Our sermon title this morning is The Danger of Good Enough.
There are times in life when nothing less than perfection is
the standard. There's situation where 100% is
the only acceptable standard. We can talk about all kinds of
industries, for instance, where people work.
Careful attention is being paid to make sure everything is
accurate up to standard. Nothing is left to chance, and
when someone does get careless and starts cutting corners,
catastrophic disasters can result.
One of my hobbies is reading and learning about mechanical
flight, airplanes, helicopters, jets and rockets and so on.
It's fascinated me all my life since I was a little boy.
One of the things I've learned over the years is the extreme
tight standards and regulations that the whole industry has, at
least in Canada and the US. That's one reason why it's so
costly. First to buy a plane, own a
plane and to fly one and even just to to fly along as a
passenger. Everything is so tightly
controlled and monitored. The good enough mentality is not
fit there. It's never about, oh, it's good
enough. At least we wouldn't be
comfortable flying if they did that.
They have rules. They have standards and
regulations that not should be followed, that have to be
followed. And when they're not,
catastrophic results sometimes happens.
And this is of course, not just airplanes.
That's just my field of hobby. It's in the medical field and
the nuclear industry. And we could go on and on and
on. Building bridges, for instance.
When a good enough mentality creeps in, it's only a matter of
time before reliability, safety, and quality is compromised and
spirals downward. And in time, but one time was, a
healthy, thriving business or organization or community just
declines and ceases to exist because nothing in the end
really matters that much anymore.
Sometimes people adopt A good enough mentality to save time,
to save costs, or they may just become lazy until one day they
realize it's too late and what always was just taken for
granted by years of neglect and compromises has just
deteriorated and no longer exists.
Think of it when it comes to the things of physical safety.
We live in a country where standards are high.
Whether it's air travel, water, running water in our town,
whether it's building codes, the list goes on and on.
But let me ask this question. But what about our spiritual
lives? How often do not Christians live
with just a good enough mentality?
That's good enough. I go once or twice a month to
church. Good enough.
I give a little bit. It's good enough.
I serve once in a while. It's good enough.
I know I'm not perfect, but hey, a few little hiccups are good
enough. I'm good enough.
For many people, if they would live their physical life the way
they live their spiritual life, they wouldn't survive.
If we lived physically, if we lived life physically the way we
do spiritually, would our physical body survive?
We may not say our spiritual life is good enough, but our
havior communicates that sometimes the way we live, the
things we do, they carry that message.
When it comes to carrying out God's commands in our lives,
when it comes to how we align ourselves with the teachings of
God's Word, we know we're not perfect.
We know that we're not God and we're not perfect and never will
be. But that should not subtract
from the aim to be perfect. Perfection should always be in
our sights, Jesus says in Matthew 548.
Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is
perfect. And we know outside the grace of
God we're not. But through God's grace, in
Christ's eyes we can be. Our human flesh will never be
perfect, we understand that. But perfection should still be
the focus. Have you ever stopped to think
of how prone people are to measure their perfection, not by
God's perfection, but how much better they are than compared to
somebody else? Think about that.
And then when we do that, we may say, oh, our quality is not top
notch, but compared to that, we're doing pretty good.
That's not the way to measure life.
That's not the standard to live by.
Oh, compared to so and so, we're doing all right.
When good enough becomes the stand for standard, when good
enough becomes the standard for moral, holy, godly living, good
enough is the is that that line? That's the introduction to
decline an eventual spiritual shipwreck.
The standard must always be God's standard, even though we
don't achieve it fully. It can't be human culture when
we evaluate ourselves by a list of bad things we do not do.
Not only is our bar too low, it's the wrong bar.
This morning we're going to go into our second sermon on the
series in the book of Judges. Today we will see what happens
when the people start compromising God's standards and
what happens when things simply become good enough, good enough.
We will see that the people of Israel did not continue the way
they started. They lowered the standards.
They started with a very high standard, but they lowered it.
Things became good enough over time.
High standards were dropped high, high moral standards were
compromised, high objectives were not achieved, and things
began to fall. I want to say a few things about
the book of Judges that I forgot to say last Sunday.
The Bible has a variety of books, and the book of Judges is
one of the unique books. They're all unique in their own
way, but the Bible has books called the books of the Law, The
first five books of Moses, the books of the law.
