Ezra 8:1-20

Intro

Whether or not you’re an art officianado, I think everyone can appreciate truly good art when they see it. I don’t mean the 6 million dollar ping pong table hung up at the DIA, I mean truly breathtaking works like the Sistine Chapel done by Michelangelo in the Vatican. If you’ve ever had the chance to see that work, or if you’ve had the opportunity to see a truly impressive work of art, you know how precious they can be. The frustrating thing about an excellent work of art, though, is that it cannot last without intense preserving work being done. There can be a variety of reasons why a work of art would need to be restored. For example, in the 16th century the beautiful artwork on the cieling of the Sistine Chapel was damaged by water leaking through the roof. In 2015, a 12-year-old boy tripped and accidentally punched a hole through a baroque-era painting valued at $1.5 million. Besides these types of things, the art materials will eventually fade and decay as time goes on.

This has led to the art preservation and restoration industry, which uses painstakingly intricate methods to restore damaged or decayed works of art. They have to be ridiculously careful in how they approach these works when they restore them because of what is at stake, though. Can you imagine the pressure when you go to remove some of DaVinci’s original paint from his work so that you can mix more of it to match? Can you imagine what it would feel like to use chemicals on a 10 million dollar painting that must be mixed just right to remove the dust and dirt without affecting the original paints?

But an even more impressive work than the Sistine Chapel is the work that God has done. God has made this Earth and all the people in it, and it is beautiful. He made us to worship him and enjoy his beauty, but, Just like art, we see in our passage tonight that our worship is also subject to decay and damage over time; whether it be caused by malicious acts, unfortunate circumstances, or the passage of time. As our worship decays, we must be careful to preserve its purity and seek restoration when it is wrecked by sin. Thankfully, we will also see that our God loves to do restoration work on our worship, but we must seek restoration according to his word. If people working on a classic work of art must be painstaking in their approach to restoration, we must be even more careful when we consider how our worship will be restored from the decay it has seen.

Sin Leads To Decay In Worship

This is one of those passages with a lot of names, the type of passage that you only really read when your reading plan makes you, and then you never really dwell on it. This is one of those passages that I look at when I’m planning a sermon and think, quite frankly, “what on Earth am I going to say about this?” But then I force myself to dwell on it for a week when I maybe would have otherwise looked past it, and then you can start to see that this passage is an important part of a bigger story that is being told. This is a passage that can tell us a lot about Israel prior to Ezra, help us to understand what was happening during Ezra’s time, and give us a forecast for what to expect in our own time. This passage will help us to see that sin leads to a decay in our worship, which is a big problem. In fact, and not to overstate it, we will see that decayed worship is even the biggest problem humanity has ever faced. More than that, we will see that God has a way of restoring his people’s decayed worship when they seek him according to His Word.

Ezra 8:15 ESV

I gathered them to the river that runs to Ahava, and there we camped three days. As I reviewed the people and the priests, I found there none of the sons of Levi.

Sin From Long Ago Leads To Decay Now

When we get to verse 15, Ezra is on his way to Jerusalem with a large group of Israelites. This is in the second wave, and this group will go to meet with those who are already there and beginning to work on the building projects. When the group takes a break for a few days, Ezra decides to take some inventory. He gathers together the people, and he separates out the priests, and he discovers something alarming: Among all of the priests on their way to Jerusalem, none of them were Levites. That might not sounds like a big deal to you, but it becomes a big deal when you realize that God has commanded Israel that Levites were supposed to be the ones who were priests in the temple.

The problem was that while the people thought they were on the right track to getting back to worshipping God, Ezra discovers that they were sadly mistaken in the details; and the details matter. God had always had a way that he told Israel to worship him, but over the course of time the people of Israel slowly relaxed those details. As the years passed, the culture pressed in, and the people of God didn’t fight to keep their worship pure. They ignored the command that the Levites fill the priestly roles in worship, and they stopped taking it seriously. The sin from their past had crept into their worship in the present, and it was something that Ezra recognized needed to change.

Which shows us an important point about restoration: even when the people were in a season of growth, there was still a lot of decay that needed to be cut out. They couldn’t afford to grow comfortable with their progress. Though they had been returned to their land, rebuilt the altar, were rebuilding the temple, had the king of Babylon on their side, and many other positives to celebrate, there was still work to be done. Sin is pervasive, and we can’t assume that just because we are seeing progress means that we are doing everything right. Our efforts to remove the decay of sin have to be just as thorough as sin’s destructive tendencies.

