This morning our sermon title is Connections.
Let me begin with this question. Why do people want to connect
with God more in hard times than in good times?
I think that's a valid question. Take for instance, the matter of
health. It's fairly easy to want to go
to God and pray for healing, which we should.
But then when times are good, the praise content may not be as
energetic or as emphatic or as driven as the prayer for
healing. I'm not saying it's never the
case, but that often tends to be the case.
We tend to forget. Once things are good, we tend to
forget. I'm not saying we shouldn't pray
for good health and hard times. We should.
There's a Psalm, Psalm 50, verse 15.
The psalmist says these words call upon me in the day of
trouble. I will deliver you and you shall
glorify me. The word glorify me is just as
vital as calling upon him in the day of trouble.
If the prayers in our trouble, the prayers that we pray when
we're in trouble, and the prayers that we pray when we're
rejoicing. If those prayers were sorted out
and put in boxes, which would be the bigger box?
The prayers of healing and the prayers of rescue and the
prayers of deliverance and the prayers of whatever needs to be
met versus the prayers of Thanksgiving and the prayers of
joy and the prayers of glorifying, which box of prayers
would be bigger? I think that's an important
question for us to think about. This morning we are going to
introduce a new sermon series based out of the Book of Judges.
And before we go into the sermon this morning, and this sermon
this morning is an overview, not particular any particular
passage where we're starting out in Chapter 1.
We're not doing that, but I want to give a little bit of an
overview of what this book is about.
And then next Sunday we'll dig into the book and start going
through it. Some might wonder why a sermon
series on this particular book. It's a dark book and the stories
are not easy stories. And some might wonder what's in
it even that makes it suitable to base a sermon series on.
And and why start at the beginning of the year with that
book? It's a book of patience, God's
patience with one people group in their journey of life.
And it shows how they forgot about God again and again and
again. And every time when they were in
a high, that's when they forgot. Never down in the bottom in the
valley. They didn't forget then.
They forgot God when things were good.
It's kind of like us today. We see continual rise and fall,
falling away from God and God sending oppressors and they
would go into this dark valley of despair and oppression and
then they'd cry out to God and they'd repent and then God
rescues them and then come into a high again and then they're
happy again and then they have time of rest.
What this boils down to in this book have one word for this and
it's connection. It's a connection issue and it
does a very good job. This writer of the book does a
very good job of painting a very accurate picture of human nature
and what happens when people disconnect from God.
Every time the disconnect happens, things go bad and often
times it's the hard times God brings in our lives to connect
us back together again. And we see this over and over in
the book of Judges. This last December, someone in
our church and I were having a conversation about some of the
planning to go forward into year 2026, and this individual just
mentioned to me the slogan for 2026.
A good slogan for 2026 would be connections.
And I just paused for a moment and thought about it.
And I said to this person, that's it.
That's what the slogan for 2026 will be, connections.
I had already earlier suggested that we go through the Book of
Judges as our next book to go through, partly because I
believe the message of judges is so fitting and relevant to our
society where we becoming increasingly in our affluent
society, becoming increasingly disconnected from God.
So what's the follow? Well, what the value is coming.
The book of Judges talks a lot about sin, about rebellion,
repentance, rescue, restoration, and so on.
But all of this is tied in with people in the stories, what
they're connected to, what they're connected with and who
they're disconnecting from and so on.
Most of you who are part of this church and have been for years
know me as a person, that my emphasis is always on
relationships. When I was first hired as a lead
pastor here back in 2012, in November of 2011, we had the
interview and, and the interview process, somebody from the
congregation sitting over there somewhere.
So, So what will your thing be? What are you going to push when
you're a pastor here? My response to this person was
to the congregation at the time was I may eventually sound like
a broken record, but my emphasis will always be relationships.
Well, that took place 14 years ago, this last November and it
started in February of the following year, 2012.
And that's coming up to 14 years now.
And I still stand by that. I have not changed.
And in fact, I think it's more relevant, more important now
than ever, given with everything that's happening in our culture,
the disintegration, separation, disconnection from everything in
our society. It's important.
