God that God himself described the things that Manasseh did and the things that he instituted, the things that he led the nation into, as worse than anything that the Canaanite nations did in which they were judged for.

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If you remember in Joshua, Joshua comes in, these Canaanite nations were wiped out.

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They were judged by God through Joshua because of the evil in the land.

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They were doing things abhorrent to God, and they were judged for it.

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And what God says is what Manasseh was doing was worse than that.

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It was worse than anything that the pagan nations were doing.

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And you can read about that in 2 Kings 21.

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If you want to open to 2 Kings 21, we’ll look at 21, 22, and 23 today, just very briefly.

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It’s a lot of text, so we won’t read all of it.

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But if you look at 2 Kings chapter 21, it says: He did evil in the sight of the Lord according to the abominations of the nations which the Lord dispossessed before the sons of Israel.

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He’s doing all of the things worse than what the pagan nations were doing.

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He rebuilt the high places which Hezekiah his father had destroyed.

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He erected altars for Baal and made an Asherah, as Ahab king of Israel had done, and worshipped all the hosts of heaven and served them.

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He built altars in the house of the Lord, of which the Lord had said, “In Jerusalem I will put my name.”

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For he built altars for all the hosts of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord.

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He made his son pass through the fire.

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He sacrificed his own son, child sacrifice.

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He practiced witchcraft, he used divination, he dealt with mediums and spiritists, he did much evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger.

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And one of the evil things that he did, which had never been done before, in the temple of God, in which God had, think about the Holy of Holies, all of the things that God had set apart for himself.

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When Solomon dedicated the temple, the glory of the Lord hovered over the temple.

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I mean, you remember all of that.

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And what does Manasseh do?

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He takes an idol, an Asherah, which is a statue of a goddess.

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They would worship this goddess.

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They would call this goddess the Queen of Heaven.

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There’s a lot that you can read about that if you desire to.

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But what he does is he takes this idol, this idol of this goddess that they worshipped, that the nations worshipped, and he puts it in God’s house, the very temple that God had described as holy, that he had sanctified as holy unto himself.

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If you read on, it says that: The people did not listen.

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Manasseh seduced them to do evil more than the nations whom the Lord destroyed before the sons of Israel.

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So it’s not just Manasseh doing these things.

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He’s leading the entire nation into this evil.

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It’s not just Manasseh loving this evil.

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It’s the entire nation loving this kind of evil.

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And then later on it says: Moreover, Manasseh shed very much innocent blood until he had filled Jerusalem from one end to the other.

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And the idea there is filling it full of blood.

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And that’s one of the ways that ancient Jewish historians described this time period, that the streets were filled from one end of the other with blood.

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Every day he was killing people who loved the Lord.

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He hated God.

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And it doesn’t take a lot of speculation for what comes next to understand that one of the things that he was doing is destroying anything that had to do with God.

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One of the Jewish historians, you have to always take them with a grain of salt.

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It could be true, it could not be true.

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But one of the things that they said was the idol that he put in the temple had five faces on it.

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One face for each of the north, south, east, and west.

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And the fifth face he put facing upward in order to mock God, to mock the heavens.

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He hated God, and he killed the prophets.

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One of the Jewish historians described that one of the prophets that he killed was the prophet Isaiah.

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And the story was that he was put into a hollow log and sawn in two.

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And it very well could be true, because in the book of Hebrews, in Hebrews chapter 11, it talks about at least one of the prophets being sawn in two.

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So at this time, during Manasseh’s reign, he’s wiping out everything that has to do with God, everything that has to do with God’s Word.

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The scriptures were abandoned, the worship of God was abandoned, and the house of God was filled with evil, indescribable evil, and idols and worship of false gods.

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People loved evil and darkness rather than the light.

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And as far as anyone could tell, God’s Word was completely destroyed.

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When we talk about things like this from history, it’s hard for us to comprehend them, especially because they happened so long ago.

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When we think about history, read history in a history book, it’s hard to comprehend time.

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Because a moment in time like that, or even a hundred years, is in the same paragraph on the history book as a thousand years.

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It’s hard for us to comprehend that.

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So when we think about something like this, where the Word of God was lost, sometimes we need to think about maybe a modern example.

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One example that I could think of was a couple months ago, I went to the country of Timor-Leste.

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It’s one of those countries that, I think it’s the country that no one realizes is a country.

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Like, every single person that I’ve asked, if they knew what this country was, they didn’t know.

