Capital City Church - Part 2 — David Ravenhill

Hezekiah’s Spiritual Model and the Influence of Godly Examples

My father was a great man of God, great prayer warrior, preached for 70 years, started preaching on the streets of England when he was 17, died at age 87. So 70 entire years in the ministry. And I could never look at him and say that he was a hypocrite.

I could never say that his message was one thing and the pulpit in his life was totally different. That was not the case. He was a great man of God and a man that influenced me, of course, as much as anybody.

But Hezekiah does not have that sort of a father. And so he looks to David, David, a man after God's own heart. I would suggest to you that if you don't have a natural father, find somebody, you know, a Finney or Wesley or whoever it is and say, Listen, I want to be like this man.

This man challenges me, whether it's Hudson Taylor or Charles Finney or John Wesley or David Brainerd or some other great man, a woman of God, and say, That's the sort of man I want to grow up to be like.

That's the sort of woman I want to grow up to be like. And so he patterns his life after this great man of God, David. Verse 3, In the first year of his reign, in the first month, he opened the doors of the house of the Lord and he repaired them.

The first year of his reign, the first month of his reign. And if you will allow me to combine two verses, if you go over into verse 17. Now they began the consecration on the first day of the first month.

Let's put those two verses together. The first day of the first month and read verse 3 again. In the first year of his reign, in the first month of his reign, on the first day of his reign, he opened the doors of the house of the Lord and he repaired them.

Putting God First and Repairing the Inner Temple

That's what I call priority. When we get that serious about putting God first, where we don't put it off for another day, another week, another month, because, well, I'm getting involved in business right now, or I'm just taking my finals in school or whatever it is, and we've always got some sort of excuse, this man, the very first day, the very first month, the very first year of his reign, he tackles a problem.

The problem is God's house. And the first thing he does, he opens the doors. The reason he opens the doors is because inside there is all sorts of uncleanness. As we work through most of this chapter together, you will find out that he does not do a single thing to the outside of God's house.

The problem was not external. The problem was internal. Let me suggest to you that as we look at God's house, keep in mind that in the Old Testament, God dwelt in buildings made with hands, but according to the New Testament, God no longer dwells in buildings made with hands, but this is God's house now.

And the problem with God's house now is what was the problem in the Old Testament. It is not external, it's internal. Most of us look pretty good. We know how to dress up the house of God. It doesn't need too much fixing up.

The problem is an internal problem, and the uncleanness is internal, it's not external. But he has, first of all, to open the doors, and then it says he repaired them. Doors serve a two-fold function, to permit access and to prevent access.

When you go home tonight, you will open the door to your house. It will permit you access. Hopefully, you won't have to climb down the chimney or through the window. You're not Santa. And so you will go through the door, but once you get through that door, you will close that door and deadbolt it to prevent access.

In other words, doors have to be repaired. You don't just leave them open. They need to respond at certain times. They also need to close at certain times. The psalmist says, lift up your heads or your gates, be you lifted up, your everlasting doors, that the King of glory may come in.

There are times we need to open the door. But the psalmist says, I've set a watch over the door of my lips. In other words, I know when to close the doors. This temple has got doors. The eye, again, is a door.

If the eye be singled, the whole body is full of light and so on. These ears can defile. If I allow these ears to open to the wrong sort of thing, it can defile this body. My eyes can defile this body.

My mouth can defile the body and so on. So the doors have to be repaired. Again, behold, I stand, what, at the door and knock. If any man open the door, I will come in. I'll sup with him and he with me.

And so the first thing he does, he repairs the doors to the house of the Lord. But the doors, first of all, had to be open. One of the great strategies of the enemy is to try and get you to never open the doors.

In other words, not to expose what is going on internally. You know, after all, I've lived with this problem now for years. I'm an elder. I'm a person in the church that people look up to and so on and so forth.

And if I were to open the doors now, what would people think? And so the enemy comes along and convinces us, do not open that door. After all, you've tried to open it in the past and nothing has happened.

You've never got help. You know, there's no answer to your problem and so on and so forth. And so we live behind closed doors. I pastored for many, many years. I imagine I've heard just about every type of sin confessed.

