Bibliography: One Tin Solder from Billy Jack; Petunia
Listen children, to a story, that was written long ago. About a kingdom, on a mountain, and the valley folk below.
On the mountain, was a treasure, burried deep beneath a stone and the valley people swore they’d have it for their very own.
So the people of the valley, sent a message up the hill, asking for the buried treasure, tons of gold for which they’d kill. Came an answer, from the kingdom, with our brothers, we will share, all the secrets, of our mountain, all the riches buried there.
Now the valley, cried with anger, mount your horses, draw your swords, and they killed the, mountain people. So they won their just rewards. Now they stand, beside the treasure, on the mountain, dark and red. Turned the stone, and looked beneath it... “Peace on earth” was all it said.
Have you ever heard these words to this song, One Tin Soldier from the 70’s? What strikes me about the song is that the people of the valley had no idea what was written on that stone tablet.
If they had known it wasn’t gold, I would like to think they wouldn’t have been so eager to kill the mountain people.
If they had known what was written on the stone, would they have tried to live differently? If they knew what the treasure really was, would THAT have made a difference in how they interacted with the mountain people and with one another?
Our Bible lesson this evening is one that comes from the chronologies of the Jewish kings long ago. The storyteller tells of one king who was very different from his predecessors.
Josiah was just a boy - 8 years old when he became king, and what the storyteller tells us is that Josiah was faithful to God.
I’m afraid the temples and synagogues had fallen into disrepair from disuse. Those who had led the country before Josiah didn’t spend a lot of time in worship. There was lots of idol worship going on then - lots of attempts to do the culturally popular thing of that day.
So the house of God was in bad shape. Josiah ordered funds to be handed over to the workers - the carpenters, builders and masons - to repair the temple, and make it a central place of worship once again.
It was while this work was going on that the high priest found a scroll - the book of law from the Bible - the book we call Deuteronomy. This book that gave instruction on how to be a faithful Jew was found among the rubble in the temple.
The book was taken to the king. It was read aloud to the king, and when Josiah heard it, he grieved.
He grieved because the people had not been living faithfully to God’s word. He grieved because he had been ignorant and uninformed, living without a whole piece of his identity, his faith, without a whole piece of his relationship with God.
The book contained the basics in moral instruction handed down from God to the leader of the Israelites, Moses, while the people had been nomads wandering homeless in the desert.
It told the story of how they had been people who were oppressed and slaves in Egypt. It told how God had delivered the people from their oppressors and how the people were to remember this event in worship - remembering God’s grace and favor, remembering God’s faithful presence.
The book told of how the people of Israel had been blessed with a home and land to settle in. And it told how to live a faithful life, providing guidelines. God’s instruction through these words, was that to follow these guidelines and to strive to lead a faithful life was to live a life of peace and harmony.
But to ignore God and to ignore God’s word results in a life of distress and disquiet, of suffering and sorrow.
Josiah grieved, because the people of Israel had NOT been faithful to God. Leaders before him had ignored God’s word, and all around him, Josiah saw the result in the lives of his people.
distress and disquiet, suffering and sorrow, division and lack of peace reigned in the land.
Josiah acted immediately. He called together all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem. He went up to the temple with the priests and all the people from the least to the greatest of them, and he read the word of God that had been discovered in the temple.
He called it the Book of the Covenant. And after he read the words from God he renewed the covenant to lead the people of Israel as faithful followers of God.
Then Josiah removed all obstacles that would interfere with a life with God. He removed all forms of idols and other places that were distracting and that had come first in the lives of the people before God had.
And when all obstacles to faithful worship and obedience to God had been removed, King Josiah ordered the celebration of the Passover, the ancient feast that celebrated God’s grace and deliverance when the people of Israel had been slaves in Egypt. You see, faithful worship was a designated part of God’s word for living a faithful life.
Our storyteller tells us that the Passover celebration had not been remembered for a long time in Israel, and there wasn’t a more faithful king in the history of Israel’s kings that Josiah who turned to the Lord with all of his heart, soul, and strength.
Now what are we to learn from this young leader who discovered God’s word? As we look at cultivating the holy habit of reading the Bible, what does his story say to us?
First of all, Josiah had a heart for God. Josiah, we could say, wanted to cultivate those holy habits in himself. He had a desire to explore God’s word and discover how it instructed his life and how to live faithfully as God’s servant.
Josiah had a heart for God.
Josiah also read God’s word diligently. His passion for God drove him to discover more about God, and one of the ways Josiah did that was to explore the Bible, the sacred Scriptures and to let those Scriptures be instructions for his life.
Josiah was diligent about reading God’s word.
Josiah implemented the teachings he discovered into his whole way of life. Josiah followed the teaching he discovered, incorporating the instruction the Bible provided him in how to live.
The Bible helped Josiah discover how to be the person God had created him to be.
And not only was Josiah changed, but the lives of all those he touched were changed. Josiah influenced all those he came in contact with - and not only because he was king.
It wasn’t only those in Josiah’s own life who were touched by his life of faithfulness. Our storyteller is very impressed by the life of Josiah, the king who turned to the Lord with all of his heart, soul, and strength, who is remembered as one of the most faithful people of his time.
Reading the Bible changed the life of Josiah and the people of Israel.
What about us? What about our lives?