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The country of Timor-Leste, and it’s okay if you don’t know that that was a country because it hasn’t been a country for very long.

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It became its own country in 2002, gained independence from Indonesia.

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There was a lot of war, civil war, and bloodshed before then.

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But there are some indigenous people on the island of Timor-Leste down in the Indonesia peninsula, and they’ve been there for thousands of years.

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There’s a people group on that island called the Makasae people.

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They speak the Makasae language.

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And there is no Bible in the Makasae language.

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They don’t have the language.

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They don’t even have Christian language in their language.

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The ideas of faith and repentance and salvation, those concepts are completely foreign.

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If you think about that, think about their history.

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How long has it been since that people knew about God?

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How many thousands of years has it been since one of their ancestors heard about God and rejected God and went to do their own thing?

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So these people, they live up in the mountains in the east of the island.

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There’s about 120,000 Makasae people on that island.

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And on the island, there are several languages.

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One is Indonesian.

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One is a more common language on the island called Tetum.

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Most people, especially in the cities, speak one of those languages.

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So if you speak Indonesian or Tetum, you can communicate with most people.

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But that’s not true when you get up into the mountains.

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When you get up into the mountains with these indigenous people living in these villages, only about half of them speak one of those trade languages.

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Half of them only speak their tribal language.

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So of those 120,000 Makasae-speaking people, half of them, about 60,000, only speak their tribal language, Makasae.

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And there’s no Bible.

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There are some people who have never heard the Word of God in their own language, never heard the Word of God at all.

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So that’s a modern example of what I’m talking about, where, because of the sinfulness of one person, or a few people, thousands of people are swept away into evil and into a time where God’s Word is, or at least appears to be, completely lost.

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Manasseh, that evil king, was the longest reigning king in Judah.

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He reigned for over 50 years.

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I think it was 52, 55 years.

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I can’t remember.

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But a little bit more than 50 years he reigned.

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And after him, he had a son.

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After Manasseh died, his son Amon took his place.

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And Amon did all of the same evil that his father did.

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He worshipped idols, participated in evil practices.

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And he must have, we don’t know much about him, but he must have been just as evil, if not more so than his father, because he only reigned two years until some people assassinated him.

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After he was assassinated, after his death, his son becomes king.

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So you have Manasseh, the most evil king.

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You have his son Amon, who was just as evil as he was.

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And then his son, Josiah, becomes king.

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And you would think, okay, like grandfather, like father, like son.

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But Josiah was different.

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Josiah becomes king when he was eight years old.

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I don’t know what you were doing when you were eight years old.

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But Josiah becomes king, and as he grows up, he’s not like his father.

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He’s not like his grandfather.

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He loves the Lord.

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I don’t know how, in the world that he lived in, but he’s king and he loves the Lord.

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And he starts to put away some of the evil practices of his father and grandfather.

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God gave him some special grace in order to do that.

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From an early age, Josiah loved the Lord.

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And so, eight years into his reign, when he’s 16 years old, the Bible says he began to seek the Lord.

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And when he was 20, he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem, but starting in Jerusalem and in that surrounding area, he’s starting to purge some of the idolatrous practices that had plagued the nation.

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Let me turn to the next chapter in Kings.

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Let’s look at 2 Kings chapter 22.

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If you look at verse 1, that’s where we are.

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Josiah was eight years old when he became king.

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And then what he does is he wants to start repairing the damages to the temple.

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And so he sends people to do that.

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Look at verse 8.

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Then Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the scribe, “I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord.”

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Imagine that.

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So Manasseh has been killing the prophets.

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He’s been filling the streets with the blood of the priests and the prophets.

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That’s anyone who would declare God’s Word.

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What we know from verse 8 of this chapter is that he had been wiping out anything having to do with the Word of God.

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The Word of God was effectively lost.

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Nobody knew it.

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But this high priest, Hilkiah, finds a copy of the book of the law, which is the scriptures.

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He finds a copy of the Bible at that time, as it existed at that time.

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Now, you can do a little bit of speculation.

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Maybe Hilkiah, who was there in the temple, maybe he knew about it for all of these years and kept it secret, or kept a watch over it because he knew this is the only copy that exists.

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Maybe.

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It’s possible.

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But that’s just speculation.

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Or maybe they haven’t been in this temple for decades and they find one copy hidden somewhere.