But I remember one couple that drove about 60 miles to come to the last church that I pastored. They would be there at just about every meeting, there at the prayer meeting, there at the Sunday morning service, other meetings.

Many times the two of them would come up and help counsel. I looked to them as a faithful, reliable couple, a couple that, again, tied and were very much a regular part of the activities of the church.

One day I noticed that he was scheduled to come and see me, the gentleman. He came into my office and after a few sort of pleasantries of just talking, all of a sudden he got very serious. And he said, I need to tell you something.

I've been in an incestuous relationship with my daughter for the last number of years. Many years, in fact. The daughter had been adopted as a child, a baby, and starting at a very young age, she was now in her teens.

There had been this incestuous relationship. My jaw sort of dropped a little bit because all of a sudden the doors opened. I never imagined, not ever dreamed that such a thing was possible out of this particular gentleman.

But you see, he was willing, again, honest enough to open the door because that uncleanness had built to a place where he knew he could not continue on. But many times the enemy will tell us, listen, whatever you do, don't open the door.

I could tell you stories like that. I'm sure almost every pastor could. Amazing, isn't it, what goes on behind closed doors. Ezekiel had the vision, of course, of the elders of Israel. He had to tunnel through, and he says there they had all these carved images going on.

They were worshipping all sorts of foreign gods and detestable idols and so on and so forth. God had to give him a revelation of the state of the spiritual leaders, quote unquote, of the nation of Israel.

And he is shocked, horrified to see what is going on, if you like, behind closed doors. Revival begins when we take seriously getting right with God, that which is right in the sight of the Lord. And we don't put it off one day or two days, but the very first day or the very first month or the very first year of His reign, He prepares to open the doors and deal with the situation that needs to be dealt with.

You see, if you go back to the previous chapter, it says there in verse 24, that his father had cut in pieces the utensils of the house of God, and he had closed the doors. The house of God had been off limits.

There was all sorts of idolatry and everything else going on, and God's house was not accessible to the nation of Israel. But now comes this revival, now comes this restoration. Verse 5, He gathers together the leaders.

Consecrating the House of God and Removing Uncleanness

He says, listen to me, O Levites. These are the spiritual leaders, obviously. Consecrate yourself now, consecrate the house of the Lord, the God of your fathers, and carry the uncleanness out from the holy place.

That is the problem. The place that was to be the place of God, the place of God's presence, the habitation of God, is defiled. And that place that God wants as His own, again it was called the holy place, is everything but holy.

It is unclean. And so He prepares to consecrate the Levites and sends them in to carry out the uncleanness. But before He does that, He begins to give us a little bit of a background. He gives us a history of why the house of God is in the condition that it's in.

Verse 6, our fathers have been unfaithful. Our fathers have been unfaithful. They've done evil in the sight of Lord our God and have forsaken Him. Notice that this uncleanness began with a breakdown in their relationship with God Himself.

That's where it begins. It begins with a breakdown in our relationship with God Himself. You have been unfaithful and you have forsaken Him. Unfaithfulness is a word that is tied in with marriage. Unfaithfulness is when you find a mistress, if you like, on the side that somehow gives you more pleasure than your spouse.

Unfaithfulness. I remember during the revival in Pensacola, my wife made friends with a lady. One day I got a call from her husband and he said to me, Listen, I'd love to get together with you. Our wives are becoming friends and doing things together.

I'd like to get to know you. And so we arranged a meeting, went to a restaurant just for a cup of coffee, a tea. And before I knew it, he said to me, he said, As your wife told you very much about our relationship, meaning his relationship with his wife.

And I said, Well, I know just a little bit. And he proceeded to tell me how they were both involved in ministry a number of years ago. He was now in the Bible school. And how his wife had basically sort of been seduced by another leader, fallen in love with this man, had an affair with this man.

And thankfully God had taken her out of that situation. Their marriage had been brought back together. And this had been a number of years ago. But even as he recounted that story, his eyes welled up with tears.

The pain to think that the one that I married, the one that I loved, the one that I set my heart upon would betray me by going after another man. The Bible says in the book of James, you adulterers and adulteresses, know you're not the friendship with the world is enmity against God.

He doesn't say you fornicators because fornication is where there is no marriage. Adultery is where there is sexual activity outside of marriage. Notice how God sees us. God sees us as a married, in a married state.