So let's think about this. We'll do a little bit of a
review from the beginning of the Bible and then leading up to
Judges. God's purpose in creating this
place we call our planet, this world, was to create images of
himself, calling them people. Image bearers are replicas of
the one they're made after. We're made after the likeness of
God. God wanted us to reflect him in
this world. We are a resemblance of an
original and God wants you and me to be that.
It happens in little children. One of our nieces is now in her
mid 30s and I remember so clearly when she was just just a
little baby, tiny little bundle, and we have photos of her from
back then. Not that long ago, she had a
baby. She and her husband had a
beautiful little girl. And I saw pictures and I
thought, wow, if I would take an original photo we took back in
the early 90s, late 80s maybe. Forget now when she was born and
a picture of her today. They're identical.
I couldn't tell the difference. She's an image of her mother.
How much of an image of God are we?
God made Adam an image of himself, and we know less are an
image of God either. And the whole idea behind it is
not just to appear like God, but to be like God in the sense how
we live our lives. There's relationship involved.
There's connection. God's plan was that the people
he created would, out of their own free will, reciprocate.
They would give back to God voluntarily what he had blessed
them with. There would be genuine
connections. Relationship consists of
connections. That's what God images do.
And when God created everything, he made this the nature, He made
vegetation, he made animals and he made the man.
And it says that he breathed into him the breath of life and
the man became a living soul and God did something else.
We don't have time to expand on all of that this morning, but
God gave Adam a job and it says in Genesis, it says in Genesis
chapter 2, verse 19, like you can take your devices or Bibles
and read along if you choose. And here it's very, very key
what it says here. It says out of the ground, the
Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the
air and brought them to Adam. Listen to see what he would call
them and whatever Adam called each living creature, that was
its name. So here's Adam, the first human
image of God, a replica. He's given the responsibility
and opportunity to participate in a unique way in the creation
story, and he got to name the animals.
So God give, give Adam a very important part in the process of
creation. He made the animals, God made
the animals. And Adam gets to put the
stickers on or the labels like the finishing touches.
That's hugely important. God did not stop there.
He made him a wife, someone to help him, his equal, also an
image of God, same as him, who would help him to do his job in
creation. And they were both holy and
perfect, God's images, doing what they're created to do.
They were free, moral human beings with responsibility.
It couldn't get better than it was.
Well, we know the story. Sin came into the world through
Satan. He tempted Eve to question God's
command and Eve listen to Satan eating from the forbidden fruit.
She took some, gave it to Adam who was with her, and that was
the entry of sin into creation. So sin broke the connection.
The relationship between God and his people had now been broken.
Their sin brought an end to this connection, to this
relationship. And from then on it would never
be the same again. And it's still not the same.
It's not like it was. Well, Long story short, Adam and
Eve were driven out of the garden and life from that point
on was difficult. And it still is, as we all know
and will continue until Jesus returns and restores everything
that is still to come. Hasn't happened yet, but one day
it will. There's enough evidence in life
that points to this. We don't doubt, we don't
question that Jesus will one day return.
He was sent, lived and died a sinless life, died on the cross
for our sins, and he rose from the dead, is in heaven now.
He's going to come back. But going back to the Genesis
story, we find that as we go further, that sin didn't just
stay at that level, it just amplified and increased and
grew. And God was sorry he had started
the whole thing. I'm sorry I made people.
He said the world had gone bad. He was going to destroy all of
life. But one man found favor in his
eyes. His name was Noah, his wife and
three sons. God said, I'm going to spare
this family. I'm going to start over, told
Noah to build an ark, a large boat, bring one pair of each
kind of animals and seven of the clean kinds.
And so God said, I'm going to start over, you know, and your
family and your sons, your wives going to the ark and I will save
you built the ark. God did everything he said he
would. The flood came, destroyed all of
life except it was in the ark and that was that.
But we find that in Genesis, the the flood story was not the end
of it. Sin continued again after the
story of the flood and God promised he wouldn't destroy the
world again like he had. But then God continued his
journey. In Genesis chapter 12, verse one
to three, we have the story where God's started the program
or the the the journey of saving humankind by grace through
faith. Genesis 12 one to three, God
spoke to Abraham and it says, and the Lord said to Abraham to
Abram, get out of your country from your family, from your
father's house to a land that I will show you.
