This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to day five of week seven of our look through First and
Second Kings. This is our last day. We are ending our study of First and Second
Kings today, and I love happy endings.

Unfortunately, First and Second Kings does not have one. There are some great
prophets, there are some great kings that we have learned from through these
books, but there's too many bad kings, and those bad kings headed the nation
towards ruin because the people followed those kings, and they fell from
faithfulness. So at the end of Second Kings, there's this great warning to all
of us in a generation where we see so many falling from faithfulness, and the
truth of the matter is this tendency did not begin in our generation or in the
generation of these kings.

Adam and Eve set the pattern, and we come to it again at the end of the study of
First and Second Kings, and we see it in our lives still today. It's an easy
thing to fall from faithfulness. It's an easy thing to trust in yourself instead
of God.

The nations of God are going to fall into terrible destruction. God's chosen people
are going to be defeated. They're going to be exiled from the promised land.

In Chapter 17 of Second Kings, you see the fall of Israel, who are defeated,
taken into exile by the Assyrians. In Chapter 25, you're going to see the fall of
Judah, who are defeated and exiled by Babylon. It does not make the most
thrilling ending for a story, but it's the truth.

The miracle of the Exodus turns into the tragedy of the exile, and you have to
wait for the New Testament for the happy endings. They are going to come. They are
coming, I promise you that.

But as you look at what happens at the end of Second Kings, they cause you and I
to take a look at what causes us to fall so that we can avoid it. We can help
other people to avoid it. We are all candidates.

I gotta let go of my pride and recognize I am a candidate for a fall from
faithfulness. We're all human. Now, why do we fall from faithfulness?

What are some of the reasons? Well, you see it in verse seven and eight, and
then skip down to verse 13, you see why they fell. All this took place because
the Israelites had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up
out of Egypt from under the power of Pharaoh, King of Egypt.

They worshiped other gods and followed the practices of the nations the Lord had
driven out before them, as well as the practices that the kings of Israel had
introduced. Down in verse 13, the Lord warned Israel and Judah through all his
prophets and seers, turn from your evil ways. Observe my commands and decrees in
accordance with the entire law that I commanded your fathers to obey and that I
delivered to you through my servants the prophets, but they would not listen and
were as stiff-necked as their fathers who did not trust in the Lord their God.

They rejected his decrees and the covenants he had made with their fathers and
the warnings he had given them. They followed worthless idols and themselves
became worthless. They imitated the nations around them, although the Lord had
ordered them, do not do as they do.

And they did the things that the Lord had forbidden them to do. What happened?
How did this fall from faithfulness happen to Israel, to Judah?

Well, let's just walk through some of the things that happened. First, deluded
trust. Israel didn't abandon their trust in the Lord.

Judah didn't abandon their trust in the Lord so much as allow it to become
deluded. Little by little, they added other trusts into their lives until their
trust in the Lord was deluded beyond recognition. They worshiped other gods.

They were deluded by misdirected worship, by false worship. They built high
places. They set up stones, ash for poles.

They were deluded by these multiplying influences, wrong influences in their
lives. Why do we fall from faithfulness? Most people don't wake up one morning
to decide, I'm going to change.

I'm not going to be faithful to God anymore. Our faith just gets deluded. Deluded
by worry, the worries of not having enough, which causes mistaken and misplaced
values to begin to take control in our lives, deluded many times by hurry, by
the busy schedules of our lives.

So, deluded faith is one of the reasons that we fall from faith. A second reason
is popularized faith. In verse eight, they followed the ways of the nations that
were around them.

This nation began to allow popular opinion to determine their faith, the way
that they followed God. The opinions of the surrounding nations, the opinions of
their kings. Popular faith, and so people were as faithful as long as the faith
was popular.

Popular in their family or in community or with their friends or at their job.
Do you have faith that's a popular faith? You can ask yourself some questions to
determine if you have a popular faith.

Ask yourself, how long would it take for you to begin church again if you moved
to another community? If it would take a long time, you'd probably have a
popular faith. It's popularized by the faith community that you're in right now.

God commands us to not forsake worship. Why would you? Well, you have even one
small measure of a popular faith.

Or ask yourself, could disappointment in a particular individual cause you to
stop serving the Lord? What if this pastor, what if I, what if Pastor Rick fell
from serving the Lord? God forbid that that would ever happen.

We have put safeguards into our lives that we want that to never happen. Well,
what if that happened? Would it cause you to lose your faith?

Then you have a popular faith. It's depending on some other person's faith, not
on your faith in the Lord. Ask yourself, what would you be willing to lose for
your faith?