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Not exactly sure how that came about, but it is important, and this person is important, Hilkiah the high priest.

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And so what happens next?

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Well, that copy of God’s Word comes back to the king.

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And look what happens in verse 11.

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When the king heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his clothes.

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And the king commanded Hilkiah the priest, Ahikam the son of Shaphan, Achbor the son of Micaiah, Shaphan the scribe, and Asaiah the king’s servant, saying, “Go inquire of the Lord for me and the people of all Judah concerning the words of this book that has been found, for great is the wrath of the Lord that burns against us, because our fathers have not listened to the words of this book, to do according to all that is written concerning us.”

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And so when Josiah is confronted with the Word of God, what does he do?

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He’s upset, he’s angry.

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He tears his clothes because he realizes that what he’s reading is the word of truth.

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It is God’s Word.

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I want you to turn to Jeremiah chapter 1, because right about this point we start getting to the introduction of Jeremiah.

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So the Word of God is found during the 18th year?

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Yeah.

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Verse 3 of 22: Now in the 18th year of King Josiah… So the book of the law is found in the 18th year.

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And then if you go look at Jeremiah, look at verse 1.

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The words of Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah, of the priests who were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin.

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So this person that finds the book of the law, the high priest, his name is Hilkiah.

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He’s the one who finds the book of God’s Word, presents it to the king, and one of his sons is Jeremiah.

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So that’s kind of why I’m speculating.

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Maybe Hilkiah had this book and read it and taught it to his sons and kept it safe from the evil kings.

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Maybe Jeremiah grew up reading the Word of God.

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All of that speculation, I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but it could be true.

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But the point is, God calls Jeremiah to be a prophet, to bring even more of his revelation to Judah and to Jerusalem and to the north as well.

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Look at this.

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In Jeremiah chapter 1: The words of Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah, of the priests who were in Anathoth… That was where Jeremiah lived.

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Anathoth was a parcel of land about three miles away from Jerusalem where the priests lived.

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Jeremiah was one of the priests.

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And then it says, when the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, it came during the days of Josiah, king of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign.

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He started prophesying a few years before they found the book of the law in the temple.

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It also came during the days of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, and then also Zedekiah, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, until the exile.

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Look at verse 4 and 5.

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Now the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I consecrated you.

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I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

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That’s a very beautiful passage.

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Imagine the Lord saying those words to you.

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Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.

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I had a plan for you before you were even a thought.

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Well, one of the interesting things is because God is God and he doesn’t change, if this is true of Jeremiah, it’s true of you as well.

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Now, I’m not saying that you’re going to be a prophet to the nations.

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That’s not what I’m saying.

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But look at God’s heart for Jeremiah.

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It is also his heart for all believers today.

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So before you were even formed in your mother’s womb, God knew you.

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It’s not just he knew about you.

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If you’re a believer, if you love the Lord, the Lord knew you.

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The word knew there, “before I formed you in the womb, I knew you,” it’s a very personal language.

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It’s more than just having knowledge of someone.

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It’s a relationship.

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As we read in the New Testament, we are called believer priests.

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And so you can take this passage and say, if you’re a Christian, if you are a believer, the Lord has a very special plan for you.

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He’s consecrated you.

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He has appointed you as a believer priest, which means you are holy to God.

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You are set apart for his use.

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So this is a very beautiful passage.

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Maybe sometime we’ll come back to it and explore it some more.

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But what happens next in the story of Josiah is that Josiah makes a covenant with God.

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And this is chapter 23 of 2 Kings.

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2 Kings 23: The king sent, and they gathered to him all the elders of Judah and of Jerusalem.

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The king went up to the house of the Lord and all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem with him, and the priests and the prophets and all the people, both small and great; and he read in their hearing all the words of the book of the covenant which was found in the house of the Lord.

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The king stood by the pillar and made a covenant before the Lord, to walk after the Lord, to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with all his heart and all his soul, to carry out the words of this covenant that were written in this book.

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And all the people entered into the covenant.

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So they read this book, they read God’s Word, and they covenant together to follow it, just like David had done, just like Solomon had done, they’re doing.

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And then what happens next?

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If you look at verse 4, after he reads the Word of God, after he does this, he had already started purging the land of idolatry, but he does even more.

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So they start tearing down all of the idols.

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They remove all of the vessels that were made for the false gods.

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They take the Asherah, the idol that was in the temple, they take it out and burn it.