I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and make your
name great, and you shall be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you.
I will curse him who curses you, and in you all the families of
the earth will be blessed. Now Abraham did not have an easy
life. He had many challenges.
He followed God's command, however, and he was called the
father of the righteous. Fast forward through his life.
Abraham had a son named Isaac. Isaac received the same promise
from God that Abraham had. And then Isaac had two sons,
Jacob and Esau. And through Esau the blessing
was called and Jacob had sons, and from those sons came the 12
tribes of Israel. God had promised to Abraham he
would give him the land of Canaan, and God also told him it
would be difficult. In fact, God told him your
descendants will be slaves in the land of Egypt for 400 years.
That's a long time. Well, that happened.
The children of Israel migrated to Egypt during the famine and
Joseph's time. They grew into a nation, but
they were forced to work as slaves under a new king.
Then after 400 years of slavery, finally under the leadership of
Moses, they were set free. The wilderness experience was a
very difficult experience. They had to go through the
wilderness to the promised land. A lot of learning happened.
All the people who rebelled, they they died.
The desert wanderings came to an end and it was under the
leadership of Joshua that finally the long ago promised
land came, became their land. Maybe wonder why that land?
One speaker I listened to mentioned that if you look at
the map of the world today, in the world that day, the way it
was populated, the land of Canaan was a unique place.
It was not some out of the corner, out of the way place,
hidden somewhere where nobody would go and nobody would be.
Kind of speaks to the testimony of our Mennonite people who
usually wanted to move away from society, away from culture.
God places people in the land of Canaan, and it's an interesting
place to be. If you look on the map, you see
Damascus there in Jerusalem. Now the bottom is Egypt and the
top there's a Syria, the, the, and then there's the Arabian
desert, the Near East. That's all deserts.
So any travel that people would do, they would from the bottom
left hand side to the top right hand side, they would go through
Jerusalem and Damascus. That that valley, that area,
those were the trade routes. That was like the hub, like
Toronto or New York or or any of the major cities where everybody
knew this is the trade route. This is where they go.
God wanted to place his people where the whole world would get
to experience what kind of a God he was.
And that's the land that the children of Israel were given.
Well, initially things did go well.
You read the book of Joshua under his leadership, they
occupied that territory and things did go well, mostly.
There were some things that went wrong, but we'll, we'll just
look at them briefly as we go on.
But they had a very good start. But good starts don't mean good
finishing, good finishes. Just starting well does not mean
ending well. It can and it should.
Anybody can leave the starting line in a race.
Anybody can apply for a job and start a job.
Finishing. That's another story.
As the people of Israel took over the land, the time came
that Joshua died. It tells us in the early part of
the judges that as long as Joshua lived and the elders who
lived with Joshua, things went reasonably well.
But in time people would compromise.
And so this morning we'll pick some key passages, and next
Sunday we'll begin at the beginning of the book, as I said
earlier. So this morning let's read
Judges chapter 2, verse 7 to 10. Judges 2, seven to 10.
So the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all
the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen
all the great works of the Lord which he had done for Israel.
Now Joshua the son of Nun the servant of the Lord, died when
he was 110 years old, and they buried him within the border of
his inheritance at Timnah Harris in the mountains of Ephraim on
the north side of Mount Gash. When all that generation had
been gathered to their fathers, another generation arose after
them who did not know the Lord nor the work which He had done
for Israel. That last part of verse 10 is a
very sad testimony of what would repeat itself numerous times.
And even in our culture we see a repeat of the same thing the
people did as God wanted during the days of Joshua.
The connection held the connection held during that
time, but when Joshua died, it was like the ending of a
chapter. Things had gone reasonably well
under his leadership. And I say reasonably for a
reason, because there were some compromises, small ones, but
there were. And if you read the story of
Joshua and the book of Joshua, we find that taking the land was
a huge, monumental task. God gave them the land, yes, but
they had to work for it. It was just here's the land,
take it it. They had to fight the battles.