These are the standards that God had for his people.
Now there was also history included in that, but they were
the books of the law, Deuteronomy, Leviticus and
Numbers and so on. Then there are books of
prophecy, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and others.
They tell foretell the future, what God is going to do and what
God did. Then there are books of wisdom,
Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and so on.
Then there's also the Gospels, and there are the letters, the
epistles, and they have their unique nature.
Each one of them has a unique nature.
But in the book of Judges, even though we don't find it as a
prescriptive book that tells us you do exactly what they did, it
does give us the moral principles that God had given to
his people. And what happens when they're
not lived out. It tells us the story of the
nation of Israel when they enter the promised land and what
happened when they shifted their moral compass, what happened
when they shifted their sights from what God wanted them to do
to what the culture was pushing. And as we go through the book,
we will learn in the book of Judges.
And if we pay attention, God does not play games.
His commands are real and they are serious.
And disobeying his commands has serious consequences.
And there's a lot about Israel's disobedience in this book.
And they didn't get away with it.
It didn't work. It's not a oh, at least they get
by. At least it worked.
No, it didn't. In our time, where we get
ourselves into trouble is when we start living this way, the
way, you know, I know we're not perfect, but hey, we're pretty
good. We're good enough.
We get ourselves in trouble when we want to make the decisions.
What's OK with God when we want to set the standards And it's no
longer God's standards that we go by, but our own.
So in today's passage we will look at some things that went
wrong and how it got the nation into trouble.
Last Sunday was just in general overview, an introduction to the
whole book. But today we want to get into
the into the weed, so to speak. In Judges chapter one verse one
to two we read and you can follow in your Bibles and your
devices. It says this Now after the death
of Joshua, it came to pass that the children of Israel asked the
Lord, saying, Who shall be first to go up for US against the
Canaanites, to fight against them.
And the Lord said, Judah shall go up.
Indeed, I have delivered the land into his hand.
We see at the outset, after the after the death of Joshua, the
values that Joshua had instilled in the people.
Those values held Joshua the leader had died, but his
teachings, his instructions, his lifestyle, his example that had
taken root in the lives and the hearts and minds of the people.
So they, they knew what he was about.
They had followed him. They had trusted him.
They had followed his pattern. Even after he was gone, they
wanted to continue that. They wanted to do it the way he
did it. They knew Joshua was a man of
prayer. Joshua would go and talk to God.
And so they also, well Lord, who do you want us to go?
Who of us should go and fight against the Canaanites to take
more of the land? Notice what they did not ask.
They did not ask should we continue?
They did not ask should we do this?
That was not the question. This question was who should be
be the one to go. It was a leadership question.
Their leader Joshua was dead as I mentioned, but his leadership
lived on in the people. That was the way it should be.
They had been commanded to take the land and they were serious
about doing this. And God responds to their
prayers as Judah shall go up first.
And this next phrase is very telling.
He says I indeed I have delivered the land into his
hand. He did not say I will deliver.
He says he had. It's a, it's a statement of
ownership. It's a statement of transaction.
The land was their blessing. It was theirs for the taking,
but they had to go and do it. God had blessed them with the
land. They were now instructed how to
continue what Joshua had started.
It was theirs for the taking. And so the first thing we want
to notice this morning is God has blessings that he's given
his people to claim. The question here is not a
question of who the Land's been given to.
It was a question of whether or not they would now proceed and
do the job. Would they claim the blessing?
Would they be willing, committed and dedicated to this work for
them to take? What had been given to them was
a gift, but it was not a free ride.
Their work wasn't. There was work involved in
clearing out the idol worshippers and the idols they
would have to drive out The people displaced them.
And we know from passages that they did go to battle and they
did fight for what God had told him was theirs.
Again, I just want to mention this here that this is not a
prescriptive passage. It's not a prescriptive book in
the sense of, Oh yeah, you can go and take out your neighbor
and take his house. That's not what this is about.
This is not a passage teaching us to go and drive our people
and take their land. This, this happened under the
old covenant where God had promised Israel he was going to
give them the land of Canaan because the that was his
promise, His covenant to Abraham.
And the inhabitants of the land would have to leave.
They were idol worshippers. They were evil, they were
wicked. And God said his judgment would
be poured out on them and Israel would remove them.
I also want to mention this morning here that we're not
going through a series of history lessons here.
