A Good Start, A Bad Ending

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern

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Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

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And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. A reading from 2 Chronicles chapters 14, 15, and 16.

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Abijah slept with his fathers, and they buried him in the city of David. And Asa his son reigned in his place.

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In his days the land had rest for ten years. Then Asa did what was good and right in the eyes of the

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Lord his God. He took away the foreign altars and the high places, and broke down the pillars and cut down the

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Asherim, and commanded Judah to seek Yahweh, the God of their fathers, and to keep the law and the commandment.

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He also took out of all the cities of Judah the high places and the incense altars, and the kingdom had rest under him.

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He built fortified cities in Judah, for the land had rest. He had no war in those years, for the

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Lord gave him peace. And he said to Judah, Let us build these cities and surround them with walls and towers, gates and bars.

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The land is still ours, because we have sought the Lord our God. We have sought Him, and He has given us peace on every side.

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So they built, and they prospered. And Asa had an army of 300 ,000 from Judah, armed with large shields and spears, and 280 ,000 men from Benjamin that carried shields and drew bows.

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All these were mighty men of valor. Zerah the Ethiopian came out against them with an army of a million men and 300 chariots, and came as far as Mereshah.

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And Asa went out to meet him, and they drew up their lines of battle in the valley of Zephathah at Mereshah.

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And Asa cried to Yahweh his God, O Yahweh, there is none like you to help, between the mighty and the weak.

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Help us, O Yahweh our God, for we rely on you, and in your name we have come against this multitude.

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O Yahweh, you are our God, let not man prevail against you. So Yahweh defeated the

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Ethiopians before Asa and before Judah, and the Ethiopians fled. Asa and the people who were with him pursued them as far as Gerar, and the

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Ethiopians fell until none remained alive, and they were broken before Yahweh and his army.

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The men of Judah carried away very much spoil, and they attacked all the cities around Gerar, for fear of the

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Lord was upon them. They plundered all the cities, for there was much plunder in them, and they struck down the tents of those who had livestock, and carried away sheep in abundance and camels.

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Then they returned to Jerusalem. The Spirit of God came upon Azariah, the son of Oded, and he went out to meet

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Asa and said to him, Hear me, Asa, and all Judah and Benjamin, Yahweh is with you while you are with him.

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If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you forsake him, he will forsake you.

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For a long time Israel was without a true God, and without a teaching priest, and without law, but in their distress they turned to Yahweh, the

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God of Israel, and sought him. He was found by them. In those times there was no peace to him who went out or to him who came in, for great disturbances afflicted all the inhabitants of the lands.

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They were broken in pieces. Nation was crushed by nation and city by city, for God troubled them with every sort of distress.

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But you, take courage, do not let your hands be weak, for your work shall be rewarded.

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As soon as Asa heard these words, the prophecy of Azariah, the son of Oded, he took courage and put away the detestable idols from all the land of Judah and Benjamin and from the cities that he had taken in the hill country of Ephraim, and he repaired the altar of Yahweh that was in front of the vestibule of the house of Yahweh, and he gathered all

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Judah and Benjamin and those from Ephraim and Manasseh and Simeon who were residing with them, for great numbers had deserted to him from Israel when they saw that Yahweh his

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God was with him. They were gathered at Jerusalem in the third month of the fifteenth year of the reign of Asa.

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They sacrificed to Yahweh on that day from the spoil that they had brought seven thousand sheep, and they entered into a covenant to seek

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Yahweh, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and with all their soul. But that whoever would not seek

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Yahweh, the God of Israel, should be put to death, whether young or old, man or woman.

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They swore an oath to Yahweh with a loud voice and with shouting, with trumpets and with horns. And all of Judah rejoiced over the oath, for they had sworn with all their heart and had sought him with their whole desire, and he was found by them, and Yahweh gave them rest all around.

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Even Ma 'akha, his mother, King Asa, removed from being queen mother because she had a detestable image for Asherah.

