Danger of Complacency (2)

Intro

There is an old piece of folk wisdom that says when you boil a frog, you don’t throw it into boiling water. Instead, you throw it in room-temperature water and gradually turn the temperature up.

Doing this allows the frog to get comfortable to the point where it doesn’t even realize it is being boiled.

First, I don’t know if that is scientifically accurate. Second, if you are boiling a frog you should probably talk to someone.

But the lesson is never-the-less a valuable one.

It is the idea that a person isn’t likely to allow themselves to be fooled by something that is glaringly wrong (boiling water).

But if you expose them to small lies, destructive ideas, and worldly notions a little at a time they will get comfortable (hot tub) and before they know it they will have allowed themselves to be burned.

In other words, given enough time we can allow ourselves to grow complacent and believe and do things we never thought we would because we didn’t stay vigilant in our pursuit of truth and righteousness.

So the question becomes, why do we allow ourselves to grow complacent in the first place? Why do people who have seen the light if you will, or who have had our spiritual eyes opened grow complacent.

Why are we not able to see the danger before its too late and before you know it we are being boiled by the world?

It think at has to do with the fact that we fail to truly understand what God has provided for us on the cross.

We don’t fully grasp what we have been safe from and what we have been offered in place of spiritual death.

And because we fail to understand, we get distracted really easy by things this world has to offer.

Far too often, we are far too easily pleased. Even though God offers us unconditional love, we satisfy ourselves with something far less than God.

As C. S. Lewis once wrote, “If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased”

Over the last couple of weeks we have been walking through the book of Amos together and looking at the mistakes that Israel made that led to Amos’s prophecy of impending judgement.

This book isn’t a bed time story or a fairy tale with a happy ending.

This book is a brutally honest depiction of God’s anger towards sin and what happens when his people who are called by him to be holy choose to abandon that call and embrace the idolatry of the world around them.

The last time we met we saw God’s response to their false worship and apostasy. Their falling away from the truth.

Why you didn’t see it coming

As we pick things back up in Amos 6 we say the prophet once again highlighting where Israel went wrong and it started with they desire for pleasure.

Amos 6:1-3 NLT 1 What sorrow awaits you who lounge in luxury in Jerusalem, and you who feel secure in Samaria! You are famous and popular in Israel, and people go to you for help.

2 But go over to Calneh and see what happened there. Then go to the great city of Hamath and down to the Philistine city of Gath. You are no better than they were, and look at how they were destroyed. 3 You push away every thought of coming disaster, but your actions only bring the day of judgment closer.

Amos make a quick reference to the southern kingdom of Judah here by mentioning Jerusalem. They were not innocent, but then he get right back to Israel by mentioning their capitol of Samaria.

He says that as you sit around in luxury, the word in Hebrew here is sha’anan which means at ease, comfortable, or complacent.

In other words, Amos is saying that the people of Israel had allowed themselves to grow complacent. They had been able to hold off Assyria for 3 years and Samaria was secure.

They were also very wealthy due to extreme trade efforts and this peace and prosperity had caused them to lose sight of their need for God and instead they looked at themselves as being this great and mighty, even untouchable nation.

Amos is saying, not so fast. Before you get all high and mighty, if you only knew the sorrow that awaited you. Then he goes on to describe what happened to some of their neighboring nations.

He says consider Calneh, Hamath, and Gath. Weren’t they just as powerful and prosperous as you? Yet Assyria has destroyed them.

And in your arrogance your destruction is only getting closer.

Amos then begins to describe what their complacency is going to cost them.

Amos 6:4-7 NLT 4 How terrible for you who sprawl on ivory beds and lounge on your couches, eating the meat of tender lambs from the flock and of choice calves fattened in the stall. 5 You sing trivial songs to the sound of the harp and fancy yourselves to be great musicians like David.

6 You drink wine by the bowlful and perfume yourselves with fragrant lotions. You care nothing about the ruin of your nation. 7 Therefore, you will be the first to be led away as captives. Suddenly, all your parties will end.

In their pursuit of pleasure they became distracted to the point of complacency. This is a dangerous place to be because they don’t see that destruction is just outside their door.

When Amos says they will be the first to be led away as captives he is referring to both the northern and southern kingdom.

And that is exactly what happened. Israel will be invaded in about 30 years and lead into captivity, while Judah will continue to exist for another 135 years before their Babylonian exile.

Time for repentance has passed

Amos is different from a lot of the other prophets in that his prophecy leaves no room for God to relent in the wake of some sort of national repentance.

What I mean by that is. Normally when a prophet would prophecy judgment over people it was done so that the people might repent and change their ways so the judgment can be avoided.

That isn’t the case with Israel here. In fact, Amos says something interesting here that leads one to understand that any attempt at repentance now would be useless.