That's not the intent of this of this sermon series.
To do a history series would take much longer, and it would
no longer be a sermon series, but a lecture series on facts,
places, and events. That's not something we want to
use the morning worship service for.
We want to do that sometime, maybe in a Bible study on a
Wednesday night and so on, but not here.
Our aim here is to see what spiritual principles were at
work in these events and times. And God is still the same God.
So let's look at the passage closely.
Before the people do anything, they inquire of God as they
should, and they listen to God. They're focused on continuing
the mission to which they were called, take over the land, and
they ask God for direction. God directs them and the land is
theirs. And says in verse 2, the Lord
said, Judah shall go up. Indeed, I have delivered the
land to his hand. Joshua.
Judah was chosen by God to take leadership.
And this already foretold in other passages elsewhere in the
Scripture that Judah would be a leadership tribe in the nation
of Israel. And it was out of Judah actually
that King David was born and also later on the Messiah as
well. But blessings have strings
attached. Blessings are not given just
because some blessings have conditions.
And to, to get the blessings, we must follow God's commands.
What would have happened if when Joshua died, the people just
kind of, oh, well, I guess that's it then?
Or what if they had prayed and God answered their prayers?
Who's supposed to go up first? And what if they just said, Nah,
I guess we'll wait a while. We don't feel like going now.
We'll wait for a different time, a better time, or maybe we'll
ask somebody else to, to do it. The blessing might not have
happened. God's blessings are not
timeless, endless opportunities. Blessings can be missed, they
can be squandered, they can be compromised.
We'll see that as we go through the book.
Many times people miss out on the blessings of God because
they don't ask for direction. In the letter of James in the
New Testament, the apostle James writes says we have not because
we ask not, then we do ask. We often ask with wrong motives
since the times of the blessings, sometimes the
blessings of God don't seem to come.
A person may be praying for something and nothing seems to
happen. An equally important question
then to ask is, how am I aligning myself with God?
God had given them the land, yes, but taking them, taking the
land, was something they had to be engaged in.
The enemies of Israel were living in the land.
They were not just going to give it up like that.
They had to be removed. Maybe you're in a place where
you would like to accomplish something, but it's too hard.
If it was easier, I don't want to put in the energy.
I don't want to have the discipline, I don't want to put
in the effort, but I want the blessing.
That mindset doesn't work. Those who have to work hard for
what they get do better than those who have things just
handed to them. I know this is not about earning
anything. It's not about grace earning
grace. Grace is a free gift.
We know that. But the blessings don't come by
themselves. We cannot expect God to give us
something and just sit there and he's going to do it.
He wants us, He wants to partner with us and making it happen.
There are many people whose lives are ruined, not because
there's no blessing, simply because they don't take it.
And sometimes we as especially as a culture, we want it easy,
convenient, and so often times, well, let's let's take a
shortcut and not experience and not not exercise discipline.
And the blessings may not come and we may ruin ourselves.
I said last Sunday that we as God's people were made in his
image. And this is true.
This applies to the Israelites as well.
To be God's image means we have part to in his work.
We have work to do. There's a connection between US
and God. We're destined to enjoy God's
blessings, but that requires our participation, our involvement,
our commitment. And so God didn't just say to
the Israelis, OK, guys, I'm going to clean up the land, send
some disasters, and the land will be bare and empty.
And you just go take the empty land.
No, you have a part in this. And we read on how the military
campaign unfolded. At the start there were good
successes, but in time, challenges would arise.
Things we got got more difficult and then the compromises began.
We find in the in the latter part of chapter one, verse 19
that God was with Judah, but the challenges would come and they
became difficult and as the people continued to take over
the land, they came to different people groups who were they were
not able to drive out. The reason for it is mentioned
here. It mentions for instance, let's
read chapter 1, verse 19. So the Lord was with Judah and
they drove out the Mountaineers. There's this stuff, stuff that
happened before this, which I encourage you to read.
But so the Lord was with Judah and they drove out the
Mountaineers, but they could not drive out the inhabitants of the
lowland because they had Chariots of iron.
Do you think God was saying, oh, oh, I guess it's too hard for
these guys here. So we'll back down a little bit.
Is that what happened? Or God said, you know what,
guys, you can let them be, That's OK, don't worry about it.