And Joshua LED well. The people followed faithfully
under his leadership. Things went well for the most
part, but when he was gone and also the elders of his time, the
people compromised. And it was their compromises,
their disconnect from God that repeatedly got them in trouble.
God wanted a relationship with His people.
He wanted to use them to bless all nations.
Remember what happened, what caused the break in the
relationship? What what caused the disconnect?
What the old generation had experienced and lived through
had not transferred to the young generation.
A break had happened, a disconnection happened.
We know the old generation fought many difficult battles,
but for the young generation, they did not have to fight those
battles. The land was passed on to their
to them as free of work as an inheritance.
Here it is, the old generation had witnessed the power of God
in the desert and the miracles in fighting these battles.
The young generation did not have those experiences and it
wasn't their fault either. The history of the old
generation did not transfer to the young generation.
There was a break this, the disconnect was real.
It severed them from the old generation.
It severed along the lines of knowledge of history.
It severed along the historical values.
It severed along the spiritual lines and the moral lines.
It makes one wonder, what is it that makes this happen?
Why do the spiritual connections sever?
Why does it happen that at one that which was at one time so
healthy, strong and vibrant, pulsing with life?
Why does it fade, decline and wither and die?
Why does the new generation not pick up and take to heart what
the older generation has lived through and trusted in?
I've seen this in my own time. I've read many books on this.
It's been highlighted here and there and often times, even when
the older, the older generation does try to teach the younger
generation their history and does try to instill the values
of the past into the young generation, many in the young
generation simply don't take notice.
It's all about the latest, the newest and whatever shifting
values, newest teachings. Never mind what the foundations
of the older generations were. Let's go back to judges.
Now. We don't know if the older
generation did not teach or did not train the young generation.
What we do know is the old generation was not perfect in
fact. They had taken a few shortcuts
themselves. They shouldn't have.
We'll go into that next Sunday, and we know those shortcuts were
wrong. Even though Joshua was a good
leader, a few things happened that shouldn't have happened
again. We'll look at it more next
Sunday. We'll see in the story of the
judges in the whole book that the biggest struggles would not
come from without. Although there were struggles
from without, the biggest struggles would come from inside
temptations of the heart. It's not the outside problems
that disconnect us from God so much.
It's the response that comes outside of us that reveals how
weak we are. The temptations do not
disconnect us from God, It's our response to the temptations that
disconnect us from God. I think, for instance, the story
of Samson won't spoil it, but if you know the story of Samson, he
was a man who could handle anything and everything that
came against him, but what was in his heart he couldn't control
and he fell. Think of our own country, the
moral values that held for generations, for hundreds of
years in Europe and in and when this land was settled.
Most of them haven't compromised at this time.
There seems to be no sight, no end insight to the compromise.
And it's not just the culture, friend, it's the church as well.
It's becoming acceptable, increasingly so, and we're now
facing a situation in our country where pastors may have
to go to prison for the words they say from the pulpit out of
the Scripture. In the days of judges, the
judges, compromises happened and the things that God had
forbidden were not only allowed, they were celebrated.
I've said this in the past that bears repeating that in our
time, the latter half of my lifetime, first there was the
mantra of tolerance. We should be tolerant.
Allow people to believe what they want to believe.
You don't have to agree. We'd just be friends and you
believe this. I believe this.
We're good. It didn't stay there from
tolerance. It migrated and became
acceptance. I don't want you to just
tolerate. I want you to accept it.
So it's about acceptance. Accept everything and everything
that goes on except at all from from tolerance and acceptance,
it migrated further to embracing.
I don't want you to just tolerate and accept.
I want you to embrace it. Own it.
And then it migrated to participation.
No, you have to actually now do it.
Tolerate it, Accept that, embrace and do it.
If you don't do it, then you discriminate.
Now we're coming to a new step. It's called prosecution.
If you don't do it, we're going to punish you.
When the connections of history are severed, when the past is
forgotten and values are trashed, there's no telling
where this drift will lead to. And one thing we'll find as we
go through judges is these weak points, and they most often
happen when people have a good, when things are going well.
