Not On My Watch

So this is our seventh and final message in the Kings and Characters Season 2 series.

Of course, if you missed any of the messages, you can catch up on our website or the podcast.

Last week, we looked at the story of Elijah and Elisha.

We looked at it through the theme of passing on the mantle from one generation to the next.

Elijah and Elisha were sort of these marginal prophetic voices who were speaking to the kings.

But the last king that we looked at was two weeks ago, we looked at the story of King Solomon.

We looked at 10 things that King Solomon did right.

When he dedicated the temple, that was probably the high point of his life.

The scripture says in 1 Kings chapter 10, King Solomon was greater in riches and wisdom than all the other kings of the earth.

The whole world sought audience with Solomon to hear the wisdom God had put in his heart.

Solomon was the guy who built the temple.

He had, he received so much blessing from the Lord in the form of wealth, but he went bad.

1 Kings 11 says, King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh's daughter.

Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites.

They were from the nations about which the Lord had told the Israelites, you must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.

Nevertheless, Solomon held fast to them in love.

He had 700 wives of royal birth and 300 concubines, and his wives let him astray.

As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God, as the heart of David his father had been.

He followed Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molech, the detestable god of the Ammonites.

So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord.

He did not follow the Lord completely as David his father had done.

Now, David was not perfect.

Three weeks ago, we looked at David's stuff up in 2 Samuel 11, but it seems that at least David was sincere in his repentance, and Solomon wasn't.

And so the Lord spells out the consequence of what Solomon has done in chapter 11 verse 11.

The Lord said to Solomon, since this is your attitude, meaning because you have followed after all the gods of your 1,000 wives, the Lord said to Solomon, since this is your attitude and you have not kept my covenant and my decrees, which I commanded you, I will most certainly tear the kingdom away from you and give it to one of your subordinates.

Nevertheless, for the sake of David, your father, I will not do it during your lifetime.

I will tear it out of the hand of your son, yet I will not tear the whole kingdom from him, but will give him one tribe for the sake of David, my servant, and for the sake of Jerusalem, which I have chosen.

Remember the Davidic Covenant, 2 Samuel chapter 7.

God promised David that David will never fail to have a son on the throne of Israel and Judah.

This is the bit of the story where the Davidic Covenant comes back in, because Solomon has turned away from God, and yet God has bound himself to Solomon's line.

And so God judges the line of Solomon by tearing half the kingdom away, and yet Solomon still has part of the kingdom.

So this is a massive moment in the overall story of the Bible.

This is the moment that the United Kingdom of Israel breaks into two.

And it breaks so that there are ten tribes in the north, which are called Israel or Ephraim or Joseph, and two tribes in the south, called Judah and Benjamin.

Jeroboam becomes king of the ten tribes in the north, and Rehoboam, son of Solomon, becomes king of the two tribes in the south.

Eventually, in the course of time, Hezekiah comes as king of the two tribes in the south, and I promise we will land in that story, but before we get there, I want to give us a 30,000 foot flyover of the story of the kings of Israel and Judah.

There's a lot of scripture.

I'm not apologizing.

I'm warning you.

Follow with me if you can, and then we'll breathe at the end of it, and we'll see how we go.

This is the line of the kings of Israel.

Remember, those are the ten tribes in the north.

1 Kings 14 verse 7.

Go tell Jeroboam, he's the king of the north.

Go tell Jeroboam, this is what the Lord the God of Israel says.

I raised you up from among the people and appointed you ruler over my people Israel.

I tore the kingdom away from the house of David and gave it to you.

But you have not been like my servant David, who kept my commands and followed me with all his heart, doing only what was right in my eyes.

You have done more evil than all who lived before you.

You've made for yourselves other gods, idols made of metal.

You've aroused my anger and turned your back on me.

So it's a pretty bad start for Israel.

The first king of the 10 tribes in the north of Israel is a bad one.

We're heading down and now I want to race through the line of the Kings.

If you've read 1 and 2 Kings, you know it goes pretty quickly between all the Kings.

The second king, 1 Kings 15, Nadap son of Jeroboam became king of Israel in the second year of Asa king of Judah and he reigned over Israel two years.

He did evil in the eyes of the Lord.

1 Kings 15 33, in the third year of Asa king of Judah, Basha son of Ahijah became king of all Israel in Terza and he reigned 24 years.

He did evil in the eyes of the Lord.

I'm gonna skip the passages.

I've gone through all of 1 and 2 Kings and traced which kings are good and which ones are bad and I'm gonna give you the verdict.

Firstly, 1st king of Israel in the North, Jeroboam, evil.

Nadab, evil.