It tells us what happened, but doesn't tell us anything about
God's mindset. We know God's mindset.
God was with Judah. He helped them drive out the
Mountaineers. But then when it came to the
valley, they had iron Chariots and so Judah didn't have the
power. From a human perspective, the
whole thing was too difficult. In their own strength, they
couldn't do it for sure. But remember Jericho, remember
the Jordan River, remember the Red Sea.
God's blessings are sometimes difficult in proportion to their
value. Not all blessings are easy.
Blessings of great value are sometimes difficult because they
require more discipline, greater effort.
Our priorities should always be looking to God, seeking God's
face, and asking God what he wants from us.
I sometimes say to people, when you say I can't, you've slammed
the door. Sometimes I ask a young man,
what would you like to do in life?
Oh I would like to XYZ but I can't.
I said don't use that phrase. Then you've slammed the door.
Rather say I would like to do XYZ and to do it would take this
and this and this. Now you have a step ladder, now
you have a set of stairs to it. Sure it's going to be hard, but
don't use phrases like oh we can't.
Someone might ask was God not willing or not able to help the
people of Israel take the lowlands?
We know God told him to take the land.
God did not say take the land. Except if you meet people with
iron Chariots, then you don't have to.
Then it's OK. That's not what happened.
They could not take the Lola and it tells us that.
And yes, the people of the valley were stronger militarily,
but the God of Judah was much bigger than any tribal nation
around them. They failed in their objective
not simply because the military might of the people in the
valley. From reading the whole book of
Judges and many other passages, we find that they overcame much
greater difficulties than that. But then right next, if you
continue reading, I won't read those verses.
In the next verse we read that the people gave Caleb the city
of Hebron. The sons of Anak lived there.
They were fearsome people, giants, men of huge stature.
But that did not deter Caleb. He finished the job of removing
these men from the land. He had served alongside Joshua,
and he goes and takes the city. And no doubt he's much older man
now than many of the Israelites were.
He trusted God, not in his own power, not in his own ability.
He did what God called him to do, not worrying about the other
circumstances. What if every Israelite soldier
had the heart and determination of Caleb?
Would iron Chariots have stopped them?
What if they prayed? We see in Caleb's view, his
obedience was his part, and Caleb's view, obedience was what
he did. Victory and success, that was
God's part. After the death of Joshua,
things had started well, but the war efforts started to decline.
We find reading onward, the people let up in their mission.
The mission lost energy, not the urgency anymore and the result
was it started to die down early on in the book of Judges.
Let's continue reading verse 1 to 21, chapter 121.
Notice the children of Benjamin. But the children of Benjamin did
not drive out the Jebusites who inhabited Jerusalem.
So the Jebusites dwell with the children of Benjamin in
Jerusalem to this day. Whoever wrote the Book of
Judges, that was the reality of the time.
It does not tell us why the children of Benjamin did not
finish the job. Perhaps they became comfortable
with the where where things were.
Maybe what they had was good enough.
Whatever the reasons were for not completing the task, there
would be consequences for allowing it to happen.
Things would not be well. We don't know the mindsets of
the people of Benjamin, but what happened is obvious.
Let's just consider for a moment.
Let's just think back to the time of the crossing of the
Jordan River in the book of Joshua, when they crossed the
Jordan River and they went up to Jericho and they took the city
of Jericho. Big events that they were.
Do you think that people were thinking, oh, yeah, In a few
generations, we will just let it all be.
We'll just simmer down. We'll quiet down.
We'll we're going to change. Do you think they thought that?
Never. That would have been not in
their minds at all. But over time, small, little
incremental compromises happened.
They started with high standards, lofty goals, but then
little by little, they changed. Let's continue reading verse
chapter 127 and on it says. However, Manasseh didn't drive
out the inhabitants of Bethshawn in its villages, or Tanakh in
its villages, or the inhabitants of Dor in its villages, or the
inhabitants of Iblium in its villages, or the inhabitants of
Megadu in its villages. For the Canaanites were
determined to dwell in that land.
And it came to pass when Israel was strong, they put the
Canaanites under tribute, but did not completely drive them
out. Think about it, not only did
they were they OK with them living in the land, they were
superior. The Israelites were superior in
power. OK, we'll just make them work
for us. We'll just benefit from them.
This was a completely what God had said don't do.