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And he goes to Bethel, which is interesting because it’s in the north.

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This is where Jeroboam set up his altar.

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Now, why does he do that?

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Well, maybe we’ll get to that later, if we have time.

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I’m not following any of what I actually wrote in my notes, but maybe I’ll skip some stuff and we’ll get to that, because I think that’s really interesting.

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The point of all of this, and the reason why I wanted to talk about this whole context, this whole story, is because I want us to really put ourselves in that moment of time when Josiah becomes king and everything turns back to the Lord.

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You’ve had more than 50 years of the most evil that you can possibly imagine.

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Not only that, but everyone in your nation loved that evil.

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No one loved God.

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No one followed God.

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No one even had heard of what was in God’s Word.

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And then Josiah becomes king.

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The Word of God is discovered.

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And if you are living at that moment of time, you’re living in a moment of grace.

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And so what this story teaches us, what this account teaches us, is that there are moments of grace when God’s people have unrestricted access to God’s Word.

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So, I mean, think about it.

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In Israel, in the northern kingdom, everything was evil.

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All of those 300 years, if you lived in the northern kingdom at that time, you lived in a time period where there was no access for all intents and purposes.

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There was no access to God’s Word.

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Nobody followed it.

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If you went to any of the priests, they would teach you something false.

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If you tried to participate in worship, it was abhorrent to God.

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There was no access to God’s Word in the northern kingdom.

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If you lived in the southern kingdom, it was marked by some good kings.

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But if you lived during Manasseh’s reign, there was no access to God’s Word.

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So I want us to think about that.

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There are moments in time where God’s people have unrestricted access to God’s Word.

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We need to think about it as a moment in time.

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The book of Hebrews quotes Psalm 95:7, which says: Today, if you would hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.

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And the emphasis there is on the word today , because we can be really cavalier about God’s Word, about the Bible.

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And we think about it as, how many Bibles do we have at home?

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You can get the Bible on the internet.

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It’s like water.

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You don’t really think about water unless you’re dying in the desert.

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But a lot of the moments of time throughout history has been a desert.

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People have been thirsty for truth and have no knowledge of God’s Word.

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So, when we think about that verse, “Today, if you would hear his voice,” the emphasis is the word today .

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You are currently living in a moment of time when you have unrestricted access to God’s Word.

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And you should realize how special that is, how blessed you are in order to have the Word of God in your hands.

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The other side of that is that moment of time doesn’t last forever.

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I think most everyone is familiar with C.T. Studd.

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He was a famous English athlete in the late 1800s.

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He was a cricket player.

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He was very wealthy.

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His family was wealthy.

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But what he did was he gave up his athletic career, he gave up his fame, and he gave up his family fortune in order to go be a missionary.

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He was a missionary in China, India, and Africa.

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And the reason why he did that, well, one of his quotes, it’s actually a poem, a hymn, he writes: Only one life, ’twill soon be past, Only what’s done for Christ will last.

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So he had everything.

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He had it all.

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But he realized that he only has one life to live.

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And what is actually valuable?

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Well, the things that you do for the Lord are the things that are actually valuable.

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His athletic career, in comparison, was not as valuable as living for the Lord.

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What I want to do next is just talk about three points of why we should treasure God’s Word.

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And the first one is what we’ve already talked about.

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We want to treasure God’s Word because you are living in a moment of time in which you have unrestricted access to God’s Word.

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You are a micro percentage of people who have it, who have access to it, who can read it and understand it.

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You’re living in a moment of grace.

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You’re sitting in a church holding God’s completed revelation on your laps in front of you.

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You are blessed more and given more grace than most people in the world today.

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How many people are in the world today?

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Well, when you take that number, which is billions of people, and you take the number of basically any type of Christian, you can be extremely conservative with that number, people who have God’s Word and who attend church regularly, well, you’re one of about 1% of people in the world.

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You are a micro percentage when you think about people over all of history.

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How many people in all of history have had access to God’s Word?

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How many people in all of history have died without hearing of God’s will, God’s law, or the gospel, or about God at all?

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So that’s one of the reasons why we need to treasure God’s Word, is because you have it, when most people don’t.

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You are of the 1% in the world today, and you’re in the 0.1% of people of all history.

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So God has blessed you with his Word, when most people don’t have his Word.

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The question is, what will you do with the blessing that God has given you?

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Well, the first thing that you do is you take that blessing and you open it up and you read it and you treasure it.