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Asa cut down her image, crushed it, and burned it at the brook Kidron. But the high places were not taken out of Israel.

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Nevertheless, the heart of Asa was wholly true all of his days, and he brought into the house of God the sacred gift of his father and his own sacred gifts, silver and gold and vessels.

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And there was no more war until the thirty -fifth year of the reign of Asa. In the thirty -sixth year of the reign of Asa, Baasha, the king of Israel, went up against Judah and built

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Ramah, that he might permit no one to go out or to come in to Asa, king of Judah.

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Then Asa took silver and gold from the treasures of the house of Yahweh and the king's house and sent them to Ben -Hadad, the king of Syria, who lived in Damascus, saying,

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There is a covenant between me and you, and there is between my father and your father. Behold, I am sending to you silver and gold.

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Go break your covenant with Baasha, the king of Israel, that he may withdraw from me.

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And Ben -Hadad listened to king Asa and sent the commanders of his armies against the cities of Israel, and they conquered

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Eshon, Dan, Abomaim, and the store cities of Naphtali. And when Baasha heard of it, he stopped building

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Ramah and let his work cease. Then king Asa took all of Judah, and they carried away the stones of Ramah and its timber with which

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Baasha had been building, and with them he built Geba and Mizpah. At the time,

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Hanani the seer came to Asa, king of Judah, and said to him, Because you relied on the king of Syria and did not rely on Yahweh your

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God, the army of the king of Syria has escaped you. Were not the Ethiopians and the

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Libyans a huge army with very much chariots and horsemen? Yet because you relied on Yahweh, he gave them into your hand.

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For the eyes of Yahweh run to and fro throughout the whole earth to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward him.

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You have done foolishly in this, for from now on you will have wars. Then Asa was angry with the seer and put him in the stocks in prison, for he was in a rage with him because of this.

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And Asa inflicted cruelties upon some of the people at the same time. The Acts of Asa from the first to the last are written in the book of the kings of Judah and Israel.

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In the thirty -ninth year of his reign Asa was diseased in his feet, and his disease became severe.

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Yet even in his disease he did not seek Yahweh, but sought help from physicians.

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And Asa slept with his fathers, dying in the forty -first year of his reign. They buried him in the tomb that he had cut for himself in the city of David.

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They laid him on a bier that had been filled with various kinds of spices prepared by the perfumer's art, and they made a very great fire in his honor.

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O Lord, have mercy on us. In the name of Jesus. Good start, bad ending, right?

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Let this be a warning to us all, that each and every one of us are capable, even in our aging years, of wandering from faithfulness to God.

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You'll note that Asa really started well, but in chapter fifteen there are the seeds of his undoing, and I'll explain why.

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In fact, this was a tough nut of a text. One of my favorite Old Testament scholars kind of puts it this way.

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When it comes to the Old Testament, his suggestion is, turn it, keep turning it, turn it again, turn it again.

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There's a lot of deep meaning in here. You have to kind of dig it out, and sometimes if you can't really see it at first, if you just keep at it, you'll get it.

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So think of it this way. We learn that God gave King Asa something unique in his day, and that was peace.

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Back in his day, that was a very uncommon thing, and of course, where Israel was situated, they were between Syria and Egypt, and they were constantly getting, as Mr.

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Miyagi would say, getting squished. They were just in the middle of the whole mess, and of course,

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God had torn Israel apart. Torn it into two pieces, a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom, and the northern kingdom was always kind of, well, harassing the southern kingdom.

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There was always little tensions and frictions between them, and then when they were getting along, it didn't take too long before they weren't getting along anymore.

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It's kind of like sisters and brothers, you know, sometimes they get along and they love each other, and then next thing you know, they can't stand each other, and it's just awful, right?

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But let's see if we can figure out what went wrong with Asa. Why did he all of a sudden go from seeking

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Yahweh to not seeking him? It's kind of an interesting idea.