They were going to capitalize on it.
A deadly mistake. Let's continue reading verse 29.
Nor did Ephraim drive out the Canaanites who dwelt in Geezer.
So the Canaanites dwelt in Geezer among them.
Nor did Zebulun drive out the inhabitants of Kitron, or the
inhabitants of Nehalo. So the Canaanites dwelt among
them and were put under tribute. Again taxation.
Nor did Asher drive out the inhabitants of Eko, or the
inhabitants of Sidon, or of Alab, or Axib, or Halba, or
Afic, or Rehob. So the Asherites dwelt among the
Canaanites, the inhabitants of the land.
For they did not drive them out, nor did not till I drive out the
inhabitants of Beth Shemesh or the inhabitants of Beth Aneth,
but they dwelt among the Canaanites, the inhabitants of
the land. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of
Beth Chemesh and Bethannan were put under tribute to them.
And the Amorites forced the children of Dan into the
mountains, for they would not allow them to come down to the
valley. And the Amorites were determined
to dwell in Mount Harris, in Ajalon, and in Chalbim.
And yet when the strength of the House of Joseph became greater,
they were put under tribute. This is jaw-dropping from what
we read at the beginning, from what God had commanded his
people to do compared to what they were now doing.
God had so clearly said don't make agreements with them, don't
reside together with them, don't have anything to do with them.
Here are 7 tribes mentioned who opted out for finishing less,
doing less than they were called to.
They lowered the bar. They accepted a different
outcome than was originally planned.
Here's an extreme shift from what we read in the books of the
law to what happened in actual life.
Somehow it had become acceptable.
It was good enough. You know what's so concerning
here? They're not just compromising
the mission, they're content with it.
It doesn't faze them. Listen, folks, the problem was
not the Canaanites. They were just Canaanites,
unbelievers, Pagan Canaanites. The problem was God's people.
And that's the problem in the church today.
It shouldn't surprise us when evil people do evil and want to
continue that. That's their nature.
That's their default setting. What was happening here to the
people of Israel, They were compromising.
They've been tasked with this huge responsibility.
Take the land. That was no longer the high
point. The land was a blessing to them.
They were commanded to take it. But they started to shift and
started to integrate with the people they were not supposed to
connect with. They were forming the wrong
connections, and guess what? They even tried to leverage it
for their own advantage. We're going to benefit from it.
We're smart. They capitalized on it.
Let's put them pay taxes to us. That's the plan.
We'll benefit from them. They had received no such
permission from God to do this. The danger was that God's
enemies would trip them up and they would wander off and follow
their gods. And we will know as we read.
We'll see. That's exactly what happened.
Notice again verse 34 where we read and the Amorites forced the
children of Dan into the mountains, for they would not
allow them to come down to the valley.
Why? Because they let them.
This does not look like Jericho or many of the other cities.
This looks like negotiating the Believers Church Bible's
commentary. The writer puts it this way.
He says rather than seeking the Lord for direction, the Danites
seek to the Danites seek the Canaanites for permission.
You know what, folks? Since when is the Church of God
asked or commanded to see what the world says and follow their
leading? Maybe you can negotiate with the
government, with the authorities, and follow their
leading. Since when they were not doing
what God commanded them, they could have prayed.
Lord, this is too hard for us. Unless you redeem us, unless you
save us, we'll be destroyed by these people.
We'll take what comes. God's people should not
negotiate away God's blessings for things of lesser value.
Since when is it God's will that His church goes to the Pagan
tables, secular culture, and sit at their tables trying to work
out agreements and negotiations? How can we serve God?
How would you allow us to serve our God?
That's never up for negotiation. The secular culture should never
be the point of reference from where the church makes decisions
on how to run ministries or what moral standards we set.
They are set. We have to just follow them.
God's Word alone should always be the only standard how the
church lives and serves God in this world.
They should never be. Oh well, I guess we could make
some shift. We could compromise when that
happens. There's no end to that.
When the shifting values and corrupt standards of the world
are incorporated into the church, there's only one option.
It's to repent. They didn't.
We see what happens. We will see repeatedly how the
people of Israel fell and then learn to repent time and again.
This would happen. Things were hard.
They break down and their brokenness and despair.
