Our Gospel lesson text this morning comes from 2 Chronicles chapter 29. We've been working our way through 2 Chronicles and our approaching the end. And now we're looking at the kingship of Hezekiah, son of David, king over Judah, the southern kingdom of God's people. At this time Hezekiah takes over as king and northern Israel, the upper northern kingdom has already been exiled by the Assyrians, the chief nation and power of Syria had his capital of Nineveh of Jonah fame and Syria went through northern Israel and exiled them to all various places, scattered them over the world. In fact, the Jews are still scattered when Jesus shows up. And in Book of Acts, when we see Pentecosts or Jews from every nation under the earth that come to Jerusalem to celebrate Pentecost, and they are in every place over the world in all the nations because of what Assyria did in the north. But Hezekiah and Judah, the southern kingdom, is still in place down in the south of the land of Israel, the promised land. And Hezekiah reigns the son of David over the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, the southern two tribes. We read this morning, 2 Chronicles 1 through 5 and then we'll read verses 12 through 19. This is God's word, eternally true. Hezekiah was 25 years old when he became king and he reigned in Jerusalem 29 years. His mother's name was Abijah, son of the daughter of Zechariah. He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, just as his father David had done. In the first month of the first year of his reign, he opened the doors of the temple of the Lord and repaired them. He brought in the priests and Levites and assembled them in the square on the east side and said, listen to me, Levites, consecrate yourselves now and consecrate the temple of the Lord, the God of your fathers. Remove all defilement from the sanctuary. Now skip down to verse 12. Then these Levites set to work. From the co-heathites may have son of Amasai and Joel, son of Azeriah. From the Mererites, Kish, son of Abdi and Azeriah, son of Jehallael. From the Gershinites, Joah, son of Zimma and Eden, son of Joah. From the descendants of Alizafon, Shimri and Geo. From the descendants of Asaph, Zechariah and Madaniah. From the descendants of Himan, Jehallael and Shimei. From the descendants of Jettithun, Shemaia and Azeriah. When they had assembled their brothers and consecrated themselves, they went in to purify the temple of the Lord as the king had ordered, following the word of the Lord. The priests went into the sanctuary of the Lord to purify it. They brought out to the courtyard of the Lord's temple everything unclean that they found in the temple of the Lord. The Levites took it and carried it out to the Kidren Valley. They began the consecration on the first day of the first month. And by the eighth day of the month, they reached the portico of the Lord. For eight more days they consecrated the temple of the Lord itself, finishing on the sixteenth day of the first month. Then they went to King Hezekiah and reported, we have purified the entire temple of the Lord, the altar of burn offering with all its utensils in the table for setting out the consecrated bread with all its articles. We have prepared and consecrated all the articles that King A has removed in his unfaithfulness while he was king. They are now in front of the Lord's altar. Here in our reading, we have a response of thankfulness printed for us in our bulletins. Let us give thanks to the Lord, the word of the Lord. Let us pray. Our God and Father, we are thankful that You have given us this Your word. Jesus, You have by Your Spirit, instructed us about Yourself, and You have written these words through prophets and apostles by Your Spirit's inspiration, so that we would have Your very words, Your very instructions to us, that we might know what Your like, and what we should be like, how we might and should live. So we ask that You would work toward those purposes in our lives, that You by Your Spirit, Jesus, You would preach to us in this by Your word, cause our hearts, by the word of Your Spirit, to be receiving of Your word, cause us in our hearts, to be repentance, we ask this Jesus in Your name. We look at this passage here, and we see some things that the King has a chia, the son of David, the descendant of David, as Jesus was, son of David, descendant of him, that the King was very concerned about, as he took office, and in the first month of his first year, this is the first thing that he put his attention to, and we've mentioned in previous weeks there were lots of things, his whole kingdom was in disrepair, but he sees rightly the most important thing for him to set in order with the temple, and the functioning of the temple, because the ultimate thing that God's people can do is worship God. And so has a chia, orders the Levites who, and the priests who are in charge of the worship of God in the temple. He orders them to be about putting the temple back into repair so that God's people can worship him rightly. And we see words here about being purified and consecrated, and that's what Jesus is speaking to us about this morning. Now, a few things to get out of the way, so we can make right equivalencies here today in 2008, in the United States, where we don't have a physical stone temple. What does God do with this physical stone temple when the New Testament comes about? What does God teach us in the New Testament