“A National Reckoning” – FBC Morning Light (7/4/2024)

Well, a good Thursday morning to you, and a happy Independence Day. And let me just say right off the bat that I'm grateful to be an

American. I'm thankful that God in His grace and His providence, His purposes, has allowed me to be born and live my life in the

United States of America. I believe it has been the greatest country on the planet.

I would not want to be a citizen of any other country. And I'm just glad to be an

American. With that said, I do think it would be prudent for us to listen to the

Lord's words of prophecy in Isaiah chapter 3 against His people, against Judah, and see what we can learn from it.

Okay? So, here was a nation, Judah, that was supposed to be loyal to the

Lord, that had been granted incredible privileges. They had been chosen by God as a people, they'd been given this land, the

Lord just provided for them in many, many miraculous ways, protected them, preserved them, and yet now when we come to this chapter, this is what the

Lord says to His people in Jerusalem and Judah. He says, Thus says the

Lord of hosts, Behold, the Lord of hosts takes away from Jerusalem and from Judah the stock and the store, the whole supply of bread and the whole supply of water.

In other words, He's sending drought and famine. He's taking away the mighty man and the man of war.

He's depleting their military. He's taking away the judge and the prophet, the justice and righteous proclamation of the truth, the diviner and the elder, those who are good leaders.

He's taking away the captain of fifty and the honorable man, the counselor and the skillful artisan and the expert enchanter.

The Lord is removing all of these leaders from the land,

He's removing prosperity from the land, He's depleting the military of the nation, and in verse 4

He says, I will give boys to be their princes and babes shall rule over them.

Instead of good, qualified statesmen as their leaders, you get children that just don't have any sense.

And He says the people will be oppressed, every one by another and every one by his neighbor.

The child will be insolent toward his elder and the base toward the honorable.

You see a complete lack of respect and respect for property as well as person in verse 5 and you see oppression by people.

Now, the reason I read that and looked at these things pretty specifically is we see a lot of this in our own nation.

You think about the heritage of this nation and what we have been blessed with and some of the statesmen that have stood in places of leadership and the multiple opportunities for the gospel to be proclaimed, heard, heeded, and followed in these

United States. It's truly been unprecedented from anywhere in the world, ever in history, and yet what are we experiencing in our age?

Aren't we experiencing some of these same sorts of things? All right, let me be careful, I want to make it very clear.

I do not think that the United States of America is a modern equivalent of the chosen land of Israel and Judah in the

Old Testament. I don't believe that. But what I do see here is that as Judah, as God's people in Israel and Judah, had incredible privileges from the blessing of God, God's hand of blessing was poured out upon his people.

They were unfaithful to those blessings. They snubbed God, turned away from him completely, chased after other idols and gods and so forth.

God says, this is what I'm bringing upon you. In fact, you read on, and verse 9 says, well, verse 8, it says,

Jerusalem stumbled and Judah is fallen because their tongue and their doings are against the

Lord to provoke the eyes of his glory. The look on their countenance witnesses against them.

How so? What's the look on their countenance? And they declare their sin as Sodom.

They do not hide it, woe to their soul, for they have brought evil upon themselves.

You know, what grieves me most about our country is not that we are a replacement of Israel and that the

United States is the chosen land of God, but what grieves me is that clearly

God has blessed this land in some pretty unique ways, from its founding down through the couple of centuries since its founding.

Tremendous blessing, and mostly spiritual blessing. We have had incredible opportunities for the spread of the gospel in this country, and consequently there has been, through the centuries and the decades, there has been plenty of good moral teaching based upon biblical truth, biblical principles, biblical morals.

And yet, what are we seeing today? We're seeing the same kind of a thing.

We're seeing that as a nation, not everybody in it, but in terms of official countenancing as a nation, we are declaring our sin as Sodom.

We are actively promoting things like the

Pride Month and all that kind of stuff, and promoting the transgenderism of little children, and on and on we can go.

You know the vices, they're abundantly clear, they're declared openly, and it says they have brought evil upon themselves.

What grieves me is I think that we, in our country, as a nation, have brought evil upon ourselves, and I don't think we've seen the end of it yet.

I long for a revival among those who are truly

God's people, and an awakening in our land to see ourselves as we really are, and to see

God as He really is, and to see the glorious provision of salvation that He has graciously provided,

He's graciously made, and that there would be a widespread turning to the

Lord of hosts, the God of the Bible. This is what I would long for, for our nation.

I hope you do as well. So on this Independence Day, let's pray for freedom from sin.

Our Father and our God, we thank you that we live in this land that we live in, and thank you for the freedoms we enjoy, but oh

Lord, that freedom has brought with it, in the hearts of many, even in those in leadership, a wholesale transgression of the

Word of God. Oh Lord, please, I pray, send revival, send awakening, a wholesale return to you, a turning to you, we pray, and we would ask this in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, however you spend the rest of this Independence Day, I trust the Lord will bless you in it, and you'll have a good day, and your heart will be blessed and challenged by even what we've read today.