I don't want to destroy this, don't want to jinx it, don't
want to mess it up. In fact, I want it better.
From good to even better entitlement.
It's about myself now. For the people of Israel, it was
when they shifted their focus away from God.
When they compromised their connection with God, that's when
they fell. Some of them said nature abhors
a vacuum. When we disconnect from God, we
don't just live disconnected. We do connect to something else.
Our connection with God and our connections with each other are
key in determining the health and success of our journey
through life. Some people have good, strong,
healthy relationships between them and God and with people.
They have good, solid connections.
Praise God for those. But then there are people who
compromise their relationship with God and with people, and
they draw away the isolate, or worse, the link up with people
who are destructive and help them disconnect even further.
And they live very disconnected, fragmented and scattered lives.
When connections fail, people are exposed and vulnerable to
attack. The less we as God's people
connect, the easier it is for Satan to isolate us and take us
down 1 by 1. You know how?
A bed of coals and a fire, everything that's in the center
is red hot, glowing. But if you take a piece of wood
that's burning or a ember or a coal put off to the side, it
cools off and just dies out. That's what happens to people
who claim to be part of the body of Christ but disconnect
themselves. Hebrews chapter 10, verse 23
writes, Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without
wavering, for he who promised is faithful.
And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and
good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together
as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another and so
much more as you see the day approaching.
It's about holding steady, staying connected, continuing on
together in unity. And in the book of Judges, we
find in a number of occasions the phrase and they all,
everybody did that which was right in their own eyes.
A commentary that I've been reading to go through the sermon
series is by Terry Brensinger called the Believers Church
Bible Commentary, and he writes, the book of Judges might well
have been written during our own lifetime.
Indeed, the situations described and the themes developed ring
true today with such force and clarity that the modern reader
rarely escapes taking part in the storyline.
With a deepening sense of anticipation, we mount the
stage. We share the joy and utter
excitement of both divine blessing and human potential.
Painfully, so too do we experience the increasing
frustration of watching our own individual and communal dreams
unravel. In many ways, The Book of Judges
is a book for the contemporary world.
The book describes our modern world today.
It clearly illustrates what happens in a person's life and
then end of the in the life of a people group what happens when
they lose their connection with God and their connections with
each other when they start each doing their own thing.
In Judges 17 verse 6, it says in those days there was no king in
Israel and everyone did which was right.
What was right in his own eyes. How relevant today.
People just doing what the jolly well please and if you don't
like it in this church, go to another one.
They'll do it whatever flavor style and color and shape and
worship you want or behavior you want or belief you want.
It's all there. But the Bible is being
forgotten. It covers a turbulent time
season in which we Live Today, too.
But you know what also is there? When the people fell, God
allowed them to be oppressed, and they cried out and they
repented, and God would redeem. That's also true.
They went through cycles of highs and lows.
They compromised God's laws, went after the idols, and
repeatedly they disconnected from God.
And one of the interesting things in the story is that they
never compromised their connection with God in the
downtime. Then they they engaged it again.
Those were the times in which they wanted the connection with
God back again. It was always in the easy times
when they abandoned God, when they wandered away.
It was always when they had it good.
It's a sad but true reality. In the easy times, it's easy to
lose their connections. And again, as I mentioned, we'll
see this as we go through it in the coming weeks.
You know how people sometimes do and they maybe lost something or
things went bad and things went South and things went bad.
And then they pray, Lord, if you arrest me, I will never again.
I will always we make all these promises and always in the hard
times, I will always start going to church.
Now I'll start giving now I'll start serving you.
I'll stop my addictions and I'll start loving people.
And I will always we make these. I will always, I'll never again.
Sentences right? They always happen down there.
I'm not saying they can't happen here, but why they always happen
down there. The same commentator makes this
comment here. This Bible commentator says the
Israelites to evil in the eyes of the Lord.
The Lord repeatedly brought upon the people of foreign oppressor.
The Israelites then cried to the Lord for assistance.
The Lord raised up a judge or delivered to rescue the people.
