When the Whole World Collapsed

I once saw a gas station, it was a small one, 4 pumps and a little food access area. Similar to the old abandoned one on the corner of Thornton and I think Rivara across from the 7-Eleven which is now an auto body shop. But you know what was different about this gas station, it went through a hurricane. The roof was twisted like one half of a fancy bow on a birthday present. The pumps where knocked off their cement and spun, twisted broken.

I’ve seen people whose emotions looked liked that gas station. There lives were wrecked.

I have been in a few places of tragedy. I’m pretty sure you have been there too. We’ve just gone through Corona time right?

Then there are the hurricanes that people have in their own lives, generational sin, unrelenting anger, overspending materialism, political or sexual idolatry

Yet there is in here many of you who are fighting to get stability in a time of loss. This is real. A time when everything has collapsed.

There is a part of the Bible that I find myself drawn to a lot right now. Ezekiel. I took a whole college class in just this book but before you get excited it was an 8 am class on like a Tuesday/Thursday. The Book is fascinating and hard and while my grade was as poor as my ability to stay awake in the class, because oh man was that early for me as a college student, the insights God still speaks to me from this part of His word touch my life to this day. I want to share them with you.

I don’t know why God has led me to the book of Ezekiel at this time but I can promise you that in 18 years of ministry I have never preached from this text.

Because the book is tough.

Catastrophe is tough. Failure is tough.

Your probably not searching for your favorite Christian podcast on failure.

A person in my life stood up this week in a very powerful statement that I have to tell you I generally don’t like, but I hear often as a pastor, the statement was, “God is about to judge us.” Then the person did what everyone else did and named their most hated sin and some bizarre news headline. Finishing with “God is going to judge us soon.”

My friends it will take you no time to research all the books that have been written about God’s soon impending judgement, that failed to predict anything but make people fearful. While ignoring the fact of what is happening right now, I spent about 4 to 8 hours a day this past week talking with people going through divorce, separation, financial catastrophe, homelessness, all while reading about the war in Ukraine, incredible inflation and reflecting on the Pandemic and all the damage that has been done. A coming judgement? A coming judgement? My friends

We live every day working out and in judgement all around.

Where is God in it? What are we to do in it? What am I supposed to do in it? A coming? It is here. Is God’s desire for us to run around crying, screaming, all scared, or is there something else a different purpose?

God speaks to us in the Bible book of Ezekiel, the Bible is made up of 66 books and Ezekiel is in the beginning part, called the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures. Ezekiel covers the speaking of God to and through the prophet Ezekiel.

A lot of times we can pick up the Bible, just start reading and amazed at all the outstanding truth we quickly understand, but their are other parts of the Bible where unless you know the history and how to read it, then this part of the Bible is like picking up a piece of Shakespeare. It’s so hard to understand that a lot can be missed and most of us put it back down and wait for the movie. Ezekiel is like that but it, like all of the Bible

Ezekiel reveals truth and the heart of God.

Please allow me to get nerdy with you so you can understand the ancient truth in Ezekiel. Like Josh Gates or Indiana Jones let me reveal to you what seems like a secret but really just takes a lot of learning. It is really easy to understand when I explain it.

But first let’s start at the beginning, The first way of us for creation

Perfection. No bad, no where. All good. All great.

Adam & Eve screwed up the idea that we and God would all be cool and nothing bad would happen because when they had a choice to disobey God they took it.

Then God allowed us to see why a second way will fail. Many of us think

I will work to do good and be good, be good to everyone and then God will be good to me.

This is the second way, and it fails. Here let me show you why. I have a question for you,

What is Good?

Many of us think about being nice and kind to people, but what about when people do mean things to us? Or what about when gas prices go up and we can no longer afford things so we have to make difficult choices, what about when some people work in places that make a ton of money off of charging outrageous prices for gas are they still good? They didn’t do anything wrong? Yet they profit off of the misery of others. Before we get high and mighty what about all of us who have clothes and cheap products made by people who barely make any money at all. We can keep going couldn’t I? These problems are huge and this sermon isn’t about all of the problems of our society but I can promise you

no one is good.