after Jesus goes up to heaven and sends his spirit and his words to his apostles to write down the New Testament? How does God define these main things that we see in the Old Testament about which the writer of Chronicles is concerned here? One, and if you'd like to fill out blanks in an outline, you're welcome to do this. If you want to just listen, that's fine, too, but if you're filling out blanks, here we go. And our introduction, first of all, Jesus is our king. So we have a passage here about Hezekiah being king of God's people. Hezekiah is son of David. Jesus is son of David and called that over and over again. And Matthew 21.5 is a good place to go to see that Jesus is our king, as Jesus is writing into Jerusalem, the Old Testament king reference about the king returning to his people, the son of David, the line of David being returned to their kingly place, to rule and reign over God's people, it's applied to Jesus. See your king comes to you, a gentle and riding on a donkey, Palm Sunday. And so Jesus takes the role here that Hezekiah has here and Hezekiah in fact is a foreshadowing of Jesus. So we see one, Jesus is our king. So as Hezekiah rightly speaks to God's people, we rightly make this connection that this is what Jesus, our king, says to his people today. Second thing, and point of introduction, second identification for us to make, is that the church is the temple. And the New Testament does that. It says that you, the church, are the temple of God. You're the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. In the Old Testament, God dwelled in the Holy of Holy, the most central place of the stone temple in Jerusalem. God dwelled in his special blessing presence among his people in the temple. And Paul writes to us in 1 Corinthians 3, 16, and in Ephesians 2 and Ephesians 3, Peter writes to us in 1 Peter chapter 2 that the church is the temple of God. And that we as believers are living stones that make up the walls of this temple. And that this temple, the church, is where God's Spirit dwells, where the Holy Spirit lives on earth. So the church is the temple. So we see here, Jesus is our king. He's concerned about the repair, the condition of the church. This is what is his first priority. And then, and we've talked about this in past weeks. And then finally, you are a, here's your third blank, you are a priest. And Larry read that for us this morning. We've read that before a good number of times, 1 Peter 2 and 9. We are a holy priest today. We are in this story, the Levites and priests, to whom the king is speaking, to whom Jesus speaks. So where does that leave us? Here's our point this morning. We have 1 point, this is a 1 point sermon, 1 point gospel lesson. And this is the point. Jesus wants the church to be purified. Jesus wants the church to be purified and to remain pure. Jesus wants the church to be purified and he wants the church to remain pure. And we see references to this consecration and purification in verses 1 through 5 and then verses 18 and 19 as well. And so we say this, and here's another blank for you, that we as priests receive this command from Jesus, our king. Okay, so we're getting all our identification, our identifications made right. We as priests, we as the Levites and priests here are standing before Jesus as our king. And Jesus through his word gives us this instruction to remain pure, to purify the church. This is our work as priests, and we see in verses 12 through 17, that the Levites and priests get at this work. The king is commanded that the church be pure, that the temple be pure, and that it remains pure, and that it be functional. And this is the work we have before us as a holy priesthood as believers in Jesus. But the question is, what does it mean to purify the church? What does it mean to purify the temple of God today? What does it mean to consecrate ourselves and the church and for it to keep pure? Well, one thing it doesn't mean will say first. It doesn't mean, and here's another blank for you, sinlessness. It does not mean sinlessness. It didn't mean that in Old Testament times. God's people were never expected to be sinless. They were expected to set themselves to follow God's law, and everything that God had said. But God knew they would fall. God knew they would sin, and that's why in the temple, the temple is marked by the activity of sacrifice. And this tells us that in Old Testament times, God knew that daily sin would be a part of the lives of God's people. And so when God demands purity, He is not saying you need to be sinless, or I will divorce you as my bride. Rather God having understanding and compassion and patience and mercy provides for forgiveness. And that's what comes to the fore in the Old Testament temple of God, that it's the place of forgiveness because God's people, they're a bunch of sinners, striving to do what God would have them do to follow God's law, to be like God by following God's law. But nonetheless, struggling as we do with our own sin natures, which remain in us, and we sympathize with Paul when he writes in Romans 7 and says, in my mind, I know what God wants me to do, but my sin nature causes me to struggle, and I have this war going on within me. And sometimes I do what God wants me to do, and sometimes I don't, but that's the importance of the temple, that it be up and running because God is a God who forgives his people and has a kind of nose. This is