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So here's how the text unfolds. Asa began to reign after his father

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Abijah died, and for ten full years, the land had rest, and Asa was a very busy king very early on.

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He did what was right in the eyes of Yahweh, his God. He took away the foreign altars, the high places, broke down the pillars, cut down the

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Asherim, and commanded Judah to seek Yahweh, the God of their fathers, and to keep the Torah and the commandments.

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And he also took out of the cities of Judah the high places, the incense altars. The kingdom had rest under him.

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I mean, he built fortified cities in Judah, and the land had rest. He had no war, and during the time when he had no war, did he sit on his laurels and do nothing, playing

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Candy Crush on his iPhone all day? No! Okay? He was busy building up and fortifying the cities, because you'll note this, that a good time to prepare for bad times is during the good times, right?

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That's kind of how it goes. If things are going well for you right now, stockpile. Start to work things out.

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Get ready, build a nest egg, because you don't know when the day of calamity will come. That's exactly what he did.

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And so we learn here, he had an army personally in Judah of 300 ,000 soldiers, and of Benjamin, which was still part of the southern kingdom, 280 ,000.

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So between the two tribes, not quite 600 ,000 men, but that's a pretty sizable amount of people, right?

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But then, well, the day comes when things go bad. All of a sudden, Zerah the

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Ethiopian came out against them with an army of a million men, and how in antiquity you would feed a million man army on an expedition is beyond me.

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I mean, this had to take some doing. He only had 300 chariots, but I mean, with a million men, he could have come at Israel with rakes, and would have done okay, at least you would seem, right?

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They came as far as Mereshah, and Asa went out to meet him, which was his duty as king.

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They drew up their lines of battle in the valley of Zephathah at Mereshah, and Asa cried to Yahweh, his

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God, and this is a great prayer. Oh, Yahweh, there is none like you to help between the mighty and the weak.

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Help us, oh Lord, our God. Notice he doesn't decree, doesn't declare, he doesn't command and control, he pleads.

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He asks God, humble supplication, humble prayer, it's a good one. And so he prays, and he says, you are

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Yahweh, our God, let not man prevail against us, and verse 12 says very definitively,

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Yahweh defeated the Ethiopians before Asa and before Judah. Who won the battle?

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It wasn't Asa, it was Yahweh. Yahweh can take a million man army, and whittle them down to nothing, in fact, he can cause them to be terrified, and their knees to knock them to flee the battlefield, for no particularly good reason except that he's the one who brought fear upon them.

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You don't want to fight against Yahweh. So Asa and the people who were with him pursued the

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Ethiopians as far as Gerar, and the Ethiopians fell until none remained alive.

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That was a terrible cataclysmic end for an expedition. They were broken before Yahweh and his army.

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The men of Judah carried away very much spoil, and they attacked all the cities around Gerar, for the fear of Yahweh was upon them.

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They plundered all the cities, there was much plunder in them. They struck down the tents of those who had livestock, and carried away the sheep in abundance and camels, and then they returned to Jerusalem, and then

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Luke Skywalker and the Ewoks were all celebrating. It was a big deal, right? In fact, they were planning a

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Christmas special after this, it was just amazing. I got the response

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I was looking for. That's all that mattered. Yup, yup, anyway.

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So chapter 15 then recounts what happens in the immediate aftermath of Yahweh defeating the

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Ethiopians. And so first person to show up is a prophet of God by the name of Azariah, the son of Oded, and he went out to meet

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Asa and said to him, now hear me Asa, and all Judah and Benjamin. Yahweh is with you while you are with him.

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If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you forsake him, he will forsake you.

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For a long time, Israel was without the true God, and without teaching priests, and without law, but when in their distress they turned to Yahweh, the

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God of Israel, and sought him, he was found by them. In those times, there was no peace to him who went out, or to him who came in, for great disturbances afflicted all the inhabitants of the lands.

