Who Really Has Your Heart?

Intro & Context

There’s some hard stuff to preach in this passage. I’m not exactly comfortable preaching the truths this morning because there’s some stuff in here that applies really directly to some folks who I love and appreciate.

This is the great difficulty of preaching. You come across an eternal truth, and at the same time you have relationships with people to whom the passages may apply to. If I could skip this passage, I would. But I will preach the whole Bible, not leaving anything out. And this passage serves as a teaching point for all single Christians listening.

And what we’ve seen all through Ezra is that in order for the mission of God to go forward, the people of God have to be made right.

Truett Cathy, founder of Chick-Fil-A and notable Christian once said, "You life’s destiny is determined by the Three M’s: Three key decisions you make in life: Master, Mate, and Mission.”

I’m sure he realized how closely those three M’s are intertwined. It’s a very important thing that your mate and your master line up. And those two will determine the effectiveness of your mission in life.

Today we’ll be looking well into how our master and mate need to align in order to accomplish the master’s mission.

The Great Sin: Idolatry

(Ezra 9)

So we come onto the scene and we see Ezra being informed of the people’s great sin. (Vv. 1-2) And he is devastated. I mean, tearing his clothes and his hair out, devastated. (v. 3)

What was the Great Sin?

The Jews married foreign (read: pagan) wives.

How big of a sin was it?

Ezra tore his clothes and tore his hair and wept for his people.

Ezra went to God saying, “our iniquities…” (v. 6) He included himself in this, though he was not personally guilty.

Ezra recognized that this wasn’t just the sin of his contemporaries, but the sin of generations and generations. (v. 7)

(By the way, have you ever considered how your sin may be picked up and learned from one generation to the next. Break the cycle, will you? For the sake of your children.)

Ezra saw God’s great grace to His people, and considers the sin how the people have repaid God. (God blesses Israel, and Israel turns from God) (Vv. 8-9)

What made this such a great sin?

The Israelites were to keep their worship of God pure. Introduction of foreign wives with foreign gods would defile the worship of God in future generations.

The sin issue was not that the people of the land were a different color. It was that they were of a different creed (belief system). Remember, Moses married Zipporah, an Ethiopian woman, and God said that he had done nothing wrong. (Numbers 12)

If you’re struggling with why this may be such a harsh punishment for their sin, you may not understand a few things:

The worship of foreign gods included ungodly practices: temple prostitutes, human sacrifices, self-mutilation, and more. This wasn’t just some obscure rule set up by God. He wanted to protect His people and the reputation of His Name across the earth.

Pagan religion is a seeking after creation and sin over and against the Creator.

The influence of mothers on the faith of their children would cause disruption to the pure faith of generations to come. This was an existential threat to the Jewish people and their faith.

This showed a lack of faith in God to provide: If Jews were to marry Jews, but they shortcut that process by marrying pagans, then this showed that they wanted to take fate into their own hands and marry who they wanted to marry. That’s not faith in God, it’s faith in oneself. Not every marriage is blessed by God, and this is what the Israelites were coming to understand.

In football, if you want to get to the quarterback fast, all you have to do is jump the line of scrimmage before the Center snaps the ball. However, while you may succeed in getting to the quarterback, you’ll get not one, but TWO penalties: One for a neutral zone infraction, and one for a personal foul against a defenseless player. THAT sets you back yardage, which goes against what you, as a player on your team, are trying to do. So too it was the case for these Jews who were seeking to preserve their faith from extinction or assimilation.

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Ezra recognized that this was disruptive to God’s plan for the world. That’s what sits behind all of this. God’s not just up on His throne dictating random rules. The preservation of the Law was to show the world God’s standard for human living AND to show that no one can live up to the letter of the Law, so that we could properly see our need for Jesus to save us from our sin. To get away from this plan was to subvert God. The great failure of Israel was the failure to accomplish God’s plan for the world through them. They never properly saw what they were to accomplish. That’s not to blame them, we Gentiles were worse off than they were.

Do we recognize how weighty our sin really is? Perhaps we miss the gravity of the Jews’ sin because we’re not adequately familiar with the gravity of sin itself. For God to save us from sin was no small wave of the hand. It was an act of great anguish for God, in which He treated His perfect Son as though He were sinful, pouring out on Him all the wrath that sin deserves.

Allow me to submit to you this idea: If sin is not that big of a deal to you, or you wonder why it should be a big deal to God, perhaps your faith is simply a Sunday morning hobby, and not a life-orienting capital-T Truth.

You see, our culture prizes personal freedom over things that limit that freedom. That’s why culture bucks at things like Christian views on sexuality or sin. It’s why your hair bristles on the back of your neck when something that you’ve done wrong is talked about. Because we’ve been trained to bristle at things that limit our ability to indulge in our desires.

