This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

I want to welcome you to day five, our last day of week six of our look through
first and second kings. We're going to be mostly in second kings 18 today as we
start to look at Hezekiah. Remember we began looking yesterday at some of these
good kings during this last season of Israel and Judah.

And we are learning from them some of the things that it takes to have an
outstanding faith, from Hezekiah who removed the high places, the places of idol
worship. We learn that you have to deal with, you have to remove sometimes the
destructive, the distracting influences in your life in order to have an
outstanding faith. Listen to what happens in verses one to four.

In the third year of Hosea, the son of Elah, king of Israel, Hezekiah, son of
Ahaz, king of Judah, began to reign. He was 25 years old when he became king and
he reigned in Jerusalem 29 years. His mother's name was Abijah, daughter of
Zechariah, and he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord.

Just as his father David had done, he removed the high places, he smashed the
sacred stones and he cut down the Asherah poles. He broke into pieces the bronze
snake Moses had made, for up to that time the Israelites had been burning
incense to it. It was called Nahushtan.

In order to have this outstanding faith, one of the things you and I have to do
is first make the place of worship a priority in our lives, but then we also
have to deal with these destructive and distracting influences. And in Israel,
they were the high places, very destructive influences. They'd been a thorn in
the side of Israel and Judah for generations.

The people worshiped idols instead of worshiping the one true God. These were
centers of self-centered worship. They were all about finding a God who would do
what I want done, not a God who was telling me how to live my life, but a God
who I can tell what I want done.

And even the faithful kings, many of the faithful kings of Israel did not remove
the high places but Hezekiah did, and we can learn some things from him. Now
what are these influences for us? The destructive and distracting influences,
we've got to deal with them.

Distracting influences can be anything and everything in life, but when you go
to the destructive ones, they really have to do with the idols of life, the
things that we worship instead of God. And for them, they were stones, they were
false gods. For us, they're materialism, they're pleasure, they're our time,
they're getting my way.

Everything that I set up is more important than God, that's an idol in my life.
Now what had happened for many years is these high places in Israel, in Judah,
they remained untouched. They remained as they were.

They tried to worship God in the right way while they were in Jerusalem, but
they still had these high places, often a corner of their lives, where they
could run to their selfishness. Are there some corners of your life like that? I
would guess there are.

There certainly are in mine. Most of us are still struggling with selfishness.
We're going to struggle the rest of our lives.

I haven't actually met anybody who's not still struggling with selfishness. So
those places that you have of selfishness set off, untouched in some corner, how
can you start to deal with them? The high places that Hezekiah had to deal with
remind us of the kind of things we have to deal with.

Let me read for you verse 4 again, very interesting. Four different kinds of
high places here, or places of idol worship. He removed the high places, that's
the first one, smashed the sacred stones, the second one.

He broke the Asherah poles, the third, and then He broke into pieces the bronze
snake that Moses had made, the fourth one, for at that time the Israelites had
been burning incense to it. It was called Nahushetan. So here are four things
that they made idols of, but you can learn about our lives too.

Four things that we make idols of. First, the high places. We make idols
sometimes of our pet trusts, things that we trust in that have nothing to do
with God.

You see, they had gone to these high places for years. They'd become sort of a
habit in their lives, familiar in their lives, comfortable in their lives. And
you and I have places like that in our lives.

We know God doesn't want us to go to that place of anger. We know that God
doesn't want us to go to that place of lust. We know that God doesn't want us to
go to that place of shopping in order to feel better about ourselves.

We know that God doesn't want us to go to that place of gossip in order to feel
bigger or better than the other people around us. We know all of those things,
but we keep going back to those places. Why do we do that?

Because we're familiar with them, because they make us somehow feel better about
ourselves. The truth of the matter is they're poisoning us in ways that we don't
understand, but we're familiar with them and we think better of ourselves when
we go to these places, even though they're destroying our lives. You got to deal
with those kind of idols, the little pet trusts, the things that make you feel
better about yourself that you know, deep down, you know are destroying you and
others around you many times.

That's the high places. And then there's the sacred stones. They went and
worshiped at these places of sacred stones.

These were stones that they had stood up and often carved to look very
beautiful. This is making an idol of our accomplishments that God, they could
not see. So they carved a stone that they could see, and then they could go and
worship something that they had accomplished.

Sometimes you can still dig them up today in archaeological digs. They're very
beautiful, very ornate, very huge construction jobs sometimes. And you and I, we
can sometimes worship at the idol of our own accomplishments, at what we have
done, at what we have accomplished, at what's happened in our family or through
our business.