Illustrate: Anybody who has ever attempted a restoration project on anything knows what this feels like. You start off with grand ideas, you begin by making great progress, but inevitably along the way you hit setbacks that can seem discouraging. For example, owning a problem-free home is a bad goal if you think you can achieve that by only working for a day. My house was built in 1890, which means it has collected its fair share of bumps and bruises that need tending. Working on a house is a life-long project, it isn’t something that can just be fixed in a day and then left alone for the rest of your life. Worship is the same. We can’t fix it with one sermon, or one conference, or one youtube video. We must be constantly assessing how we have allowed sin to decay our worship, and constantly seek how we can be seeking restoration.

Apply: Human beings forget often and decay rapidly, and so does our worship. We have allowed the culture to creep in steadily for 2,000 years. We have seen good times and bad in our history, and w ehave collected a lot of decay in that time. While we may have dealt with a lot of it, we won’t ever be done dealing with it.

We have allowed the culture in many ways to sell us idols that creep into our worship.

Our sundays can become a lot less about worshipping God among the fellowship of believers and a lot more about our own leisure and selfish desires.

We can complain about the song choice and about how we wish that we played catchier music, caring more about the current trends than songs that worship God in truth.

We have become so consumeristic in our understanding of Church membership. We go shopping for churches like they were stores in a mall, expecting them to bend over backwards to satisfy our preferences. When a church no longer lives to serve me, I can dump it and move onto the next one.

We often view worship with ourselves at the center, looking for what it can do for us. If it makes me feel good, I like it and maybe ill come back next week. If it challenges me or pushes me in the wrong places, I’ll drop it. Our own comfort supersedes the glory of God in our worship.

There is no doubt that our own worship is covered in decay, but thank God that he doesn’t leave us that way. God is the mater at restoration projects, and he specializes in restoring broken, sinful, selfish, ignorant idolaters like you and me.

We see how this plays out as Ezra seeks to resolve the problem of a lack of Levites.

God Restores Our Worship Through His Means

Ezra 8:16–20 ESV

Then I sent for Eliezer, Ariel, Shemaiah, Elnathan, Jarib, Elnathan, Nathan, Zechariah, and Meshullam, leading men, and for Joiarib and Elnathan, who were men of insight, and sent them to Iddo, the leading man at the place Casiphia, telling them what to say to Iddo and his brothers and the temple servants at the place Casiphia, namely, to send us ministers for the house of our God. And by the good hand of our God on us, they brought us a man of discretion, of the sons of Mahli the son of Levi, son of Israel, namely Sherebiah with his sons and kinsmen, 18; also Hashabiah, and with him Jeshaiah of the sons of Merari, with his kinsmen and their sons, 20; besides 220 of the temple servants, whom David and his officials had set apart to attend the Levites. These were all mentioned by name.

The first thing I want you to notice about this passage is revealed to us in verse 18; When Ezra sends a party to go and recruit Levites, the good hand of God was on them. Although their long history of sin had caused damage that they suffered for, God didn’t just leave them out to dry. As Ezra was seeking to restore their worship back to the way God had intended it to be, God was gracious and good to them, providing them with exactly what they needed to make it happen. When they went to Iddo and asked him to send Levites away from home and into this rebuild in Jerusalem, they received exactly the people that they needed to make it happen. There is no question in this case that God was the one at work providing what was needed to restore worship.

But I also want you to notice a second thing about what’s going on in this restoration project: God provided what they needed, but it was on his terms. The only reason God’s good hand was on the Israelites was because they were seeking restoration according to the Word of God. Two things were present amongst the Israelites at this time: a deep passion for worship accompanied by careful consideration of God’s word as the rule for worship. These two things are both necessary when it comes to worship restoration. Commentator Derek Thomas said: “Zeal without careful planning leads to eccentricity and lopsidedness, not because God doesn’t honor zeal but because rewarding the bizarre is not his way.”

Approaching worship with a lot of passion but no attention to God’s Word does not honor God. Conversely, approaching worship with careful analytics without a heart for God is dead and void. Ceratinly God is the one who is in charge of the restoration project in Israel, but the passion for God and a love for his Word are the tools that God will use to restore his people’s worship.

But what does this have to do with us today? As far as I am aware, we don’t have any Levites in the building and we don’t have any plans to go find them, or even to rebuild the temple. What does this passage teach us about worship in Trenton, MI in 2022?

It teaches us a lot about worship today. Beyond the need for Levites, we learn from this passage that worshiping God with passion and truth is critical.