We are married to the Lord Jesus Christ. And so he says you are an adulterer if our relationship is not good enough and you find more pleasure in the world than you do in relating to me. Pretty serious charge, isn't it?

You're an adulterer. You're an enemy of God. And so he is dealing here with how the problem began. They were, first of all, unfaithful to God himself. They have forsaken him. The next thing he says, they've turned their face away from the dwelling place of the Lord.

You see, when you're unfaithful to an individual, in this case, obviously God himself, then the next thing, you don't want to be where God lives, so to speak. If I could put this into a natural illustration, let's say we've got Tom and Mary.

Tom and Mary are crazy about each other. Maybe high school sweethearts, maybe, you know, she's a cheerleader, he's on the hockey team, I guess, in Canada. And, you know, after every match, Tom's over at Mary's house and they, you know, crazy and going out together and so on and so forth.

And Mary's parents just get used to Tom being around. He's almost one of the family. And then one day, Tom doesn't show up after a game. And maybe the parents think, well, he's been here four nights this week already, you know, we'll give him a break and they give him a pass.

And sure enough, the next game, Tom doesn't show up. And during the week, he doesn't show up. And so finally, you know, Mary's parents say to Mary, they say, hey, Mary, what's going on? I haven't seen Tom for about four days now.

Mary sort of gets a little flustered, drops her head a little bit. She says, well, Dad, we broke up. You see, because there has been a breakdown in their relationship, he no longer wants to be where Mary lives.

He is now not frequenting the house of Mary in that sense. And so when there is a breakdown in our relationship with God, then the next thing is we don't want to be in the presence of God. We don't want to be in God's house.

We turn our back on the house of God. Not only that, but then the spiral begins to spiral out of control, if you like. It says they have also shut the doors of the porch and they've put out the lamps.

The lamp, of course, was the seven-branched candlestick, which symbolized the work and the ministry of the Holy Spirit. In other words, there is no spiritual activity going on in their life. Why? Because they have cut off their relationship with God, and therefore the voice of God is no longer relevant.

They are no longer listening for the voice of God. They're no longer being led by the Spirit of God. And if you recall, if you've studied the tabernacle, that the candlestick was put in a strategic place.

Moses could not just arrange the furniture any place he wanted. God told him exactly where to put it. The candlestick was to give light to what was in front of it, the Bible says. And what was in front of the candlestick was a table of showbread.

In other words, it was the illumination of the Spirit of God symbolically on the Word of God that brought it to life. The letter kills, the Spirit gives life. And yet the light has gone out. There's no revelation, there's no understanding.

You know, the Word of God is dry. You're not getting anything out of it. That is a sign that you need revival. Something has begun to cool in your relationship with God. That passion is missing that you once had.

That fervor that you once had is no longer there. You know, when they announce a special meeting, well, I don't feel like going tonight, you know. That is the beginning of a downward spiral, if you like.

Not only that, it says they've not burned incense. Verse 7. The burning of incense, of course, typifies two things. Prayer, primarily, but also praise. Now, prayer is not simply bringing God a shopping list.

It is fellowship, it's communion with God. Go back to the illustration of Tom and Mary. Tom and Mary are madly in love with each other. At least they were. And as long as they were madly in love, you know, they're tweetering each other and sending emails to each other when they're not together.

And they are maintaining a relationship. But now that the relationship is over, the emails stop. The tweetering stops. You know, the telephone calls stop. The text messaging stops. All of that stops. Why?

Because the relationship is broken. And so here is this downward spiral. It all begins. We've forsaken him. We found another lover. We found something that satisfies us. Now we don't want to be in the house of God.

We'd rather be in the movie house or whatever the substitute happens to be, the hockey house, and so on. But now we are no longer communicating. We no longer have the fellowship that we used to have. And then the last thing it says, nor have they offered the burnt offering.

The burnt offering, of course, was a voluntary offering. The Bible says, Thy people will volunteer freely in the day of thy power. In other words, when God is active in your life, you want to be involved in what God is doing.

Isn't that right? One of the things that every revival does, people get charged up, in a good sense, spiritually speaking, and they want to get involved. But you know what it's like when you're not in a right relationship with God, and the pastor stands up, maybe at the beginning of the year, and he says, Listen, we've had an increase in children in Sunday school this year, and Sister So-and-so is retiring.