Most of us will make the definition of good where we are seen as nice and good. look good and create explanations where we look bad. Just confront someone and usually they will work hard to tell you why they are not bad but good. Yet this is what Jesus said.

Mark 10:18 CSB

18 “Why do you call me good?” Jesus asked him. “No one is good except God alone.

God actually stepped through that justification, he saw through all of our explaining and defined this is good and this is bad.

He chose a man, Abraham, and all his decedents through the line of Isaac as only one people who would be given the standard, the agreement. The agreement came through a covenant much later through the man Moses,

Covenant of Moses that if the children of Abraham, the Hebrews did good as God defined it then they would receive all the blessings of God. God would protect them from all enemies. God would bless their wealth. Do good, get good.

You know that question that some people say when something bad happens, “What did I do to deserve this?” The only people that God made an agreement like that with, where they would get what they deserve is the Jewish people. Follow the good, the laws of God, and if all the people did it than God would bless them.

They failed. They failed miserably. From the very beginning, they and we all know we would too but they justified their failures, didn’t take full faith in the law of God, worshipped false Gods, lacked any faith, and yet God proved faithful in that he allowed for depending on how you date it 500 to well over a 1000 years or more to determine the agreement,

The time between Moses and Ezekiel is likely greater than the time between you and the last Roman Cesears. God is patient.

the covenant failed and it was Moses’s people, Abraham’s descendents, a people who worshipped God in Jerusalem who failed and so God allowed horrific judgement by the time of Ezekiel. God’s patience was now turned to hand’s off judgement.

Horrific. War and more war and more war. With no red cross and no one bringing aid. All of the leadership of what was supposed to be God’s people were being either killed or forced to leave the area of Jerusalem and walk to Babylon, like walking from Stockton to Pocatello Idaho.

It was bad, bad, horribly bad.

Ezekiel himself, no longer was in the area of Jerusalem but had been forced to go to Babylon

For Ezekiel this was waking up after the building was bombed out, this was life among complete failure and disaster.

For all of a 500 years the people of God worshipped him in the Temple in Jerusalem and now there was no way for many of them to worship in the Temple. They were in Babylon, they were over 700 miles away.

Ezekiel didn’t even know if God would speak outside of the Temple.

All of us know what is like to be cut off from worshipping God in the way we know how. We lived through a pandemic. Ezekiel didn’t know. Could God still be with him? Where was God in this catastrophe?

Then God showed up in a huge way.

Ezekiel 1:2–3 CSB

2 On the fifth day of the month—it was the fifth year of King Jehoiachin’s exile—3 the word of the Lord came directly to the priest Ezekiel son of Buzi, in the land of the Chaldeans by the Chebar Canal. The Lord’s hand was on him there.

Ezekiel, was a priest, a Jewish priest who did all the detailed sacrifices in the temple in Jerusalem. That was the only place such worship could be. This was the job of all his cousins, uncles, grandfathers, dad, and they were responsible to help the Jewish people be right before God. They were part, a major part of failing God, they messed up. Ezekiel could look around at his only family and know they failed. Why? Because he wasn’t in the land of the Jews, He wasn’t in the Temple. He wasn’t even near the Holy City Jerusalem, he was in the land of the Chaldeans by the Chebar Canal. WE would call that place Iraq.

Sometimes our location tells us we failed God.

had a friend who found himself in jail on his 40th birthday, and said, I’ve never been arrested sober. Others of us have been in different spots, different meetings, our location told us we have failed God.

There is this moment, when we look around and realize we were never meant to be here. This bed, or this office, or this all alone place.

Realizing you have failed is a God-Moment.

John 16:8 (CSB)

8 When he (the Holy Spirit) comes, he will convict the world about sin, righteousness, and judgment:

That moment while not good is the most godly moment. God is the one who takes the time to find us and wake us up. He is the one who shows us how we have been living. Waking up to truth is a spiritual moment.