Finally they would cry out to God and God who loves to forgive
repentance. Sinners would reach down and
lift them out of their bondage and descended the deliverer to
freedom. We are today not under that old
covenant. As I said, Judges is not a
prescriptive book, but the principles hold true.
It's a book of principles revealing God's perfection in
the standards and they're not up for negotiation today.
The Church of Jesus Christ in large part is not working for or
fighting the battles correctly. And it's never an earthly battle
we should be fighting anyway. It's a spiritual battle.
The Church of Jesus Christ today is focused on sharing the
gospel. And should we should do that?
Preach repentance to sinners, preach hope to the lost, Go
down, go to the down and out. Those are the the words we have
to say. Our weapons are not swords and
guns and bombs. We fight with love and
compassion and suffering. Our call is to expose injustice
toward the oppressed, the poor, and the marginalized.
Our call is to expose sin with the light of the gospel.
Our fight comes at a cost to us. The world is not a friend of the
Church of Jesus. When earthly rulers sense
they're being exposed, they will push back.
When they're rebuked, they'll often turn on God's people, as
we know the voice of the martyrs.
Many other organizations we know from the story of Daniel.
We know of other stories. God sometimes rescues people.
Sometimes he lets them be killed.
John the Baptist, he confronted Herod.
His head was chopped off. He was not spared.
The danger often comes when the world comes with inviting
negotiations. Let's, let's, let's have a
dialogue. Let's talk about this.
There's never a time to sit down at a table and talk with evil
and say, oh, by the way, maybe we can incorporate this into our
church as well. When it comes to the standards
God gives us in His word, the secular culture may want to
influence us, but the red flag should always be up.
The people of Israel got themselves into trouble time and
time again. When the culture starts to want
to join hands with the church, the church should always be in
high alert and have it scarred up.
We know from the outcome, from the story of Israel, the passage
that I read last Sunday. I want to read it again this
morning, as I mentioned last Sunday, that not everything in
this book is in chronological order.
The writer, whoever wrote the book, did not put it on
chronological order. And here's a piece in chapter 2.
That's before Joshua died. Let me read that again.
Joshua chapter 2, beginning verse one.
Then the Angel of the Lord came up from Gilgal to Bakum and
said, I LED you up from Egypt and brought you to the land
which I swore to your father's, and said, I will never break my
covenant with you, and you shall make no covenant with the
inhabitants of this land. You shall tear down their
altars. But you have not obeyed my
voice. Why have you done this?
Already in Joshua's day there were signs of this compromise.
They were doing good, but compromise had started to form
cracks in there. Handling.
Handing over God's blessings comes at our peril.
This Angel of the Lord is a messenger from God.
The danger of a good enough mentality will lead to
compromise and lowering one's moral standards.
God rebukes his people for not having carried out his commands
against the nations to which He sent them.
Terry Bensinger in the Bible commentary writes this.
He said Israel's failure is not primarily the result of military
or political incompetence, but of sin.
Similarly, the ongoing struggle anticipated in the future is
problematic not because of loss of property or political unrest,
but because of religious syncretism.
Like the Sirens wooing Odysseus to the rocks, the gods of Canaan
will lure Israel into faulty beliefs and practices.
Religious syncretism means when different belief systems from
different religions are brought together, mixed together, the
different values come come one and embraced and accepted one by
the other. This phrase that Terry mentions
here in his book The Sirens Wooing Odeskis to the Rocks is a
is an ancient mythical story by a writer named Homer.
And it's written in different ways.
And it's a fictional story about an island inhabited by mythical
creatures that were part bird and part woman.
And the story is that is told in different ways.
But these creatures have beautiful voices.
And if a sailor sails by the island, these creatures would
sing beautiful songs and the sailor would inevitably steer
his ship to the island and be and be crashed on the rocks.
And this man, Odysseus, has been warned of this.
So he comes up with a plan. He wants to check out and make
sure that when he hears the songs without, he will not do
that. He orders his men to plug their
ears with beeswax so they won't hear the song of these
creatures. And but he leaves his ears open.
But he has his his crew tie him to a mast so he can't move.
And he tells them, even if I want you to release me, don't
until we're past. And so they sailed by this
island. And sure enough, this beautiful
singing, so attractive, he wants the ship to be steered to the
island. And they don't listen because
they can't hear. And after they passed the
island, he's released. Of course, this just a fairy
tale. It's a myth.