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They were broken in pieces, nations were crushed by nation, city by city, for God troubled them with every sort of distress, but you, take courage.

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Do not let your hands be weak, for your work shall be rewarded. And this is a true prophecy that was given by Azariah, and words of encouragement from Yahweh prompting them to what?

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To continue to trust in God. To hear his words and recognize that even if God seems like he's not around here, seek him, you will find him, he desires to be found by you.

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So take heart, trust his words, and do as he has said. Now as soon as Asa heard the words of the prophecy of Azariah, the son of Oded, he took courage, and he goes on a reform binge, a good one, right?

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Getting rid of all of the things that are contrary to the Ten Commandments, especially that first commandment.

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He put away the detestable idols from all the land of Judah and Benjamin and from the cities that he had taken in the hill country of Ephraim, repaired the altar of Yahweh that was in front of the vestibule of the house of Yahweh.

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We also learn from 1 Kings that he got rid of all of the male cult prostitutes, praise

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God, right? So he's really doing exactly what he should be doing.

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He gathered all of Judah and Benjamin and those from Ephraim, Manasseh, and Simeon who were residing with them for great numbers had deserted to him from Israel when they saw that Yahweh was with him.

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A little bit of a note here, think of it this way, there was a little bit of an exodus taking place in the Northern Kingdom. The Northern Kingdom is marked by rank idolatry, rank idolatry, and what has happened is that the faithful up in the

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Northern Kingdom, when they see that Yahweh is with King Asa, they decide to leave their inheritance in the

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North and come down and live in the Southern Kingdom. A little bit of an exodus. Think of it similar to what's happening with Californians leaving

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California and going to Texas. Although it's not for godly reasons, it has more to do with the fact that they, well, they elected a bunch of people who taxed them to death and so they're hoping that Texas will be a little more merciful tax -wise.

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As long as they don't elect the same kind of officials, it should be okay, right? But the idea here is that there's an exodus, a flood of people leaving the

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Northern Kingdom which is going to strengthen Asa's hand and weaken the

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Northern Kingdom. But here's where things are going to begin to get a little sketchy, alright?

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Here's what happened next. All of them were gathered at Jerusalem in the third month of the fifteenth year of the reign of Asa.

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They sacrificed to Yahweh on that day from the spoil that they had brought, 700 oxen, 7 ,000 sheep, so this is still in the aftermath of the war with the

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Ethiopians, and they entered into a covenant to seek Yahweh, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and with all their soul, but whoever would not seek

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Yahweh, the God of Israel, should be put to death whether young or old, man or woman.

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Now, on the surface, this might seem good, but it's not. Let me explain.

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This is not merely a renewal of the Mosaic Covenant. This is adding to the

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Mosaic Covenant. And you'll note, throughout the Scriptures, when we see prophets arise and they call sinners to repentance, those who have been faithless, those who have committed the sin of idolatry or other sins,

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God always calls them to repentance and assures them of his forgiveness.

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But this covenant that they cut, this covenant's different, and basically says, you must seek

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Yahweh with all your heart, all your soul, or I kill you. You dead.

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Who's going to enforce this? What's going to be the standard for evidence?

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Is this really the kind of covenant that God has made with Israel? No. In fact, a good way to think of it is this.

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This is a covenant that is all law and no gospel.

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And a covenant that is all law without any gospel in it, how long do you think they're going to be committed to keeping that thing?

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I always like to talk about my time as a Nazarene, don't dance, drink, smoke, chew, and you can always tell the

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Nazarenes in the liquor store because they never look up, they always make sure not to make eye contact. But the thing is that you'll note that that kind of approach when it comes to God leads to rank hypocrisy.

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It legitimately does. Where they've set a standard that not even God has kept.

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Because the purpose of the law is to show us our sin. That's its primary purpose.