Do we turn to the Bible for guidance in our life today? Do we continue to read it, to let it instruct us and change us? Or is it basically lost and forgotten in the rubble of our lives?
Cleland Boyd McAfee tells this story about a newspaper reporter who searched for David Livingston, a missionary to Africa.
Naturally he (meaning the newspaper reporter) had made up his load as light as possible. Of books he had none save the Bible; but wrapped about his bottles of medicine and other articles were many copies of newspapers.
Stanley (that is the reporter’s name) says that “strangest of all his experiences were the changes wrought in him by the reading of the Bible and those newspapers in melancholy Africa.” He was frequently sick with African fever, and took up the Bible to while away his hours of recovery. During the hours of health he read the newspapers. “And thus, somehow or other,” he reports, “my views toward newspapers were entirely recast.”
“As seen in my loneliness, there was this difference between the Bible and the newspapers. The one reminded me that apart from God my life was but a bubble of air, and it made me remember my Creator; the other fostered arrogance and worldliness.”
What about us? Are we dilligent about discovering our connection with God through studying the Scriptures?
Or do we have trouble getting started? Or maybe we have good intentions. You know this isn’t the first time we’ve ever considered our committment to Bible reading at Grace. Maybe we start out with good intentions, meaning to read the Bible on a regular basis, but somewhere we got distracted and we really haven’t read it all that much.
I can understand that.
There are two very important points that impact our committment to reading the Bible.
The first is this:
Reading the Bible won’t change us unless we want it to change us. Our motivation for reading is a huge determining factor in what we will get out of it.
One Bible student had this to say about it:
If we read the Bible only as a duty saying “I am a believer, I must read the Bible no matter what,” it becomes a dry matter of routine to us, just an exercise to satisfy our conscience. We are going to miss the joy of meeting with God in His word. We need to come to the matter of reading the Bible with expectation and anticipation, expecting God to speak to us and expecting to get instruction from His word.
Some people say it is God’s love letter to us and they make a rather good analogy. If we received a love letter from somebody, we wouldn’t just leave it alone, we would be reading it over and over again and maybe underlining and circling and so on.
Thats how we should read it - as a love letter from God.
When we read the Bible, what do we expect to get out of it? Do we see it as a duty, or do we really and truly seek a relationship with God?
The second element to made about reading the Bible is this:
Prayer is a vital element to Bible reading. Its not by accident that we began this faith journey, discovering what habits we should cultivate by looking at our prayer life.
Prayer is that vital communication link to God that makes what we read come to life. Reading the Bible without prayer is like talking about someone who is in the room with your rather than talking directly to them.
You’ve seen that before...Harold is blind, and the waitress at the restaruant will ask his wife how he would like his coffee. Harold obviously is incapable for answering for himself at the very least, and it is more likely that he can’t make a decision for himself.
God says to us, “I am right here. Ask me, and I show you what I want you to know about me.”
When we read, we should first pray. There is an intimacy with God that comes with prayer. We should ask God to fan our desire to discover something new in our relationship with God.
We should ask God to help us grow in our faith and in our relationship with God through our reading.
Prayer and our desire to know God are two vital elements that will in some ways determine the committment we make, our faithfulness to that committment, and what we will glean from it.
In 1950, Roger Duvoison wrote his first story about a goose named Petunia. One day in her barnyard meandorings, Petunia found something she knew to be treasured by her human companions and caretakers.
It was a book.
(I hope I am remembering Petunia’s story correctly. Its been a long time since I’ve read it and I couldn’t locate it this week.)
Now that Petunia found herself in possession of something so valuable, she found herself rising in her own esteem and that of her fellow barnyard friends.
She began going around the barnyard quoting the phrase, “She who owns books is wise.”
Are we suprised by her behavior?
Do we ever treat our own faith in God in the same way? Do we see something missing in Petunia’s life? Do we see something missing in our own?
It wasn’t long before Petunia began acting upon her self-made importance. And the barn animals, believing in her proclamation that she who owns books is wise, trusted in her remedies for their many problems.
They were miserable; they were confused; but they trusted Petunia. She was, after all, in possession of the book.
And then one day, a box fell off a truck passing on the road in front of the farm.
Petunia was summoned. She would know what to do. She would know what the word said that was printed on the side of the box.
What a momentous occassion. Petunia could not disappoint. But Petunia had a problem. You see, Petunia couldn’t read. She did, indeed, have possession of the book, but Petunia was ignorant of what was inside it.
Ever feel like Petunia?
She faced the expectant eyes of her friends, and pronounced that
D-y-n-o-m-i-t-e
spelled candles.
There were candles in the box. So matches were brought out and soon all the barnyard animals had a lit candle.
Only soon it became apparent that they weren’t candles. And from Petunia’s assumptions, all of the animals soon learned a very important and painful lesson.
Petunia altered her wise expression. “She who owns books and READS them is wise.”
Could the same be said for our Bible? Is our Christian faith one we possess but that is not informed? Do we continue to feed it daily from the word of God?
As we look at cultivating holy habits in our life that will lead us to be better Christians and help us further along the journey of become the person God created us to be,
what committment will we make in reading our Bible?
Will we climb one step in our journey?
I invite you to be prayerfully considering the committment we will make 7 days from now.
In the spirit of Petunia: One who owns a Bible and reads it is wise.
Amen.