The judge LED Israel to freedom. The land had rest this whole
period of time. The book of judges lasted over
300 years. Then there's always spans a time
spans of good times and time spans of bad times.
We as a country, we as a nation have had it good for a long,
long time. But we're not being a good
people. We read that Joshua died and the
people continue their conquest, but then in chapter 2, verse 7
to 10, we have a rehearsal of the death of Joshua and the
events that followed. See, there's overlap in the
book. And in fact, I just want to
mention this here as well. The book is not a chronological
timeline. That's not how the book is
written In our sermon series. We don't want to focus on that,
but just what God did in these stories.
But the time in which we live now, too, is so similar to their
times. You see, there's never been a
time in history ever before where anybody's had it better on
earth than we do today. And never has so much changed so
fast at such breakneck speed as it's happening today.
We talk of AI, we talk of technology, and the list goes on
and on. The times of confusion have also
never been greater than they are now in terms of moral values.
But let me just say, God is watching.
The same God we find in Judges is still on the throne.
He's watching and as I said before, we'll go through this
whole book starting next week, but there's a passage I want to
read this morning. This happened actually before
Joshua even died. Read with me Joshua 2 Judges 2
verse one to six. Then the Angel of the Lord came
up from Gilgal. Remember, this is not beginning
in the in the story 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've not obeyed my voice. Why have you done this?
Therefore I also said, I will not drive them out before you,
but they shall be thorns in your side, and their 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 name of that place Bochum, and they
sacrificed there to the Lord. And when Joshua had dismissed
the people, the children of Israel went each to his own
inheritance to possess the land. This is a dark part even of the
story of Joshua. They had not done as they should
have. They did a lot of good things.
They did no bad things, just not all the good things they should
do. Think of that for a moment.
We just focus often on, well, I'm not doing bad things, how I
must be OK. Not doing good things is not OK.
One of the good things was to clean out the land, clear out
all the idol worship, get rid of all that dishonored God in the
land. They had not done that.
They did a lot of it, just not all of it.
And then later on, Joshua passed away.
And it does say here at this point in time, they wept.
We don't find that they change their lifestyles.
The question that comes to our mind is if an Angel of God would
walk into our facility this morning, which we don't expect,
but the message is true in the live that He has for us in His
Word, what would He tell us? Maybe our community, What would
He tell our community? He's not so much concerned
about, oh, just get rid of all the bad things.
Are we living up to the good standard that he's given us?
There was an outward appearance of holy living, yes, sure, but
it was just that. Who are we connected to?
God or stuff or culture? We've been given the opportunity
to choose God. Let's go back to the book of
Joshua 2415. This is now before Joshua passed
away. This is there's a bit of overlap
in these stories here. And Joshua says, if it seems
evil to you to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves this day
whom you will serve, whether the gods which your father's served
that were on the other side of the river, or the gods of the
Amorites and whose land you dwell.
They had entered the promised land.
But As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
We're going to be connected to God.
We like the people of Israel in the book of Judges.
We've been placed here on this earth for a season and for a
time. We didn't choose this place.
This time God gave it to us. But we have an opportunity.
We have a privilege and a responsibility, just like Adam
in the Garden of Eden. What are we going to do with it?
God give Adam an opportunity, Eve, Abram an opportunity, gave
Moses and the people of Israel opportunities.
Then Jesus came and died for our sins.
He gave the Israel's opportunities.
In Christ Jesus. We've been set free to connect
with Him, to connect with God and connect with each other and
live in relationship with Him. If you want, this can be yours.
God is calling us. You have the opportunity, the
responsibility to surrender, to commit, and to connect and live
in relationship with Him. And out of that, all the rest
flows. Let us pray.
Thank you, Lord, for this first Sunday of 2026.
Thank you for the grace you gave us as we started this journey.
I pray, Lord, we'll be faithful to you.
Lord, help us to stay connected to you.
Give us wisdom and insight to stay strong.
Help us, Lord, to connect with you in a way you designed us to
connect with you. And as we go through this year,
maybe experience your presence in our lives.
Thank you, Jesus. Amen.