son of David. He knows the temple needs to be up and running because God's people are people who need to be forgiven. They needed those sacrifices to be repeated for them over and over again. And here we see the work of Jesus. Jesus knows that we, his people, need forgiveness. And so his first priority as he comes on this earth is to get the temple up and running. And what he does to do to get the temple up and running is he offers himself as priest and sacrifice to and on the cross. We knew that we, his people, are not sinless and that we need forgiveness. And so Jesus does this for us. So in Old Testament times, in New Testament times, when God talks about purifying ourselves, it's not talking about sinlessness. It's all in the context of receiving this forgiveness that Jesus our King has provided for us by being our priest and sacrifice as well. So we get on in our gospel lesson here to what we've named as point A. And this means that the sermon won't be as long as it originally was going to be, B is next week. What does this mean? To consecrate ourselves, to consecrate the temple, the church, to purify ourselves, to purify the church. What does it mean? It means concentrating our focus. That's your blank there. Concentrating our focus upon him. So personally, yes, we need to look upon this morning also how we do this as a church. So we think about when we focus upon him that we are to be people that are constantly thinking about God and what God would have us do and what God is like, whether it has to do with when we're waking up in the morning and getting ready for the day or whether it has to do with our interactions with people or the way we do our work or how we read our families or how we are being led by our boss at work or by our mom and dad at home, whatever the case would be, we are focusing upon him. And this is the work that's being done in this passage. Through Ahaz, the wicked king, who has a kind of father, God's people and the king had not been focusing upon the Lord. And this brought them great trouble. That's what we heard from God last week as we looked at this passage. This brought them great trouble because their focus was off the Lord. They were not consecrated unto him. They did not have this purity of focus upon him. And so we do that personally, have a focus upon the Lord. But secondly, this means that as a church and here's a blank for you, that we recognize we are to be about Jesus. As a church, corporately, as a group, we say, what are we to be about? Ahaz and those in Judah had forgotten what they were to be about. And that got them into all kinds of trouble, militarily, economically, agriculturally, they have all kinds of trouble because they forgot what they were to be about as God's people. We recognize as the church that we are to be about Jesus. This might sound like one of the points, of course, what's the church to be about, Jesus, right? We answer Jesus to everything and that's generally right. So let's talk about this and we'll see how this has not been a duh point in the church throughout the centuries. And it's not a duh point in the church today in the United States. We have lost focus as a capital C church in the United States. What are we to be about? So number one in your outline here. The church being focused on Jesus means that the church is not a center for the, here's your blank entertainment of its members. The church being focused on Jesus is not a center for our entertainment. It's not about us laughing or feeling we laugh a lot around here but that's not the point. That's not what we're here for. This is not a stage and you're not an audience and we don't use that terminology in our church here because of this reason. This is not a show. The musicians sit down because they're not a rock band and we're not screaming teenagers at the Ed Sullivan Theater. Beatles fans there. And in our new building you'll see that it's set up where there's not enough room to get these guys up on the little raised, barely raised surface up front. And our musicians are going to be sitting on the side left and when we stand up there are going to be just a few people that can even see them. It's on purpose. That's a structural thing that we're putting in order because this is not a show. We don't have and churches have musicians up on a raised area. That's okay. Don't be judgmental about that. A lot of this is just a heart function, the way we view it. So don't condemn your Christian friends that have musicians up on a stage or if a guitar stands up. That's okay. We're putting some things structurally here so that it's hard for us to lose focus. We don't want you to lose focus on musicians. We want you to be thinking about the words you're singing and singing under God. We don't have three singers, each with a mic, the pips or the spinners up here. When I see that, and that's just me, maybe that's protection of me because when I see that I expect them to go like that, which is great fun to do and I did that when I was a high school student but it's also something that draws our attention to them. This is not a Las Vegas show or the pips or the spinners or any of those groups like that. This is not entertainment and you'll see that as we head into our new building. We want our musicians to disappear and most of them want to disappear as well too, if not all of them want to disappear. But church is not about entertainment, it's not about us