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It also shows us what a good work is. But to sit here and say, well, you are going, well, thank you

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Azariah for your prophecy, so we're starting a new covenant, we're making a new pact with God.

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If you don't seek God with all your heart, you're dead. It doesn't matter who you are. If you're young or old or whatever, yeesh.

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And here's the thing, you do this and it's just a matter of time before you are caught by your own standard.

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And that's the problem. And I would note that people wither away.

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Their faith isn't built by such legalistic standards. Their faith is oftentimes hurt and impaired by it.

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You'll note that if there's a funny thing that happens when you have a generation that goes hard into legalism, a form of pietism that is not exactly the piety of Scripture, and they rigidly demand that people obey that standard, the generation that grows up underneath that, they swing hard to the left.

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And what do they end up doing? They basically end up abandoning God altogether and making things far, far worse.

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But both errors are wrong. Legalism, pietism, not piety, legalism, pietism is one extreme, and on the other side you have liberal licentiousness.

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Both of them are errors. And that requires us to consider that Scripture teaches us to hold law and gospel in tension.

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You cannot break this tension. And this is where Asa is going to go off the rails.

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Now you'll note, right out of the chute after they make this covenant, Asa even goes after one of the most privileged women in all of Judah, his own mother, the queen mother.

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He deposed her, took her out of her job, why? Because she made a detestable image for Asherah.

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Asa cut down her image, crushed it, burned it at the Brook Kidron, but the high places were not taken out of Israel.

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That's the northern kingdom. He had no say about that. Nevertheless, the heart of Asa was holy true all of his days, but the thing is you can see he's drifting.

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He brought into the house of God the sacred gifts of his father, his own sacred gifts, silver and gold and vessels.

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He gives gifts, gives tithes and offerings to the temple. Good thing, but there's something going to go wrong here.

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And then there was no more war until the 35th year of the reign of Asa.

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And this is where peace then disappears and you can see what's happened.

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So all of that covenant was done in the 15th year of his reign. We fast forward to the 35th year of his reign, 20 years later, and in the 36th year of the reign of Asa, Baasha, the king of Israel, went up against Judah and built

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Ramah. Basically think of it this way. This is an early attempt at Trump's wall and the whole goal here is to keep people from leaving the northern kingdom and coming down to the southern kingdom, to keep them bottled in and use

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Ramah strategically as a fortress city that he can then harass and maybe even launch an attack against the southern kingdom so that he might permit no one to go out or to come to Asa, the king of Judah.

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Then Asa took silver and gold, and watch the word, from, from the treasures of the house of Yahweh and the king's house.

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He took it from where? He went into the temple's bank account and decided he was going to empty it.

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Isn't that stealing? And isn't that stealing from, you know, God?

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That's kind of the point. What about this covenant that you made back in the 15th year of your reign?

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Anybody who doesn't seek Yahweh with all of his heart shall be put to death. Doesn't matter if they're young or old, right?

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Well, I would say that stealing from God is the opposite of, well, seeking the

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Lord, right? We're just going to take from God, okay?

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So he took all the silver and gold, took it, and sent it to the king of Syria.

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His name is Ben -Hadad, and he said, there's a covenant between me and you, as there was between my father and your father.

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Behold, I'm sending to you silver and gold. You go break your covenant with Bashar, the king of Israel, so that he may withdraw from me.

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Then Ben -Hadad listened to King Asa and sent the commanders of his armies against the cities of Israel, and they conquered

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Eshon, Dan, Abimeim, and the store cities of Naphtali. And when Bashar heard of it, he stopped building

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Ramah and let his work cease. Then King Asa took all Judah, and they carried away the stones of Ramah and its timber with which

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Bashar had been building, and with them he built Geba and Mizpah. And there's

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Asa going, yes, job well done, we've achieved our objectives, but there's a problem here, and it's a big problem.