She's 99 years of age, and she's been doing this for the last 20 years. And we need somebody to help out with the fifth graders or the six-year-old boys or whatever. He starts, Would anybody like to volunteer?

And all of a sudden, everybody begins to pray. You know what it's like. Because you know, the moment you make contact with pastor, all of a sudden, we sort of bow our heads. And it's like pulling teeth.

You know, I pastored, I know. But you know, when God is doing something, you want to be involved. Listen, I'll do it. Oh, it may cost you your Saturday night. You may have to prepare. Again, some of those kids maybe don't have dads.

Some of those kids need somebody. It's more than just teaching a Sunday school lesson. It's being a pastor to those kids, maybe taking them fishing, taking them on a camping trip, instilling God into their lives, being a spiritual mentor.

And you say, That's too costly. I don't want to do that. But God says, Listen, how much do you love me? Are you prepared to give up your Saturday night, prepared to pray, prepared to give up maybe a Saturday every once in a while, take those kids out, and so on.

But the burnt offerings were no longer being offered. And then verse 8, Therefore, the wrath of the Lord was against Judah. We don't hear much about the wrath of God. I think one of the problems today in much of our preaching is that we have, you know, we've customized a God to our own making.

The psalmist, I think it's Psalm 50, where he talks about, You thought that I was altogether like you are. In other words, we've reduced God down to this, you know, amiable, very cuddly, warm, fuzzy sort of a God that never gets upset, never gets ruffled, and so on and so forth.

And we overemphasize the Father heart of God. He is a Father and so on. But the Bible also talks about the severity of God, the goodness of God and the severity of God. And sometimes we miss the fact that God is also a God of anger.

He is a jealous God. I know what I would feel like, and I know you would too if you were to find out that your wife or your husband had been cheating on you. Boy, all of a sudden I would be angry. There would be a jealousy there to think, you know, that this woman that I've been living with for the last 45 years, you know, has found somebody else or whatever.

God is a God of wrath. It is a righteous wrath. It is a righteous anger. It is not a sinful anger. It is a display of His love, His righteous love towards us. And He is angry. Why? With His own people because they have forsaken Him.

And His wrath is against Judah, the very people of praise. It says that He made them an object of terror, of horror, and of hissing, as you see with your own eyes. For behold, our fathers are fallen by the sword.

Our sons and our daughters and our wives are in captivity for this. Notice He puts the emphasis, first of all, on our fathers. Our fathers are fallen by the sword. In other words, our fathers have been killed.

As a result of that, our sons and our daughters and our wives are in captivity for this. Some of you men, I hope this is not the case, but you may say, listen, I've got a daughter that is sexually active.

I've got a son that's taking drugs and so on and so forth. You've got sons and daughters in bondage. They've been taken captive. Why? Because you yourself have not been the father that you should have been.

You have not put God as a priority in your life. You've had a breakdown in your own relationship, and then you wonder, why is it that my son, why is it that my daughter is in captivity and bondage and so on?

Why is it that death has resulted? Because it says, our fathers are fallen by the sword. You say, well, all that, of course, is Old Testament, and we're in the New Testament now, the new covenant and so on and so forth.

Well, the Bible says, listen, for this cause, many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have already gone to a premature death. You think God does not still get angry, that God does not still sort of pull the plug?

Paul says, listen, many of you, because of your relationship or your lack thereof, your relationship with God is not what it should be. Your relationship with one another is not what it should be. Therefore, many of you are already sick.

Many of you have already died, gone to a premature death and so on. Again, we need to understand that God is a God that is a God of severity, a God of judgment as well as a God of love. And many times we find it hard to balance those two.

So he gives us the background. This is how it all began. He said, this is how this downward spiral began. First of all, a breakdown in your relationship. You forsook me. Then you forsook the house of God.

Then you allowed the lamps to go out and so on and so forth until ultimately you're in this place of bondage and the enemy has come in and many of you have been taken captive. But here is a 25-year-old man, verse 10, Now it is in my heart to make a covenant with the Lord, the God of Israel, that his burning anger may turn away from us.

