OPENING STORY: Wife goes with husband to doctor. Doctor examines the husband and diagnose that the husband is critically ill has but perhaps there might be a slim chance of a cure otherwise he has only one week to live.
The doctor takes the man’s wife into the next room and reports his finding to her privately. “His only hope to be cured is for you to relieve all his stresses. You can extend his time by rubbing feet and back, cooking his favorite meals, relieve him of all stress by letting him go fishing, waiting on him hand and foot, etc. Be as affectionate as when you were first married.
The wife returns to her husband and he asks, “Honey, what did doctor say?”
She replies, “You’re going to die.”
You see many people do not get healed, not because their condition is incurable, but they’re not healed because they do not want to follow the doctor’s orders.
More than that, the wife is like the church and her husband is like our community and our nation
We know what we need to do, we are just too lazy to do it.
Background
The first few chapters of 2 Chronicles record the building of the Temple of God, under King Solomon.
• The Temple was completed and Solomon dedicated it to the Lord, in chapter 6.
• He knelt down before God’s people, spread his hands out toward heaven, and said a long prayer – a prayer for the nation, asking God for His blessings
The passage we read was God’s response to his prayer.
Solomon’s prayer is a long prayer – in 2 Chron 6:14-39.
will look at verses 24-30 to understand the context.
Both Solomon’s prayer and God’s answer is full of conditional statements IF – THEN a mathematical equation
If A then B
2 Chronicles 6:24–25
24 “Or IF Your people Israel are defeated before an enemy because they have sinned against You, and return and confess Your name, and pray and make supplication before You in this temple, 25 THEN hear from heaven and forgive the sin of Your people Israel, and bring them back to the land which You gave to them and their fathers.
2 Chronicles 6:26–27
26 “WHEN the heavens are shut up and there is no rain because they have sinned against You, WHEN they pray toward this place and confess Your name, and turn from their sin because You afflict them, 27 THEN hear in heaven, and forgive the sin of Your servants, Your people Israel, that You may teach them the good way in which they should walk; and send rain on Your land which You have given to Your people as an inheritance.
2 Chronicles 6:28-29
28 “WHEN there is famine in the land, pestilence or blight or mildew, locusts or grasshoppers; WHEN their enemies besiege them in the land of their cities; whatever plague or whatever sickness there is; 29 whatever prayer, whatever supplication is made by anyone, or by all Your people Israel, WHEN each one knows his own burden and his own grief, and spreads out his hands to this temple:
2 Chronicles 6:30
30 THEN hear from heaven Your dwelling place, and forgive, and give to everyone according to all his ways, whose heart You know (for You alone know the hearts of the sons of men),
Why would there be famine in the land, with pestilence and blight?
Solomon in his prayer acknowledges an important fact to God
2 Chronicles 6:36
36 “WHEN they sin against You (for there is no one who does not sin) . . .
Notice the when and not if. Sin is something we are all guilty of.
. . . for all have sinned.
Now watch. God answers Solomon much in the same way he prayed
2 Chronicles 7:13
WHEN I shut up heaven and there is no rain, or command the locusts to devour the land, or send pestilence among My people,
2 Chronicles 7:14
IF My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, THEN I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.
Let’s break this down.
If My people
Just who are God’s people?
In reference to this this passage; it is the people of Israel.
These are people who are called by My name.
These people of Israel, the Jews, had become quite arrogant.
they were after all the chosen people of God.
It is not like God would ever do anything to His people?
They had just dedicated the magnificent Temple.
God said in just a few verses later:
2 Chronicles 7:16
For now I have chosen and sanctified this house, that My name may be there forever; and My eyes and My heart will be there perpetually.
They now have the security of the Temple. Or do they?
Fast forward 400 years
Jeremiah 7:3–4
Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: “Amend your ways and your doings, and I will cause you to dwell in this place. 4 Do not trust in these lying words, saying,
‘The temple of the LORD,
the temple of the LORD,
the temple of the LORD are these.’
They have developed a “Temple theology”
God would never destroy His temple?
God would never destroy his people.
But in 582 BC, about 400 years after the temple was dedicated, God allowed the foreign nation of Babylon to come in and utterly destroy Jerusalem and the temple.
God even said this was a possibility:
2 Chronicles 7:19–20
“But IF you turn away and forsake My statutes and My commandments which I have set before you, and go and serve other gods, and worship them, 20 THEN I will uproot them from My land which I have given them; and this house which I have sanctified for My name I will cast out of My sight, and will make it a proverb and a byword among all peoples.
God told His people: I built you up and I can take you down.
2 Chronicles 7:21-22
“And as for this house, which is exalted, everyone who passes by it will be astonished and say, ‘Why has the LORD done thus to this land and this house?’ 22 Then they will answer, ‘Because they forsook the LORD God of their fathers, who brought them out of the land of Egypt, and embraced other gods, and worshiped them and served them; therefore He has brought all this calamity on them.’ ”
And the temple ruins will stand to tell the nations a story about a people who has forsaken their God.
This happened to the temple a second time 600 years later.
Luke 21:5–6
Then, as some spoke of the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and donations, He said, 6 “These things which you see—the days will come in which not one stone shall be left upon another that shall not be thrown down.”
Now fast forward 2000 years.
We are a nation that has been blessed by God more than any other nation on the face of the earth.
We are people who have turned our face from God.
The church today has stopped being an influence in our society and in our culture.
We are people (the church) who no longer care for our community.
Let’s look at the passage again,
2 Chronicles 7:14
IF My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, THEN I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.
IF My People.
Do we call ourselves the people of God?
Are we called by His Name
Then name Christians mean those of Christ.
How would Jesus feel about our community?
We know how He felt about His community.
Sitting on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem on Palm Sunday
Luke 19:41
Now as He drew near, He saw the city and wept over it,
Do the things that make Jesus weep make us weep?
We know our land is sick.
When I look out at people and I hear their stories
I know as a people we are dysfunctional
People are hurting, children don’t know who their parents are.
Many children are raising their sibling because mom and or dad is too involved with drugs and alcohol, affairs and etc.
Crime is in the home. Children can no longer play or walk to school alone. – And this is in our little town, right here where we live!
Do we weep over our community, our city, our nation?
God took out Israel – what makes us thing God will not take us out?
People are sick, our community is sick, our nation is sick
And there is a cure? What is that cure?
2 Chronicles 7:14
IF My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, THEN I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.
Will we humble ourselves?
Will we pray?
will we seek out God?
will we turn from our wicked ways? Repent?
This week, I am dealing with the “IF”
Next week I will deal with the “THEN”
We are sick. But there are 2 big problems
1 We do not know we are sick
2. Even if we do know we are sick, we do not want the cure.
Notice in this verse.
We have to do the IF before we can have the “THEN”
Have we individually and collectively as a church:
humbled ourselves
prayed
Sought out God’s face
Repented of our careless attitude? – Which is wickedness.
The only answer, the only cure, is going to Jesus.
We cannot do this ourselves. We cannot fix this ourselves.
All our church programs – it is just so much work, for nothing,
unless we humble ourselves before God, seeking his face
Asking for Him to intervene for it to be worth anything.
Our national and local elections, same things. Will we pray?
Will We seek the Lord as God’s people?
(All Scripture References are from the NKJV)