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Remember that covenant that you made that you needed to seek the Lord with all your heart? So God sends a prophet, a seer by the name of Hanani, and he came to Asa, the king of Judah, and said to him, because you relied on the king of Syria and did not rely on Yahweh your

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God, the army of the king of Syria has escaped you. Were not the

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Ethiopians and the Libyans a huge army with very many chariots and horsemen? Yet, because you relied on Yahweh, he gave them into your hand.

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For the eyes of Yahweh run to and fro throughout the whole earth to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward him.

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You have done foolishly in this, for from now on you will have wars.

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Whoops. Now, remember when David was confronted with his sin, the whole

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Bathsheba, Uriah the Hit type thing, murder, adultery, it still makes the headlines if you think about it.

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When he was confronted by Nathan the prophet, what did David say? I have sinned against Yahweh.

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That's all he said. That would have been the right thing for him to do, but here's the thing, hypocrites can't, hypocrites can't ever admit that they've done anything wrong.

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It's like dealing with a theological Karen, okay? It's a bad, bad space to be in.

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And so hypocrites, they never do anything wrong, they deflect, they project, they punish, it's just a mess.

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And so what did Asa do when he was confronted by God's prophet, Hanani?

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It says Asa was angry with the seer and put him in stocks in prison for he was in a rage with him because of this, which means

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Hanani is now being persecuted for speaking the truth.

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So note, Asa didn't repent, instead he put

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Hanani in prison and put him in the stocks, which means his hands and his feet were probably fettered because you'll note ancient prisons were not exactly the greatest of places, right?

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I'm sure he wasn't playing basketball and lifting weights at the lunch hour out in the playground, okay?

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Something very different. So and Asa then also inflicted cruelties upon some of the people at the same time.

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And what's the problem here? Again, he has taken the word of God and turned it all the way up to 11 on the law, but doesn't understand how mercy and forgiveness, repentance, and God even forgiving of sins.

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Rather than confessing, he's now punishing the one who spoke the truth to him. And then we learn that God, well, not only took peace away from Judah at this time, but very shortly after this,

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Asa gets sick. And his sickness is kind of a poetic justice, if you think about it.

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The Acts of Asa from the first to the last, they're written in the book of the Kings of Judah. And so in the 39th year of his reign, just a few years later,

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Asa was diseased in his feet, and his feet became, and his disease became severe.

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One has to wonder, is this an undiagnosed form of, what, diabetes maybe that we're dealing with here, losing his feet.

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And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. He put Hanani in prison in the stocks, fettered his hands and his feet, well, guess whose feet now are going to be punished as well.

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You see, God, when he punishes, he's very meticulous about how he does it. Now, important to note here, the scriptures say very consistently that Asa always had faith in God.

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That is not the problem here. Asa here is now being disciplined by God because he's theologically and morally in the wrong.

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And as a result of it, he's being stubborn and pigheaded, just like hypocrites are prone to do.

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And so God is allowing him to suffer in the hopes that he would repent, that he would see his wrong, and that he would ask

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God to forgive, and maybe even ask Hanani to forgive him for doing what he did.

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It says this, though, terrible words. Yet, even in his disease, he did not seek Yahweh, but he sought the help from physicians.

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Now, we have to tear this one apart a little bit here. In the ancient world, physicians didn't exist like the way we know them.

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So you go to Altru, you make an appointment with the doctor, you go in and they run tests and things like this, and then they do an

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MRI, a CAT scan, they do blood work, all this kind of stuff, and then they come back and say, here's what's wrong with you.

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Physicians back in Asa's day were a little bit more in the camp of soothsayers, and there was witchcraft and things like this involved.

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And this is not a good thing. So it's important to note here that this is not telling us that we are sinning if we go to the doctor.

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And you'll note, as Christians, when we run into the inevitable bodily breakdown, what do we do?

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We pray, right? We pray for a lot of people here every single Sunday.

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We pray. But in praying, do we then not seek the help of doctors and professionals? Of course we don't.