But there's an important illustration of the story.
The idea is it is never safe ever to dabble with temptation,
no matter how attractive, how logical, how rational, how good
it looks. The things we know to be true
are not up for negotiation. It's never right to dabble with
sin. It's never right to entertain
things we know are not right. This is an area where the church
in North America does not have a good track record.
I don't need to go into detail, but we all know that as a people
we are very privileged in every way in our country, more so than
many people in many countries. And so it stands to reason we
should also be producing fruits in line with that.
But it's not happening. So the church today, to a large
part, instead of being a light to the world, increasingly
changes and shifts and adapts to fit around in the culture.
What the culture does, we can somehow incorporate in the
church. We see increasingly the world is
ramping up the pressure to embrace, engage in increasingly
what the world does. The people of Israel have been
blessed with the land of Canaan. They'd done some of what they're
supposed to do, but they failed in the overall objective.
Notice what happens next. The Angel says, Therefore I also
said, I will not drive them up before you, but they shall be
thorns on your side, and the gods shall be a snare to you.
So it was when the Angel of the Lord spoke these words to all
the children of Israel that the people lifted up their voices
and wept. Then they called the place the
name of the place, Bakum, and they sacrificed there to the
Lord. The very things that we
compromise with and things we think we can adapt, they're
going to destroy us. The consequences would be these
people would not drive out their dollar to snake wicked nations,
and they would instead let that be a temptation to them.
This is not one massive sweep of events.
It's just a slow incremental stage by stage.
And yes, they couldn't take the whole land of cane in one fell
swoop, that's true. But they were supposed to do a
totally thorough job of cleaning it up.
Not just do a little bit here and dabble here and dabble there
and dabble everywhere and just let this happen, Let that in and
not make that at all. That was the problem.
The lines became blurred. There were people in places they
should have been cleaned out. They'd let people stay.
The problem was it just became good enough.
What do we allow in our lives? And it's good enough.
Oh, yeah, I know. I have a habit and I know I have
a problem. I know I have an addiction.
I know I don't. I know I should.
No, it's good enough. It says here they rept they were
sad they never repented. Not here.
Some people go to church. They know they're sin in their
lives. They feel guilty and feel
convicted in how they live. They go to church, expect a
harsh sermon, a powerful sermon. They go home feeling convicted
and they feel good. They felt convicted.
There's no change. They weep, No change happens.
God's not interested in tears. He's interested in reformed
hearts. Tears are good if they come from
a heart of repentance, but they didn't hear.
They came from a heart of regret and sorrow.
It's not working. They sacrificed, Lord, we'll
give you a sacrifice. Or they would repent later on,
but not yet. Someone might say, well, repent
of what? Misplaced priorities?
Misplaced values, misplaced commitments, misplaced goals.
Where are our hearts today? Oh, it's good enough.
We're doing good enough. God wants to bless us.
It's not a physical land that He's calling us to conquer.
God wants us to discipline ourselves, to control ourselves.
He sent us and Jesus to die for this so we could do it to give
us eternal life. And His Spirit in our hearts
helps us. We can't earn it.
We can't earn eternal life, but our life of discipline, our life
of Christian values that should always be coming out from our
hearts. Of all the places we may be
tempted to cut corners and think this is good enough.
Let it not be in our relationship with God.
He's the last person we should ever feel like short changing.
He will never take second place. He's a God of love and
compassion, but also justice. He's a God of grace and mercy,
but also of truth. When we go from here this
morning, let's seek God, not seek how we can maybe
accommodate, have the best of both worlds.
Let's devote ourselves to Him, make our connection with Him
sure, and everything else becomes secondary because in the
end, good enough won't cut it. Let's pray.
Thank you Lord, for your word. Your standard is perfection.
There is no partial good grade that you accept.
You've called us to obedience and service to you.
You provide us with your gift of grace to be able to walk with
you. We're thankful for this day
together as a church. We pray that we will take heart
and what you revealed to us about ourselves and Your Word,
and you will apply it. Or may you bless your people.
Help us as your people to aim for perfection and all that we
do. We know it will fall short, but
Your grace covers that. Our sins are covered.
That we know, but not in a good enough way where our sins are
covered. There we are, perfect in you.
Or may you lift our spirits up, guide us and lead us as a
church. We thank you in Jesus name.