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The second point is you should treasure God’s Word because God has entrusted it to you.

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So it’s not that you have God’s Word.

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God has entrusted God’s Word, his Word, with you.

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And you need to steward it like you would steward a great inheritance.

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So the Word of God was first entrusted to the Jews.

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It was entrusted to Abraham and Moses, the Israelites.

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The kings of Israel, starting with David, were supposed to write their own copy of God’s Word so that they would have their own copy of God’s Word.

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They were supposed to treasure it.

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He entrusted his Word to David and then his son Solomon, and then he entrusted his Word to Jeroboam and Rehoboam and the rest of the kings of Israel and Judah.

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And what did they do with it?

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Well, they rejected it.

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He entrusted God’s Word with Manasseh.

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As king, he was entrusted with God’s Word, but he hated God’s Word.

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He killed his prophets.

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He filled the streets with blood.

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And what was God’s response?

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Well, Jeremiah writes in Jeremiah chapter 6: Hear, O earth, behold, I am bringing disaster on this people, the fruit of their plans, because they have not listened to my words, and as for my law, they have rejected it also.

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There’s not a better picture of this than in Jeremiah chapter 36.

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I want to just turn to that.

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This is after Josiah.

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This is during the reign of the next king, Jehoiakim, who was an evil king.

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All of the kings after Josiah were evil kings.

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God tells Jeremiah to write everything, all of the prophecies that he has given to Jeremiah, to write them on a scroll so that the king can read them.

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Because the king wasn’t listening to Jeremiah, but if he had it in front of him, if he could read it, maybe he would listen.

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So Jeremiah does that.

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He takes a scroll, he dictates, and on this scroll is written everything, all of the prophecies of Jeremiah was written on that scroll.

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When it’s taken to the king, look at verse 20 of Jeremiah 36.

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So they went to the king in the court, but they had deposited the scroll in the chamber.

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Verse 21: The king sent Jehudi to get the scroll.

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He took it out of the chamber, and he reads it to the king as well as all the officials who stood beside the king.

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Now the king was sitting in the winter house in the ninth month, with the fire burning and the brazier before him.

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When Jehudi had read three or four columns, the king cut it with a scribe’s knife and threw it into the fire that was in the brazier, until all the scroll was consumed in the fire that was in the brazier.

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Yet the king and all his servants who heard all these words were not afraid, nor did they rend their garments.

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Think about the difference between that and Josiah getting God’s Word.

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When Josiah finds God’s Word, he cherishes it as a precious thing.

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He recognizes it as, these are God’s words.

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He tears his clothes.

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Jehoiakim and the officials, they hear God’s words, and not only do they not tear their clothes, but he takes God’s scroll, tears it up, and throws it in the fire.

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There’s no better picture of Israel rejecting God, rejecting God’s Word.

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And so God does an amazing thing.

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What he does is open up his salvation to people who are not Israel, who are not Jews.

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It opens up to the Gentiles as well.

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And so the point is, because of this rejection that we’ve been reading about, you are now entrusted with God’s Word.

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You have been entrusted with God’s Word, and you need to steward it like you would steward a great treasure.

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Do you know what time it is?

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It’s 8 after 12?

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I’ve been going by this clock up here.

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It’s like 20 minutes behind.

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We’ll just wrap this up then.

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So that second point is we need to treasure God’s Word because it’s been entrusted to you, and you need to steward it.

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The third point is you should treasure God’s Word because through it there’s salvation.

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Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

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In Romans 10.

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And you all have heard lots of messages on that verse, so we don’t need to explain what that means.

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We are to treasure God’s Word because it’s precious, because through it, people come to the knowledge of God, and we need to share it with others.

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Now, before we close, I want to just describe one thing that is really interesting.

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When Josiah tears his clothes, when he reads God’s Word, he’s reading God’s Word for the very first time.

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Picture it.

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He’s reading Genesis and Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers, Deuteronomy, the five books of the law.

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We know he at least read that.

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But I think there he’s also reading the accounts of the kings that came before him.

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I don’t think people read those.

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I think they were part of what he’s reading there.

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Because what happens next is he starts purging the land, not just his land.

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He goes up north.

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There’s a reason why he does that.

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Think about it.

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He’s reading Scripture.

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He’s reading Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.

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And then if he’s reading the accounts of the kings, he’s reading about David.

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He’s reading about Solomon.