being entertained. Every what, the secular world does entertainment much better than us and we'll leave that to them. They've got better sports and better shows and better movies and better books and everything like that and we'll let them do that. That's what they're experts at. We're experts at God. That's who we are. We're priests. We're a holy nation of royal priesthood and so that's what we focus upon and that's what Hezekiah, son of David, gets and that's what Jesus, son of David, commands us at priests to do. Be about me. This is a consecrated thing. This is a thing that is to be pure from worldly influence to what does it mean to be about Jesus. The church being focused on Jesus means that the church is not a place we come to to get our, here's your blank needs met. It's not a place we come to to get our needs met. That is, when we come to this place on Sunday morning, the church is not the place that's your filling station, it's not your super walmart, it's not why, it's not about you. Now God does something for us, it's very helpful for us in understanding what it means to for us to be a member of his kingdom and to come to a worship service on a Sunday morning. In Ephesians 5, he declares his relationship, Jesus' relationship with his church to be the relationship that a husband has to his wife. In Ephesians 5, it calls the church, the kingdom of Christ, the bride of Christ, and Paul goes into many verses about how Christ is our husband, and we his church are his bride, and Jesus is married to the church, the church is Jesus' bride, and here's something we think about. What if there were a spouse in real life? I've done two marriages in the past two weeks and they've been fun, and we've been thinking about, and it's been in premarital counseling with these folks and giving the gospel lessons during the sermon, and talking about roles, and one thing I say to each spouse is something like this. What if there were a spouse who went into marriage and viewed as his or her job judging how well their spouse, his or her spouse, is doing in his or her role? And typically that's why we're getting trouble, and I say to each side, your job, Jamie, your job Andrew, your job Carl, your job Jessica, is not to evaluate how well your spouse is doing in his role as God lays out roles for us, his husband, husband you do these roles, wife you do these roles, you don't worry about that, you're making vows to do your role. Well, that's what you promise to do, and you can't do anything really about how well your spouse is going to fulfill his roles as a husband, or fulfill her role as a wife. You, when I say to my kids all the time, you worry about yourself, you do what's right, don't tattle on this person or that person, you do what's right. I don't care if all your classmates are doing the wrong thing, you do what's right, you worry about yourself, you worry about doing your role well. What if a spouse went into the marriage with no intent to fulfill his role as husband? And only went into the marriage because he looked over on the other side and said, oh, my wife is going to have to fulfill these various things for me. We would call that spouse a lousy spouse, who comes in committed to doing nothing, committed only to being served, and sitting there just evaluating and judging their spouse all the time, you're not doing this well, you're not doing this well, you're not doing this well, you're not doing a thing to fulfill his or her own vows in her role. We would say that kind of a spouse is a lousy, selfish, and unreasonable spouse. A spouse that doesn't understand how the relationship works. So, a spouse shouldn't say, honey, I'm home, time to meet my needs, nor should the spouse say, good, you're home, time to serve me. See, that's not our role. We do our role, we worry about our own role, our side of things, and we do that to the best of our ability. Again, if a spouse does that, honey, I'm home, time to meet my needs, or good, you're home. Now I quit, time to serve me. A spouse is to do his or her job, and such is the case with the church. We don't worry about getting our needs met, because guess why? Our husband is perfect. Think he's going to fulfill his role toward us? I think so. Do I have to nag Jesus to get him to do what he has promised to do for me? Do I have to worry about what him protecting me, providing for me? No, not at all. What do I have to worry about? What do I have to concern myself about? Doing my role, focusing on how can I be a good spouse to my husband, Jesus? Jesus is a perfect husband to us as church. So we don't have to concern ourselves with getting our needs met. Nor should that be our mentality when we come to church. Jesus, meet my needs now. Rather when we come, we say, how can I fulfill my role best? So when we come to church, when we meet in a worship service, we don't show up and say, Jesus, I'm here. Time to meet my needs. Nor Jesus, show up. Time to serve me. Did my part, I'm here. That would be being an utterly selfish, fully off the mark, spouse, to our husband, Jesus. If we look at the church as a place to meet our needs, we're being a lousy spouse, and are fundamentally misunderstanding our role in our relationship with Jesus. So the church, what is our role? In our marriage to Jesus, here comes your blank. In our marriage to Jesus, our role is to serve our spouse. We're the priests in this passage here, verses 12 through 17. What's