An incredible beautiful image of Jesus, is as the good shepherd.

Matthew 18:12–14 CSB

12 What do you think? If someone has a hundred sheep, and one of them goes astray, won’t he leave the ninety-nine on the hillside and go and search for the stray? 13 And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over that sheep more than over the ninety-nine that did not go astray. 14 In the same way, it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones perish.

There when you wake up, when you see, perhaps this is why you are at church today, this week you woke up and you saw, you looked around and said, this isn’t where I’m supposed to be in life. My friends you have discovered what Ezekiel discovered.

God is everywhere and He goes everywhere to bring us to salvation.

You are loved by God. I tell you only those who truly loves us can give us truth and hope. When you became aware, perhaps it felt awful. The prophet Isaiah had one of these moments when God showed up and He became completely aware of the reality of his spiritual condition.

Isaiah 6:5 CSB

5 Then I said: Woe is me for I am ruined because I am a man of unclean lips and live among a people of unclean lips, and because my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Armies.

You see the awareness of where we are in God is scary but it is also amazing. It is when the fog of this life has cleared. It is when all the stories about Jesus become personal. Jesus, in the Bible went into a person’s life who were caught in sin: sexual sin, financial sin, betrayal, selfishness, and even generational sin, sin that has gone down their family line, and Jesus said to them and says to you.

John 3:16–17 CSB

16 For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

You are invited to accept this for the first time. You are invited as Jesus said when Jesus was talking to someone who was being confronted and asked about the behavior of another

John 21:22 CSB

22 “If I want him to remain until I come,” Jesus answered, “what is that to you? As for you, follow me.”

God did not bring you into awareness of your situation so you could get over your problem and go right back to what you were doing. God didn’t come to Ezekiel and say, yep I’m everywhere, take care, ta-ta.

Because of Jesus we see what God desires, God desires us to surrender our lives to Him, to obey. To follow.

Many of us are like Ezekiel. We have known God all along. We find ourselves confronted by God with an awareness of God and ourselves. We have a choice, we can accept that Jesus is the author of forgiveness. He is full of amazing Grace.

Or We can believe that we are awful horrible human beings, that we should have known better, we can swear off the horrible sin, refuse to be around anything that brings us joy, and go further and further down the rabbit hole of self-hatred and self-punishment which sounds so religious because it is the bad form of religion that has nothing to do with God and everything to do with lies. The relationship of following is what God calls us to:

God calls us to repentance.

Acts 5:31 CSB

31 God exalted this man to his right hand as ruler and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.

Repentance is an awareness that we need forgiveness of sin

1 John 1:9–2:2 CEV

9 But if we confess our sins to God, he can always be trusted to forgive us and take our sins away. 10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make God a liar, and his message isn’t in our hearts. 1 My children, I am writing this so that you won’t sin. But if you do sin, Jesus Christ always does the right thing, and he will speak to the Father for us. 2 Christ is the sacrifice that takes away our sins and the sins of all the world’s people.

It will not be our saying sorry that makes us right, it is Jesus, the same God who woke us up, who found Ezekiel, He is the same one that says just acknowledge what I have already done.

Say I need your forgiveness and accept it with no more self punishment.

The opposite of self-punishment is repentance. Repentance turns to God and does the ways of God rather than the sin we did.

Instead of hitting amazon to find that one more thing that will bring us joy for the moment we recognize the hole we are filling and turn to God instead.

Instead of hitting the bottle to wash to away our thoughts of pain and suffering we reject the self-medicating substances and do the work of recovery, joining celebrate recovery, taking the tireless inventory of ourselves, and all the other pillars or steps.

If we turned to sexual and romantic relationships to fulfill our lives doing what our partner wanted because it made them happy or at least didn’t give us a hard time, when we sinned and put them before God so in repentance, we instead turn to God, we learn to say yes to God because we know this is what God is calling us to do.

Repentance means forgiveness and obedience.

That is what God came to Ezekiel for, he came to Ezekiel to give him an opportunity for obedience.