But it’s not just the culture that we shake our fist at. Let’s turn the spotlight on the church for a moment… Unfortunately, we are all enablers. We push the margins of our Christian freedom into sin over and over again. And we invite others along for the ride. Have you considered how when you engage in sin, other Christians look at you and say, “Oh, if he’s doing it, or she’s doing it, it must be fine for me to do, too.” This is why we have stories of Christian celebrities getting caught in sin. Three big ones this year: Jerry Falwell, Jr. of Liberty University, Carl Lentz of Hillsong New York, and Ravi Zacharias. All of them could not keep their character up with their ministries.

The church today doesn’t need lawyers to defend and plead the church’s case. It needs prophets who are willing to do the hard work of rooting out sin and calling God’s people to God’s standard.

The sin isn’t just who they married… The sin is that they set into motion a cycle that would put them back in the place of their former kings, choosing to go back to their past ways that put them in exile in Babylonia in the first place.

There are a lot of ways we engage in similar practices today. The first and most obvious it that we deny God’s command to marry people of like-faith. This wasn’t just an old testament command. It’s renewed in the New Testament:

Why all the fuss about this? Again, it comes down to who you love the most. Do you love God and believe His call on your life is the most treasured aspect of your life? Then trust Him, that He will make a way for you to experience joy in a way that honors Him. To marry an unbeliever is to make the mistake of believing that we can choose to follow our hearts over the Holy Spirit. Make no mistake, the Spirit does not lead you into decisions that go against God’s Word. Now if you are married to someone who does not believe, your job is not to go divorce that person. Paul earlier mentions that if you’re already married to an unbeliever, not to divorce them, but to earnestly pray for their salvation and to be a good witness to them.

Consider other ways in which this passage applies. The main point of the Jews taking these steps to to keep their faith in God pure for coming generations. In what ways in all of our hearts have we made compromises with the world? Do you find yourself making deals with idols? Saying, “oh, I can quit any time,” and then never making good on that promise? That’s when you know something has mastery over you and is well into full-blown idolatry. So before you cast a stone at those who have married unbelievers, consider how you’ve “married foreign wives” in the form of allowing idols to crowd God off of the throne of your life.

This could be your job, your hobby, etc.

The Great Cure: Repentance

(Ezra 10:1-19)

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God doesn’t leave it at convicting of sin. Notice that Ezra and the people both confess their sin before God and have the opportunity to make it right. This is repentance. Turning from our way and going God’s way.

How the Israelites did this:

Immediately repentant… Even though it was raining heavily, and caused the Israelites great distress.

Methodically executed… There were “investigations” to conduct. My speculation is that they wanted to see which of the foreign wives were truly Jews in their faith, and which were bringing in pagan idolatry.

And so they commit to take all of their pagan wives and children and return them back to their people.

A note on this: This is not God taking it out on the pagans. The Israelites’ instructions are to repent of their sin. The truth is that the Jews were not to have taken these spouses in the first place. So the fate of the pagan wives and children is up to the Jewish husbands and the people they are returning them to.

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What idols plague you and refuse to let you go? Will you turn from them toward God?

What sin are you refusing to part ways with? Whether it’s a lack of forgiveness toward someone, an unhealthy relationship, whatever it is, it’s keeping your heart and affections from the Lord, and He is worth those.

Charles Spurgeon once told a story of a little girl and some berries she found:

300 Sermon Illustrations from Charles Spurgeon Confiscated Berries (Job 1:21)

A child came home from the common with her lap full of brightly shining berries. She seemed very pleased with what she had found, but her father looked frightened when he saw what she had and anxiously asked her, “Have you eaten any of those berries?”

“No, father,” replied the child, to his great relief.

Then he said to her, “Come with me into the garden,” and there he dug a hole, put the berries in, stamped on them, and crushed them, and then covered them with earth.

All this while, the little one thought, “How unkind father is to take away these things that pleased me so much!” But she understood the reason for it when he told her that the berries were so poisonous that if she had eaten even one of them, she would in all probability have died in consequence.

In like manner, sometimes, our comforts turn to poison, especially when we begin to make idols of them. It is kind on the part of God to stamp on them, and put them away from us, so that no mischief may come to our souls.145

The cure for the Israelites’ sin is the same cure for your sin and my sin: Repentance. God is always at the ready to receive us back into His arms, when we simply turn away from our former ways in commitment to Him.

Conclusion

And that repentance is right where it begins with Christ. I don’t know what your thoughts are when you hear the word, “repentance,” but I hope they’re something to do with God’s grace. Repentance is that gracious act that we are allowed to take part in which God uses in making us right with Him again. And it’s available to us all the time. There’s never a repentant heart that God turns away.

Maybe repentance is an act of weakness to you. Maybe it’s something street preachers shout at you as you walk by. Or maybe, just maybe, you have a good connotation of repentance. Perhaps for the first time. Listen, we’ve all messed up and sinned, and we deserve eternal punishment for our sin. If we only repent, God is willing and able to forgive.