their role? They don't say, oh, he's a guy. You're here. Time to serve us. You know, King gives the orders, and they serve. And we are a royal priesthood, and we serve our King. Third thing, what does it mean for us as a church to be focused on Jesus? One, as we've talked about, our first thing is we don't consider church to be a place where we're entertained. Secondly, our second thing is we don't consider church a place to get our needs met. And then thirdly, the church being focused on Jesus means that the church is not about film of blank. Us, me. Yeah, the church is not about me. The church is not about us. As soon as we think it is, we become impure, don't we? We put our own stuff in the way. The church is to be purely focused upon Jesus and doing what he wants us to do. As soon as we think the church is about us, the church becomes, here's your blank, impure, full of all kinds of peripheral. I'll spell that for you. P-E-R-I-P-E-R-I-P-H-E-R-A-L. The church becomes full. If we think the church is about us, it becomes full of our peripheral garbage. And only remotely, as the years go on, to do about Jesus. You know what the Kidren Valley is that's spoken of in this passage? It was the garbage dump. Jerusalem was on a hill, and on one side of this hill in the walls of Jerusalem was this steep slope that went down to the Jordan River, and it's essentially where they threw all their garbage out over the hill. And that's the priest do here. A-has didn't understand that life was about God. He didn't understand that the church, the temple, was about God. He had put stuff in there that he liked, that he thought would help him out instead of following God's instructions and keeping the temple as something pure about him. So it takes the Levi's, what is it? 16 days to clean out this, and they take out all the garbage from the temple and they dump it in the garbage dump of Jerusalem, the Kidren Valley. And that's what a church can be like. That's what the church was like, or the temple was like when Jesus showed up in Jerusalem in John chapter 2, wasn't it? As soon as we think the church is about us, the church becomes impure, becomes full of us. It's a gate we open that we don't want to open, because as soon as we open, we start tacking on all our stuff to it. The church becomes full of a bunch of human trinkets. There's a great episode of King of the Hills, the mega church episode, and it makes fun of how we as humans, when we let our sin nature run its course, fill the church full of all this peripheral stuff, a handbell choir for the teens, and a coffee shop, and a bookstore, and a dry cleaning place. You can drop off your dry cleaning there before you go into the service and pick it up on your way out. By the way, the pastor whispers to the hills when he's introducing them to this church on Sundays when the cowboys play. King of the Hills takes place in Texas. We tend to leave the screen on and watch the game. The church becomes full of other stuff, full of stuff that we like, but the church is not a place to make us happy. Now it will, but it does that by us focusing upon the Lord. When we focus upon the Lord, guess what? We get happy. When we focus upon the Lord, we get satisfied. Our souls are filled, but not by the stuff we think will fill it, but by focusing upon the Lord. So we don't add trampolines to our churches or cappuccino machines or dry cleaners or that kind of things. And if we think the church is about ourselves, we wind up with something that Larry read to us about in 2nd Timothy chapter 2. Paul said it was true during their day. You will have people who don't want to hear from God. They want to hear about themselves, and they want you to say what they're already doing so they can walk away from the church feeling good about what they're already doing. Paul says Timothy resists that temptation. Preach the word in season and out of season. Not preach what people want you to say, because there will be people who come up and just tickle the ears of people, tell them what they want to hear. And that's what can happen if the church becomes about us. He says, preach the word in season and out of season, because if you got an ear tickler, you will starve the souls of your people. What satisfies their souls, what fills them up is God's word. This is the pure spiritual milk of the word that Peter talks about in 1st Peter 2 verses 1 through 3 that was read for us this morning. We need this book. We need God's word because these are God's words. Our words don't matter a whole lot when it comes to figuring out what's right and wrong. God's words are the standard for us. When a child says they're hungry, do we let the child determine what he or she wants? What's the child pick? Candy. Do we do that as responsible parents? No, we say, we know you want candy, but here's your oatmeal. Here's your hamburger. We say to our kids, you need something that will nourish you. And when the church becomes about us, we start giving cotton candy to the people, the church. You have to survive on candy corn very long. In fact, when you're really hungry and you have candy corn, it makes you feel bad, doesn't it? Ever done that? I see some head shaking. What you really need is a roast beef sandwich. What you really need is a hamburger or a good broth or something like that. The church is not about us. It's not about what we want. It's about what God wants and what God feeds to us as His