And we look at those things and we look to those things to cause us to feel
better about who we are. And many times when we make those things the idol, how
do you know if you've made an idol of your accomplishment? The accomplishment
becomes more important than God in your life.

You don't have time for God, you have time for the accomplishment. The
accomplishment becomes so important because your self-image is tied up in that
accomplishment instead of being tied up in who God is. Third place of idol
worship for them was the asher of holes.

They worshiped a false god of success, fertility. And this is making an idol of
our happiness, making an idol of our pleasure and our success. Feeling like God
is there to give me pleasure and God is there to give me success and I don't
have those things, then there must be something wrong with God.

And the truth of the matter is, many times you will find joy in the Lord and
happiness that goes along with that joy. But in this world, there are also times
of mourning. There are also times of grief.

We're not in heaven yet, we're not in the perfect place yet. There will be a
time when there is only joy. But for now, if you've made an idol of happiness,
then you will run away from the true God in order to find a God who will give
you the finances that you want or give you the immediate pleasure that you want
or give you the immediate success that you think you deserve.

God is bigger than those things. God is greater than those things. He's looking
at your life, not just in this next five years.

He's looking at your life in terms of eternity. That's the kind of success that
he's building in. And then there's this fourth place of idol worship, the most
interesting one to me, Moses' snake.

They took the snake, the bronze snake that you can read in the Old Testament,
Moses had made and he held it up to the people. He said, "If you look at this
snake and trust in God, then you won't be killed when the death angel comes
through the camp. " Well, here they are, 600, 700 years later.

They're still holding this up as a place of idol worship. They're burning
incense to it. Now, this is nothing new what happens here.

We see it many, many times in the Bible. The snake that Moses raised up that God
had told them to look at that day, now they're trusting not in God, they're
trusting in the bronze snake. It becomes so familiar with this idol, they even
had a pet name for it, Nahushtan.

We've got Nahushtans in our life. We can do the same thing. We can make an idol
out of a place.

It can be a tent that you used to worship in or a building you used to worship
in, and you can say, "God could not work in my life in the way that he worked in
my life in that place. " Or you can make an idol out of an experience. You have
some experience with God at a camp or in a church service.

Some people even make an idol out of their experience of being born again. They
think, "I can't get back to that same feeling, so I must not be as close to God.
" You're making an idol.

Sometimes you can make an idol out of a person. Some pastor that you used to
have, Pastor George or Pastor Nahushtan, whatever you name that pastor, he's the
one that brought you to Christ. He's the one that you first learned the word
from, and you think, "Well, there's no other person that can really teach me the
word.

" That's just not true. No one will ever be like them, but also no one will ever
be like the pastor that you have now, the leader that you have now. Don't make
an idol out of that person so that it keeps you from growing now.

The essence of idolatry is the desire to get. Idols are self-serving little
false gods, and it's easy to become self-serving about our faith. We can become
disappointed in ourselves or sorrowful about this world, but look at how
Hezekiah dealt with these places.

Remember what we just read? Let me just read what he did. He removed the high
places.

He smashed the sacred stones. He cut down the Asherah poles. He broke into
pieces this snake.

He dealt with it once and for all. There was no compromise. There was no putting
them off to the side so that maybe we can come back to them later.

He totally dealt with them. You can't deal with high places in your life with
halfway measures. It takes an unwavering commitment, and that often means
telling someone else that commitment that you're making.

The reason you're afraid, I'm afraid, to tell somebody else is I know that I'm
going to stick with the commitment. Somebody's going to hold me accountable to
that commitment, but it is worth it because when you deal with these
destructive, these distracting influences in your life, you've opened your life
to a kind of faith you've never discovered before, an outstanding faith, the
kind of faith that can not only strengthen your life, but strengthen the life of
everyone around you. So let's pray for God's strength in this one.

We ask for strength to deal with these destructive influences in our lives,
these idols that we set up of our own past, our own comfort, our own
accomplishments, our own pleasures, all of these things, Lord, that so easily
can seem to us to be the way to reach you. We don't want to put anything between
you and us. The truth of the matter is we just need to reach you.

You are the God that we need. You're the father that we need. And so we come to
you right now.

And we pray that if there are these idols in our lives, these things that are in
between us and you, these self-serving gods, that, God, you'd help us to be
aware of them and help us to, as Hezekiah did, set them aside entirely, destroy
them, because, God, we don't want that. We want you. We want the truth.

We want faith. We want life. So we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen. Well, join us next week. We're going to continue to learn about faith from
some of these great kings as we finish this next week, our study of first and
second kings.