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And then at the end, this would be at the end of what he has of his Bible, on the last few pages, he reads about Jeroboam and this man of God, this prophet that comes and pronounces judgment on Jeroboam’s idolatrous worship.

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That’s in 1 Kings 13, that pronouncement of judgment.

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And I want us to look at that just really quickly, because what it says is this: Now behold, there came a man of God from Judah to Bethel by the word of the Lord, while Jeroboam was standing by the altar to burn incense.

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He cried against the altar by the word of the Lord and said, “O altar, altar, thus says the Lord, ‘Behold, a son shall be born to the house of David, Josiah by name, and on you he shall sacrifice the priests of the high places who burn incense on you, and human bones shall be burned on you.'”

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So I want you to picture that.

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So the Bible has been lost.

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Josiah is reading it for the very first time, and towards the very end of the pages of his Bible, of his scriptures, he sees his own name there.

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I don’t know what you would think if you saw your own name in Scripture.

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How would you feel?

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But he sees his own name there, and he sees what has been prophesied about him.

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He’s been cleaning up Jerusalem.

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He’s been purging Judah of the idolatry.

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But what he does next, after he reads God’s Word, is he goes up and he does exactly what has been prophesied of him to do.

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He purges all of the high places, all of the places that they still worshipped Baal, and he takes those priests and he destroys them.

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The altars that they worshipped Baal with, their bones are burned on that altar.

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He digs up the bones of the priests that had died and burns those on the altars as well.

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And he gets to one grave and he says, “Whose grave is this?”

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And the people with him say, “This is the grave of that man of God who told you that prophecy that you read about.”

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And so he leaves that grave alone.

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It’s really interesting because imagine the comfort of that.

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Put yourself in Josiah’s shoes.

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You are him.

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You are entering into a kingdom where everyone hates God.

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You love God.

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Everyone hates God.

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Everyone loves evil, and maybe you are afraid.

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You want to change.

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You want to lead the nation into right thinking, into loving the Lord, but you’re 16 years old.

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What can you do?

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Will people even follow you?

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When he’s in his 20s, he reads this.

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Imagine the comfort of that, and seeing that this is something that you will do.

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All of those high places, all of those hundreds or maybe thousands of priests that worship Baal, they’re going to be destroyed, and you’re the one who’s going to do it.

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Imagine the comfort that that brings him, the surprise or the joy of seeing his name there.

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Imagine the comfort or the surprise or the joy of seeing your name in the Scriptures.

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What would you say if you opened the Bible and found your name written there?

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Well, you might do a double take and say, “I haven’t seen that before.”

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Would you be excited, or frightened maybe?

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So Josiah turns to the last pages of the Word of God that he had.

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And I want you to turn to the last pages in your Bibles, to Revelation chapter 19.

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Revelation 19 describes the praise of all of the people of God before Christ.

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And I want you to notice something, because this is the praise of all of God’s people right before the marriage supper of the Lamb.

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This is all of them gathered together, and with one voice they’re saying: Hallelujah!

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Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, because his judgments are true and righteous.

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Hallelujah!

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For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.

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Let us rejoice and be glad and give glory to him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready.

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And if you are a believer, you’re standing right there in the middle of all of them.

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It’s an interesting thing to think about.

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You are in the Bible.

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You’re right there with all of these people, proclaiming these hallelujahs, these praises to the Lord.

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This is your future.

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This is what you were created for.

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You were created to live with God forever, to be free of every sin, to be free of every worry, every pain and tear.

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This is your future, and it’s coming quickly.

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Just as it said that his bride has made herself ready, we need to make ourselves ready.

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We need to read God’s Word.

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We need to cherish it.

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We need to view it as precious.

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We need to remember those words of C.T. Studd, only one life to live, only that which is done for Christ will last.

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The ending of that hymn is: Only one life, ’twill soon be past, Only what’s done for Christ will last.

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And when I’m dying, how happy I’ll be That the lamp of my life has been burned out for thee.

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Let me pray for us as we think about these things.

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Father, we do praise you for your word.

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We ask you that you would work in our hearts, that we would cherish it, that we would treasure it, and that we would see the moment of grace that you have placed us into.

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Let us not be cavalier about the way that we think about the scriptures, about the Bible, but to read them and to share them with others, because we realize that only through them that anyone can have a knowledge of you.

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Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.

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Help us as we share them with others, as we proclaim your truth.

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We ask this in Jesus’ name.

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Amen.