FBC Morning Light – June 13, 2022

A good Monday morning to you. I hope you had a wonderful weekend. I hope you were able to gather with God's people, and I hope you heard from the Lord through his word, and I hope you worshiped the Lord with all of your heart and your soul and your mind and your strength.

You worshiped him in spirit and in truth as you gathered with God's people yesterday. Today, we're reading in the book of Isaiah, and the question comes to my mind, what do I do? What's my first response when I'm faced with some kind of distressing situation, some kind of threatening situation?

What's my first response? What's yours? Do we just start assessing the situation and trying to figure out, okay, what do I need to do? How can I get out of this jam? How can I prevent this thing from happening?

What do I need to do? How can I solve this problem? Or maybe pick up the phone and call somebody. I need your help here. What's the first response in something that's distressing you? What do you do? In Isaiah 37, we get a very helpful example of how to respond in a distressing situation.

You talk about distressing. There is a seriously distressing situation for King Hezekiah and the people of Jerusalem and Judah, because they have been invaded by the Assyrians. The king of Assyria has come.

He has threatened a siege against the city of Jerusalem. He is intending to overthrow it. He's declaring that you don't stand a chance against me, and you know it. All Hezekiah would have to do is just look at recent history, and he could come to that same conclusion that he doesn't stand a chance.

This is an overwhelmingly much more powerful army than anything Hezekiah could raise to fight it and defend himself. He's in a pickle. This is a distressing situation. What does he do? What do we read in verse 1?

It was when King Hezekiah heard it, heard the word from Sennacherib, the leader of the Assyrians, that he tore his clothes, covered himself with sackcloth, and went into the house of the Lord. In other words, he sought the Lord.

He went to the Lord. He went to the Lord as the only one who can help solve this problem, who can get me out of this distressing situation. He sent some emissaries to the prophet Isaiah and asked him to pray for the situation and give any insight that he could offer.

Isaiah came back to him and said, Don't be afraid of the words which you have heard, which the servants of the king of Assyria have blasphemed me. Surely I will send a spirit upon him and he shall hear a rumor and return to his own land.

I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land. That's exactly what ended up happening. Before all was said and done, the king of Assyria, his emissaries, came back to Hezekiah and to the Jews and said, Your days are up.

Your days are numbered. I'm coming back and I'm going to destroy you. He says in verse 10, Thus shall you speak to Hezekiah, the king of Judah. Don't let your God in whom you trust deceive you, saying, Jerusalem shall not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria.

Look, you've heard what we've done to the other places. He goes on in verse 13 and says, Where is the king of Hamath? Where are the other kings that we've attacked? They haven't been able to stand up against us.

Don't let your God deceive you. How does Hezekiah handle this? The same way he handled the earlier thing. Verse 14 says, When Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the messengers and read it, he went up to the house of the Lord, spread it before the Lord, and he prayed, and he prayed.

He sought the Lord. He sought the Lord's help. This prayer of Hezekiah stands as a powerful example of pleading for help from the one true God, the creator of all. Listen to what he says. He says, O Lord God of hosts, the God of Israel, the one who dwells between the cherubim, the God who is over all and above all, you alone of all the kingdoms of the earth.

He's acknowledging that God is sovereign over all nations. This is something to acknowledge in your prayer. You are sovereign over all things. Acknowledge that He is the creator of all things. You made heaven and earth, He says.

Incline your ear, O Lord, and hear. Open your eyes, O Lord, and see. Hear all the words of Sennacherib, which he has sent to reproach the living God. Assess the real scenario here, what's really going on in this situation.

Truly assess it. Truly, Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste of all nations and their lands. I acknowledge that they are a powerful people. Nobody's been able to stand in their way. They have destroyed everybody.

But then he comes to this point in verse 20, he says, Now therefore, O Lord God, save us from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you are the Lord, you alone. He prays for God to deliver him from this distressing situation, but notice that his emphasis is not so that we may be comfortable, so that we may be happy.

Deliver us from this situation so life will go easier for us. Deliver us from this distressing situation, from this overwhelmingly powerful foe, so that you may be glorified, so that everybody will understand that you alone are the God of all the earth.

What a wonderful example of how to deal with a distressing situation. I pray and I trust that we will learn from this and we will develop the mindset, we'll develop the habit of immediately turning to the Lord when we hear news, something happens, comes our way that causes us to fear, that threatens us, and is truly distressing.

May our gut response be, O Lord, I need you to turn to him. Our Father and our God, teach us from this, we pray, and may this be our habit, and may our desire in all of our petitioning you in our distress be not so much the relief of our distress as it is the glorifying of our God.

In this we pray in Jesus' name and for his sake. Amen. All right, we'll have a good rest of your Monday. Hope your week gets off to a great start. Good day.