Word. Now, if this all sounds a little bit harsh, guess who wasn't Gentile about peripherals getting tacked on to the church? Guess who wasn't Gentile about add-ons being present in His church the temple taking focus off of God. Here's your blank. Your blank there? Jesus. John, I love everything about God, I guess, but I especially love when God comes in and kicks tail. I do. I like that about God. I'm being gentle there in my language. But I love it when God comes in and cleans house. When I was a sophomore in high school, a freshman in sophomore in high school, there was a kid two years above me and his name was Mike Lover. Now, if your last name is Lover, guess what? You're not going to be a wimp. And this guy's dad was like a man's man. I mean, you didn't want to ever have Mr. Lover mad at you. In fact, Mike Lover, he was an often, I think he played both ways on the football team. Went to West Point and played on their football team. So here's a guy, West Point Army guy, career Army guy, playing football. And he used to go into the bathrooms in the high school and there were smoking in the bathrooms. Yeah, for you fans of early 70's songs. And he used to go in the bathrooms and say, Hoods, get out. You know, he's kids smoking. You see him, they would literally come shuffling out of the bathrooms and he would bang on the doors back toward the back of the bathroom. He came in and kicked tail and that was kind of fun. But Jesus goes into the temple and he's not, hey, you guys might want to consider. Jesus comes in and what does he do? He gathered some cords and makes a whip out of it and he lets everything loose. And he knocks over people's money tables and that kind of thing with the scourge of cords of whip. Jesus wasn't real positive about trinkets and distracting factors being added on to the house of his father's worship. This player and one of the other parallel passages to this, Jesus says, this is to be a house of prayer and you've turned it into a den of thieves. You've added all these distractions. This is the place about the Lord, not about us, not a place to make money, not a place to make our lives more convenient. So I don't have to carry a sheep from my hometown all the way to Jerusalem. I can just buy it in the temple court when I arrive here. That was a convenience thing for them. And Jesus said, this is not a place to be convenience. In convenience yourself for my father. King Hezekiah and King Jesus were and show us that we are to be, here's your blank, zealous. Zealous about a purity of focus upon the Lord in the church. So be zealous for the purity of the church that it might be always about God and not about us. Be always conscious of this and zealous to be out of the way of people seeing our God clearly. Ahas had made the church the temple so full of junk that people couldn't see God anymore. They couldn't worship him anymore. May we see God. Menon believers come into our church and see God in his gospel as well because we've cleared it of all the evangelical Christian paraphernalia. The priest's work heart we see in this passage to accomplish this. A pure house of God where God could be clearly seen through all the temple furnishings and all the sacrifices these outward reflections of God and his character. And we are God's priests. So today we as Christians are to be like these priests and work hard to make sure God and His gospel can be clearly seen in this place. We're to be people that clear out this place of stuff that steals the scenic view of who God is, so to speak. We can do this and we can excitedly as these priests do, then come before our King Jesus and say, Jesus, we've done it. And make us always do this. To keep this place clear of the Christian paraphernalia garbage that we just thrown rightly into the Kidren Valley. Lord, we've made this place about you to be devoted, to be focused upon you. May we ourselves and our souls and may others who come into this place see you and only you. We have purified the church for you, Lord, so people and we may see you. So let us always continually share both the fervor of our King Jesus as he clears the temple out in John 2. May we reflect the hard work of these priests as they clear the temple out in 2 Chronicles 29. May we share our King's zeal, hezekiah's zeal, his first priority in taking his kingship that the church would be pure so that God could be seen. So your final blank here, be zealous for the church, always to be focused on the Lord. Focus on him personally, focus on him in the church. Next week we'll talk about how we might be pure and consecrated unto the Lord as well. Let's pray. Father, this is good news. It's good news, Jesus, that you came and that you cleared the way in the temple of your day so that you could be seen. The good news is not us being seen. The good news is not filling this place with trinkets, so to speak. The good news is you, and so help us to see you and help us to be zealous to have this church show you as purely as we can. Help us to get out of the way that we and others might see you and believe and live in a way that reflects you. And help this church to be pure so that when non-believers come in they can see Jesus your care for your church and your care that you God be seen in the church. We ask that you would give a strength by your Holy Spirit and reminders from your Word and hearts to always repent toward this end. We ask Jesus in your name. Amen.