This man is sincere. Covenants are very serious things. This man doesn't say, listen, I'm going to try for a while to see if we can sort of turn things around. No, he makes a covenant. I am determined to get right with God.

Nothing is going to stop me. This is a covenant. This is a blood sacrifice, if you like, that I am prepared to make in order to see God's burning anger turn away from us. Verse 11, My sons, do not be negligent now.

In other words, quit being apathetic. Quit being indifferent. We talked about that this morning. Basically, wake up. Don't be asleep. For the Lord has chosen you to stand before him, to minister to him, and to be his ministers and burn incense.

Now you'll notice what he is doing here. I believe he's showing them, listen, this is what we have fallen from. This is the privilege that we have neglected. And it is still true. The greatest privilege, he says, is that you and I have access to stand before him.

If you received in the mail tomorrow morning an invitation to go to Parliament to meet with your Prime Minister on a one-on-one basis, have a private luncheon with him, here you'll get in the mail a little embossed card, you know, with the government seal on it and so on, and here is a private personal invitation.

You would be flashing that around, thrilled to think that, listen, I am one of just a handful of people that have ever received one of these, a one-on-one meeting with the Prime Minister, or the Queen of England, or some other dignitary.

And yet we have access into the presence of God, don't we? I may have shared with you before, I picked up a book a number of years ago by A .W. Tozer, and he made a statement that I pondered for quite a while.

He said, imagine if only once a year you could see the stars. In other words, there was only one night a year where the stars were visible, and that day was approaching, and you know that tonight is the night when we can look up into the heavens and see the stars for the first time in the entire year.

This is something that only happens once a year. You would put the children to bed early, especially if they had not experienced this before. And then you would wake them up, and you would take them outside, and they would marvel as they see the stars for the first time.

But he says, because they are accessible every single night, we don't really get that much excitement out of it. It's just mundane. It's something we just take for granted. The stars are there. And he says, in the Old Testament, one man, once a year, had access into the presence of God on that day of atonement.

And yet now that veil has been rent, and we have access 24 -7, but how often do we avail ourselves? If this was the night, once a year, where that veil had not been rent, but let's say that every single one of us, for one night alone, on this particular night, every house of God in Canada would be jammed to the gills, because this is the night where somehow there is an open heaven, and our prayers are going to be answered, where we have access in the presence of God.

But at midnight, that thing closes until another year opens. Boy, it would change everything. But because we have access all the time, we don't avail ourselves of it. And he says, listen, don't forget now, don't be negligent.

God has chosen you to stand before Him. What an honor. The second thing, to minister to Him. I don't understand fully how you can minister to a God that is so absolutely complete within Himself, a God that needs absolutely nothing.

He is self-existent. He is the Holy One. That doesn't just mean in the sense of righteousness and purity, but it means in absolute transcendency. There is none like Him. He is incomparable with anybody else.

And how that One that is so self-sufficient can be ministered to, but He can. We can minister to Him. Again, it boggles the mind, doesn't it? And then it says, and to be His ministers, that you and I can represent God Himself.

We can be ambassadors, as the New Testament says. An ambassador, you check it out in the dictionary, is the highest-ranking office that a person can have outside of a kingdom. In other words, if you were the ambassador to France from Canada, you have all the backing of the government of Canada behind you.

You are the highest-ranking member living outside of that kingdom. And we represent the kingdom of heaven on earth. We are ambassadors for Christ. We represent Him. We have His authority. We have His backing.

We have all the backing of the kingdom of God behind us. And so, this young man gathers together the Levites, and he says, listen, this is what we've lost. This is what sin has done. Sin has separated us from our calling, this holy calling, this sacred calling, this high calling.

We need to get back to it. And the thing that will bring us back to it is to get rid of the uncleanness. And so the process begins. Verse 15, he assembled, or they assembled, their brothers. They consecrated themselves.

They went in to cleanse the house of the Lord according to the commandment of the king by the word of the Lord. Now notice the standard. They went in to cleanse the house of the Lord. According to the word of the Lord.

In other words, the standard was not what is politically correct. The standard was God's word. If God says this is a sin, it's sin. Regardless of what society says. The priests went in to the inner part of the house of the Lord to cleanse it.