The book of John tells a story of an encounter Jesus had with a Samaritan woman at a well. The woman was a sinner, but nontheless seemed to be interested in worshipping God. She knew of the feud between the Jews and the Samaritans, where the Jews worshipped in the temple and the Samaritans worshipped on a mountain, each thinking less of the other because of it. When the woman asked Jesus to weigh in on the topic, he responded by saying

John 4:21–24 ESV

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

Jesus discloses that all of the Old Testament ordinances and commandments were not complete in themselves, but they all meant to point us to a deeper, more profound truth. They were meant to teach us that it wasn’t ever going to always be about the temple and the sacrifices and the Levites, but that in the fulness of time God’s people would worship him in Spirit and Truth.

The woman responded by saying she knows to be looking for the Messiah who will help the people of God to know these things for certain, to which Jesus responds,

John 4:26 ESV

Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”

If we want to worship God in Spirit and in Truth, we are completely dependent on Jesus. It is through Christ that God restores our worship and repairs all the damage we have caused over all those years.

Jesus restores our worship because when he lived a perfect life, he did it intending to transfer that perfection to us

jesus restores our worship because when he died, he did it willingly as a substitute in our place so that We wouldn’t have to bear our guilt anymore

Jesus restores our worship because when he rose again, he did it so that we can experience restored Resurrection life with him

Jesus restores our worship because when he ascended into Heaven, he did it so that he could reign as King and send the Spirit of God to dwell in our hearts and begin the restoring work of sanctification in us.

Jesus causes us to worship in Spirit because he gives all those who believe in him the Spirit of God. Jesus fixes our heart problem in worship by filling us with his own Spirit. He removes our heart of stone that focuses only on the self and replaces it with a heart of flesh that seeks the glory of God. As the Spirit of God dwells in us, we are given control over our selves, power over our sin, and love for God. Because Jesus has sent the Spirit into our hearts, we can be confident that we are worshipping in Spirit; and that is truly honoring to God. Because Jesus has filled us with the Spirit, we can have confidence that what we are doing here tonight matters and is acceptable to God because it is flowing from a clean and pure Spirit.

Beyond that, Jesus causes us to worship in truth because he has revealed himself to us through his word. Unlike the woman at the well, we don’t have to wonder where we need to worship or what its supposed to look like; Jesus has made it clear for us. There is no special temple or holy mountain that is required for acceptable worship. We no longer require Levites to be the ones to service our worship. Rather, the true church worships wherever the people of God are gathered under the preaching of his word and the administration of Christ’s sacraments from faithful ministers called by God to serve his people. As we order our worship according to the word that Jesus has delivered to us, we can be confident that we are worshipping God in truth.

Illustrate: You see, although God’s magnificent creation has been badly damaged by sin, and we have found ourselves wrecked beyond the capacity to perform worship in an acceptable way, God has done a work of restoration through Jesus. As we look to him and believe in him, confess our sins to him and repent of them, commit ourselves to him and to his glory, we are filled with the Spirit of God and the Word of God. Through Christ, our sin is put to death and we are made pure again. Through Christ, we are made complete in beauty again, the way God made us to be.

Apply: What this means for us is we need to be actively seeking whether we are worshipping in Christ, or according to our own sinful desires. We need to ask ourselves if we really are worshipping in Spirit and Truth.

If we have stopped worshipping in Spirit, if our worship has become dull and dead, void of passion and love, then we need to take a look at Jesus. We can’t do anything to manufacture worshipping in Spirit, we are in utter dependence on Jesus to supply the Spirit of God to us. We must look to him, asking that he would supply us with all we need to worship God in Spirit.

If we have stopped worshipping in Truth, we need to honestly reconsider what our priorities are and on what authority we structure our worship. We need to stop thinking about ourselves and our own preferences, whether we like the musical style or the colors of the building or the types of hobbies the people around us have. Rather, let us place the Word of God, and only the Word of God, at the center of our worship. Let us settle any controversy not with selfish argument, but with careful consideration of God’s word. Rather than chasing comfort and convenience and attention from the outside, let us seek to honor God in truth.

Friends, our worship is threatened by decay every day as sin constantly threatens to turn our eyes and hearts away from God. As we continue killing sin daily, we must fix our eyes on Christ as we find him in his Word, and fully commit together as a body that we will worship God in Spirit and Truth through his Son Jesus Christ.

FCF: Our Worship Is In Decay

CFC: Through Christ our Worship is made Pure

The call: Worship in Spirit and in Truth through Christ