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We do. We go and we see our doctor, and if the doctor says, here's what's wrong with you, and prescribes something and a medical treatment and it works, what do we say?

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Thank you, Lord, for healing me. How did he heal you? Through his doctor. Through your doctors, right?

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But here's the thing, Asa didn't seek Yahweh at all.

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When faced with his own mortality, he didn't even cry out to God at all.

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What is that? I would say that's a bad and foolish and faithless thing to do.

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Because God allows and God inflicts things on people for the hope that they would seek him and repent.

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So, Asa slept with his fathers, dying in the 41st year of his reign.

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And what do we learn from this? Well, number one, peace is one of those things that comes from God, but also war.

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Conflict, difficulties, pain, and suffering, these are all brought on by God for our good in whatever it is that he sends these things.

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And then we also need to recognize this, and that is that Asa's story truly is a warning to us.

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A warning to us that each and every one of us are capable of falling. Each and every one of us, even if we had a good start in our lives, we can end well.

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We cannot rest on the laurels of our faith from yesterday, but we must continue to believe

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Christ is the one who endures to the end will be saved. But endures in what? Legalism?

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No. Endures in penitent faith in our God, who is the one who has brought us peace.

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If you were to think about it this way, the one who ended up having to die for Asa's foolishness, for Asa's ridiculous, stubborn refusal to recognize his own sin, that had to be his great -great -great -great grandson,

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Jesus, who bore his sins on the tree. And you'll note that unlike Asa, Jesus never pillaged and plundered the temple of God or stole its money.

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In fact, he was quite zealous because there were people who had turned the temple of God into a money -changing venture, and Jesus made a whip of cords and drove them out.

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Get out of here, right? And also, Jesus, he humbly, humbly continued to seek the

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Father, even in the face of his own death, and he cried out,

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Lord God, my Father, if it's possible, let this cup pass from me. But again, not my will, but your will be done.

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Where Asa ended poorly, Christ never, ever faltered.

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And this is good news for us because each and every one of us, we do have seasons in our lives when we do falter.

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Lent is a time for us to again consider the different ways in which we have fallen short.

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And maybe one of the ways that we have fallen short is taking the gospel for granted and somehow putting our faith on, well, autopilot, by letting the law just continue to be the thing that we focus on, rather than both law and gospel.

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But Christ is the one who has bled and died for us, and he has promised us, because he is the

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Prince of Peace, that we now are reconciled to God, the warfare is ended, and that because of what he has done, and we now trusting in him because he's given us the gift of faith, we have nothing to fear from God, even if there be war, or difficulty, or prison in our lifetime, or whatever it is that faces us.

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But all of this, he's assured us that we have a right standing before God because he has gone to the cross, borne your sins and mine, even the sins of King Asa.

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So as we again consider this Lenten time, a time of repentance, it's good to look back on our life as Christians and ask the question, have we slipped into, quite innocently, and yet very deadly, have we in any way slipped into a form of legalism, a form of pietism that masquerades as true piety?

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When we are confronted with our sins, do we get annoyed and want to punch the pastor in the face of the person delivering the message?

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Or do we recognize that it's true, that we have fallen short, right? Are we hypocritical in claiming that we have a covenant with God and a right standing with him while all the while doing the very things that that covenant says that we ought not to do, right?

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You'll note that in biblical Christianity, there is no room for hypocrisy, none at all, because in biblical

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Christianity, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, you and I, all of us together. And there is no place for us to look down on any other person because we're all down on the same level, the level of sinner saved by grace through faith.

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So may God grant us to end well, to run our course well, and to finish well, unlike King Asa, whose story stands as a warning to us of those who trust in their good works rather than in God.

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In the name of Jesus, Amen. If you would like to support the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, you can do so by sending a tax -free donation to Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, MN 56744 And again that address is

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Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, MN 56744 We thank you for your support.

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All of our teaching messages may be freely distributed as long as you do not edit or change the content of the message.