Verse 16, and every unclean thing that they found in the temple, they brought out to the court of the house of the Lord. The Levites received it. They carried it out to the Kidron Valley. That was basically the place of fires, the garbage dump, if you like.

Revival’s Thorough Cleansing and Celebration

But notice they went in to the inner part. The psalmist said in his confession in Psalm 51, Thou desirest truth in the inward part. That area that is unknown to anybody else other than you and God. That secret sin.

The Bible talks about the secret sins in the light of your presence. That activity that nobody knows about. Your wife doesn't know about it. Your husband doesn't know about it. It's in the inner part.

The way you think. The things that you're thinking of and so on. Those are the things. God wants to go right in to the very core of your being. In other words, that's revival. Revival gets to the very heart of a matter.

And here is a young man again. He says, listen, don't spare anything. We've got to go right to the very core of the problem. Verse 17, they began the consecration on the first day of the first month. On the eighth day of the month, they entered the porch of the Lord.

They consecrated the house of the Lord in eight days. They finished on the sixteenth day of the first month. Sixteen days. The house of God was not that big. You've got a number of Levites. We're not told exactly how many Levites there were.

But you have the whole Levitical tribe. And so you've got dozens and dozens of men going in there cleaning the house of God. And it takes them sixteen days. This was not a superficial cleaning. This was a thorough cleaning.

What we would call a spring cleaning, if you like. You know, where we don't just dust over a few things. We take everything out and air it out and clean it and make sure it is a thorough cleaning. And then they come to the king and they said, We've cleansed the whole house of the Lord.

The altar of burnt offering and all the utensils. The table of shore bread and all the utensils. All the utensils which King Ahaz has discarded during his reign in his unfaithfulness. Everything was cleansed.

And then you'll notice something. And this is true, I think, of just about every revival. That after this time of consecration, after this time of cleansing, there is now an incredible time of celebration.

You go down to verse 25. And he stationed the Levites in the house of the Lord with cymbals, with harps, with lyres, according to the command of David of Gad, the king's seer, Nathan the prophet. Verse 26.

The Levites stood with the musical instruments of David and the priests with the trumpets. It says, When the burnt offering began, the song of the Lord began and the trumpets, accompanied by the instruments of David, king of Israel.

The whole assembly worshipped. The singers sang, the trumpets sounded. All this continued until the burnt offering was finished. At the completion of the burnt offering, verse 29, the king and all who were present bowed down and worshipped.

Moreover, King Hezekiah and the officials ordered the Levites to sing praises to the Lord with the words of David and Asaph the seer. And they sang praises with joy and they bowed down and they worshipped.

Every revival has produced a whole new batch of songs. Because, as the psalmist says, He lifted me also out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay and what? He put a new song in my mouth. In other words, I want to express what God has done for me.

Not what He did for Charles Wesley, thank God, not what He did for this person, but I want to express how God set me free. And every revival, again, there's been revival songs, an expression of what God has done in the midst and through the work of the Spirit of God.

And we find that following revival, again, there is always this time of rejoicing, this time of celebration. There is a divine order in the Word of God, righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.

And you can never switch those around because there is no peace, the Bible says, for the wicked. First of all, you have to be righteous. In other words, right standing. When you are in a state of righteousness before God, when you are standing right in His eyes, so to speak, then you have the peace of God.

Peace with God, the peace of God. And then, because you have peace, then comes the joy. It is always that order. They are now righteous, they are now standing right before God. As the old hymn says, nothing between my soul and the Savior.

And because of that now, there is this incredible season of joy. They are bowing down, the instruments are going on. I mean, this is a great celebration. It says, verse 35, there were so many burnt offerings.

It says, well, I mean, the last part of the verse, thus the service of the house of the Lord was established again. And Hezekiah and all the people rejoiced over what God had prepared for the people, because the thing came about suddenly.

In other words, it doesn't take long. Suddenly, in this case, of course, 16 days. But that's not long when you consider the state of the nation. This nation was in a place of apostasy. This nation had gone back into idolatry, perversion, every possible degrading thing.

And now a young man, because of his determination, I'm going to put that which is wrong, right in the sight of the Lord. And all of a sudden, God comes. You know, the suddenly is in the Bible. The day of Pentecost, suddenly, the Spirit of God came.