That tells you whether you have a popular faith. And these questions remind us
that all of us have probably some measure of a popular faith in our lives that
we have to deal with. And if we don't, then we can fall from faith.

We can fall into faithlessness. A third thing that they struggled with is what
the Old Testament calls stiff necks. They were stiff-necked.

That means your neck is locked in a certain position. You're looking ahead and
you're not going anywhere else. This is the biblical word for mule-headed.

And you can probably think some other words for this. They were just plain
stubborn. The Lord warned them, they wouldn't listen.

They would not listen. They knew they were wrong. God made it clear through the
circumstances of their nation, of their families.

But they were just too stubborn to admit it. Stubbornness is, without a doubt,
one of the major causes for a fall from faithfulness in your life. You're too
stubborn to admit that you're wrong.

And so you fall. You're too stubborn to forgive, and so you fall. You're too
stubborn to change, so you fall.

You're too stubborn to cooperate, so you fall. You're too stubborn to love, and
so you fall. So in chapter 25, verse 21, we have these ringing words.

So Judah went into captivity, away from her land. Those four words, away from
her land. That is a wailing cry.

This is the promised land. This is the promised land they were in. They so
trusted in the promise that they believed God would never take them away from
this land.

No matter how faithless they might be, God would not take them from this land
'cause it was the promised land. They were assuming upon God rather than
trusting in God. It's pretty obvious that when we lose sight of God's promises,
we become faithless.

And they were taken away from the land because of this. This fall into
faithlessness in our lives, it's usually a slow fall. Israel heard warnings over
hundreds of years.

That fall might have begun in your life or in the life of somebody that you
love. It's time to stop it now. Stop the fall now.

Restore your faith in the Lord this very moment. This very moment. Decide, I'm
going to get rid of those distracting, diluting influences.

I'm going to determine in this very moment to not let my stubbornness rule and
guide my life. I'm going to be the kind of person who trusts in God instead of the
popular opinion. Now, as we end this study of First and Second Kings, I can't
end with just the fall.

I have to go back to some of the good news. I want to remind you as we end this
study of the positive lessons of First and Second Kings. Remember who we learned
from as we walked through these books.

We learned from Solomon. We learned from Solomon how to build for the Lord. The
way to build with faithfulness in your life for the Lord.

We learned from Elijah the prophet how to be a significant servant. How do you
have the kind of faith that causes you to serve God in significant ways? And we
learned how to trust God through the victories of life and how to trust God
through the defeats of life.

We learned from Elisha how to see miracles in our life and the great lessons of
God working the miracles through our lives, the simple moments that we trust in
him. That a miracle is not so much some great thing, it's some great trust. And
in that trust, that's when we see the great thing.

That's when we see God do the great thing. And then these last few days, we've
learned from Josiah and Hezekiah and Joash how to have outstanding faith. In a
world that's headed away from God, how do I keep heading towards God?

These are the kings that stand out, stand forth and say, here's how to have
faith even in difficult times. That's the kind of faith I want to have. That's
the kind of faith I want you to have.

So let's pray that we'd have it right now. Lord, we thank you that we have
Jesus, we have the Holy Spirit, we have the church. We have all these things
that the kings did not have.

They had the promised land, but we have your promise realized in our hearts and
in our lives. We live out that promise of faith. In a world that we don't always
see things happen as we want to, there's too much bad news and it's too hard
sometimes to feel like we're having to swim upstream against the current.

In that kind of world, Jesus, you can meet us. You can strengthen us. You can
empower us to live by faith because you walked into that kind of world and you
live by faith in that kind of world.

And you've put your spirit into us to empower us to do the same thing. So we
pray that you would cause us to be examples of hope and faith and love in a
world that so desperately needs it. Lord, help us to hear your love for us.

Help us to hear the hope that you have for us. We pray this in Jesus' name,
amen. I want to thank you for joining us for the study of first and second
kings, these great lessons.

I hope you'll join us, continue with us for our next study. Or if you want, you
can go to drivetimedevotions. com.

drivetimedevotions, alloneword. com and look at any of the other studies that
we've done through the entire New Testament, most of the Old Testament. Pick any
of those studies that you want, the next one that God has for you.

So stick with us this next week for our just ongoing studies. Or join us at
drivetimedevotions. com for the next study that God has for you.

Whichever way you do it, I just want to say as I end this study, I always feel
this, I am so grateful for your love for God's word. I'm so grateful that you're
allowing God's word to be poured into your life because you love the Lord and
you want to live a life of love for him. And I pray for you that God will bless
that faithfulness in the most wonderful of ways.