Ezekiel 2:1–5 CSB

1 He said to me, “Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak with you.” 2 As he spoke to me, the Spirit entered me and set me on my feet, and I listened to the one who was speaking to me. 3 He said to me, “Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites, to the rebellious pagans who have rebelled against me. The Israelites and their ancestors have transgressed against me to this day. 4 The descendants are obstinate and hardhearted. I am sending you to them, and you must say to them, ‘This is what the Lord God says.’ 5 Whether they listen or refuse to listen—for they are a rebellious house—they will know that a prophet has been among them.

You are being awoken for forgiveness but so much more.

You are found to repent but also for calling

You are not what you don’t do, you are a part of God’s family and He has something for you to do.

God Shows Up and Calls

Did you catch something amazing in the words of Ezekiel about his calling. See if you can see it.

Ezekiel 2:1–2 CSB

1 He said to me, “Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak with you.” 2 As he spoke to me, the Spirit entered me and set me on my feet, and I listened to the one who was speaking to me.

Did you see it? It’s not a metaphor, or a symbol. It’s very literal and powerful for your life.

Do you see it?

Let me show you

in Ezekiel 2:1

Ezekiel 2:1 CSB

1 He said to me, “Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak with you.”

Ezekiel is commanded to obedience. It is a simple command. Stand Up.

I will tell all my students to do that this week. You might tell someone this week or later. Stand Up is what Ezekiel was told.

Who did the standing? How did Ezekiel Stand

Ezekiel 2:2 CSB

2 As he spoke to me, the Spirit entered me and set me on my feet, and I listened to the one who was speaking to me.

God. The Holy Spirit stood Ezekiel up. Whenever you see the word Spirit beginning with a Captial in the Bible you can know this is the Holy Spirit. Who did the work, so that Ezekiel could obey? Holy Spirit

We choose to obey, God does the work.

Today you are being told to obey your calling. I am so excited for Rochelle to be working in the children’s ministry today. Others are coming saying God is calling them to … and I can see their restless heart. I am thrilled that Helen is hear to minister to God’s people our children. I was blown away by the hospitality of our Sunday morning Bible Study who is taking food to the Luke family. We do not do these actions for thankfulness, we do these as service to our God. This week I was overjoyed to boringly sit at DMV because I was doing the work of God helping out someone with my possessions and my time.

You are not called to a feeling. You are called to follow. God is calling you to obedience, to a purpose.

Let God speak to you.

Did you see something else? Something essential about obedience to God. Success, attendance, people listening to you, influence, whatever is not the determination of whether it is of God or not. Obedience is the determination of success.

Ezekiel 2:3–5 (CSB)

3 He said to me, “Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites, to the rebellious pagans who have rebelled against me. The Israelites and their ancestors have transgressed against me to this day. 4 The descendants are obstinate and hardhearted. I am sending you to them, and you must say to them, ‘This is what the Lord God says.’ 5 Whether they listen or refuse to listen—for they are a rebellious house—they will know that a prophet has been among them.

I love that statement. God is so epic. “They will a prophet has been among them.” Mic Drop.

We live in a different time from Ezekiel.

We live in the third time. When God finished with people trying to earn their way to be right with God, and instead God came as Jesus, and made it right.

Jesus died for our sins as the perfect sacrifice. Then he came back to life. We are invited to follow Him but we don’t follow Him alone, the Holy Spirit has entered our lives and now those who follow Jesus are empowered by the Holy Spirit.

You are the prophets, you are the ambassadors of God.

2 Cor 5:20 Look around you.

2 Corinthians 5:20 CSB

20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us. We plead on Christ’s behalf, “Be reconciled to God.”

Ambassadors are the representatives of the King. when you speak to them you are speaking to the kingdom. When Biden speak to the Russian ambassador he is speaking to Russia and the ambassador represents the whole.

Those who follow Jesus, You are the ambassadors of Christ.

In the darkest hour someone will say where is God, and you will raise your hand and say He sent me.