Amos 6:9-12 NLT 9 (If there are ten men left in one house, they will all die. 10 And when a relative who is responsible to dispose of the dead goes into the house to carry out the bodies, he will ask the last survivor, “Is anyone else with you?” When the person begins to swear, “No, by …,” he will interrupt and say, “Stop! Don’t even mention the name of the Lord.”)

11 When the Lord gives the command, homes both great and small will be smashed to pieces. 12 Can horses gallop over boulders? Can oxen be used to plow them? But that’s how foolish you are when you turn justice into poison and the sweet fruit of righteousness into bitterness.

It reads kind of funny but here we see Amos describing this interaction between two people.

He says that the destruction coming will be so bad that if 10 men are left in a house they are all going to die.

And when they die as was customary in Jewish tradition, the nearest relative will come to dispose of the dead and when doing so he might come across a survivor of this destruction.

And he will ask did anyone else survive? And the survivor will go to say, no by.... and he will be interrupted.

He will be told, don’t even mention Yahweh. This indicating that the man was about to say thanks to the LORD I survived.

He says don’t mention his name. The time for calling upon him or praising him are over. He has turned has back to his people because of their complacency and they aren’t worthy to call him by the very name he gave them.

He illustrates this futility in calling upon the name of LORD further by asking two questions that were so absurd that the answer was obvious.

Can a horse run through a field of boulders? Can an ox plow a field of boulders? The NIV says can and Ox plow the sea?

Of course not, that would be futile. As futile and useless as continuing to call God’s people to repentance.

The chapter ends with this statement.

Amos 6:14 NLT 14 “O people of Israel, I am about to bring an enemy nation against you,” says the Lord God of Heaven’s Armies. “They will oppress you throughout your land— from Lebo-hamath in the north to the Arabah Valley in the south.”

It isn’t that God doesn’t want Israel to repent. But Amos is saying that as a prophet, continuing to call upon Israel to repent is futile.

Either for one, they are so complacent they they won’t heed it. Or two, their repentance won’t stop the coming judgement.

Application/Closing

One of the biggest hot-button issues schools are dealing with today is bullying. People throw that word around quite often as being the cause for many of the problems our youth face.

And the last thing you want to be accused of standing idly by while bullying is taking place.

Even if you aren’t the one causing harm, as an onlooker one can enable the harm by not speaking up and doing their part to stop it.

One of things that the Church has done in our own complacency is we have become onlookers who have enabled others to be harmed because for too long we have chosen to sit idly by rather than speak up and speak out when the world is pushing ideas that are hurting others.

Why, because we are too easily pleased with what the world has to offer. We fail to understand just how much better what Jesus offers us is than what the world has to offer.

We have to be very careful that we don’t allow ourselves to become spiritually stagnate.

When water stagnates and is not active in any way, there is all kinds of potential for rotten things like diseases and the insects that carry them to begin to be active in that water.

In a similar way, many of us as believers feel that if we are just neutral and not sinning in an explicit way that we are doing good, while not realizing that neutrality leaves our souls in a stagnant position for other things to be produced in our lives that we would not like.

Sin will take that opportunity of us not being fully invested and use it to destroy us.

James says it this way...

James 4:17 NLT 17 Remember, it is sin to know what you ought to do and then not do it.

We cannot allow ourselves to do what Israel did in Amos’s day and be complacent.

We cannot continue to think that because of our safety and prosperity that somehow this must mean that God is pleased and we have his blessing.

We often hear our politicians say “God bless America”. Oh how I hope he does. But I have to be honest in saying I don’t know why he would when we continue to turn our back on him.

We know that God is patient. And how do we know this, because of how long he has waited before sending Jesus back.

2 Peter 3:9-10 NLT 9 The Lord isn’t really being slow about his promise, as some people think. No, he is being patient for your sake. He does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants everyone to repent. 10 But the day of the Lord will come as unexpectedly as a thief. Then the heavens will pass away with a terrible noise, and the very elements themselves will disappear in fire, and the earth and everything on it will be found to deserve judgment.

The time to repent is now. We need to remember who is leading this world in on it current trajectory.

Satan himself is the prince of the air, and his influence over our world leaders is growing stronger by the day.

And has his influence grows, as humanity is being plunged further and further into darkness, and as our minds continue to be turned over to depravity, this only serves to shorten the window for repentance.

When the day of the LORD begins, the opportunity to turn to Christ will have passed and as Jesus himself said in...

Matthew 13:41-42 NLT 41 The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will remove from his Kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. 42 And the angels will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

When this happens those who rejected Christ and chose to do evil will be confronted with the reality of what they have done.

In their deep sorrow they will weep, but not because they feel bad, but because there will be no escape.

Even in their weeping they will gnash their teeth at God. Meaning their hatred and anger toward God will result in the gritting of their teeth in seething anger.

And they will stay in this state for eternity, where all hope is lost, and where they lived this life wanting nothing to do with God, they will get their desire met in an eternity completely separated from him.

Don’t be complacent. Don’t be stagnate. Repent where you need to. And live for Christ now, so you can live with him in eternity.