Basha, evil.

Elah, evil.

Zimri, evil.

Omri, evil.

Ahab, evil.

Azahaya, evil.

Joram, evil.

Jehu, evil.

Jehoahaz, evil.

Jehoash, evil.

Jeroboam the 2nd, evil.

Zechariah, evil.

Shalom, evil.

Menahem, evil.

Pekahiah, evil.

Pekah, evil.

Hoshiah, evil.

19 kings in a row, evil.

Every single king of the 10 tribes of Israel in the north was evil.

I never realized that until this week.

I stepped back and looked at the story as a whole.

I told you a couple of weeks ago, the line of the kings goes like this, up and down.

It doesn't go up.

It's down.

The line of Israel is down.

19 kings in a row.

In fact, if we were to graph it, this is what the graph looks like.

Each of those dashes is a king.

There's 19 kings.

In a way, it's funny, but it's also incredibly tragic.

This is evil.

And this line at the bottom is exile.

Because all throughout this descent, God was speaking to Israel through his prophets, through Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, calling them to come back, calling them to stop sacrificing your children, stop worshipping other gods, and return to Yahweh, but they would not listen.

And so in roughly the year 722 BC, Assyria came and exiled the kingdom of Israel.

2 Kings 17.

In the ninth year of Hoshea, that's the 19th, the final king of Israel, the king of Assyria, Shalmaneser, captured Samaria, which is the capital city of Israel in the north, and deported the Israelites to Assyria.

Shalmaneser settled them in Halla, in Gozan, on the Habal River, and in the towns of the Medes.

All this took place because the Israelites had sinned against the Lord their God.

The line ends.

Israel are exiled.

And what we know from history is the Assyrian people had an assimilation policy that when they would conquer a new people, they would take those people and tear them apart.

They would scatter them across the entire empire, so that the people would not band together and fight against Assyria.

And so you might have heard it said the Lost Tribes of Israel, the 10 Lost Tribes.

When I was a kid and dad told me that one time, I thought, oh, that's so spooky.

Like, where did they go?

Are they hiding in a cave?

They're not hiding.

They were assimilated into Assyria and lost.

Lost into history because their ethnic identity, what made them the people of Israel was lost when they were torn apart.

Israel goes into exile and that is the end.

So now let's rewind 19 Kings back.

Back to King Solomon, the kingdom divides and we'll follow the line of Judah in the south and see if they're any better.

Solomon was king.

The third king, Saul, David, Solomon.

After Solomon, the kingdom splits in two.

One King's 14, Rehoboam, son of Solomon, was king in Judah.

He was 41 years old when he became king and he reigned 17 years in Jerusalem, the city the Lord had chosen, out of all the tribes of Israel in which to put his name.

Rehoboam's mother's name was Nama.

She was an Ammonite.

Judah did evil in the eyes of the Lord.

By the sins they committed, they stirred up his jealous anger more than those who were before them had done.

They also set up for themselves high places, sacred stones and asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree.

There were even male shrine prostitutes in the land.

The people engaged in all the detestable practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites.

King number one, not a good start.

Judah is heading down from the start.

The second king, one king's 15.

In the 18th year of the reign of Jeroboam, son of Nebat, Abijah became king of Judah.

And he reigned in Jerusalem three years.

His mother's name was Macca, daughter of Abishalom.

He committed all the sins his father had done before him.

His heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God, as the heart of David, his forefather had been.

Nevertheless, for David's sake, the Lord his God gave him a lamp in Jerusalem by raising up a son to succeed him and make Jerusalem strong.

So we're 0 for 2.

Two kings, both of them are evil.

But again, the Davidic Covenant comes back in.

Because even though you have two evil kings, the trajectory is heading down.

God has promised David that there would always be a king on the throne.

And so as bad as the line gets, God has to remain faithful to his covenant.

Again, let me skim through 30,000 feet over all the kings of Judah.

Rehoboam, evil.

Abijah, evil.

Asa, good.

Jehoshaphat, good.

Jehoram, evil.

Ahaziah, evil.

Joash, good.

Amaziah, good.

Uzziah, good.

Jotham, good.

Ahaz, evil.

Hezekiah, good.

Manasseh, evil.

Ammon, evil.

Josiah, good.

Jehoahaz, evil.

Jehoiakim, evil.

Jehoiachin, evil.

Zedekiah, evil.

19 kings of Judah and only 8 of them were good.

I never realized both Israel and Judah had 19 kings before exile.

All 19 kings of Israel were evil, evil, evil, evil until the exile.

But when we follow the line of Judah, we see of the 19 kings, 8 of them were given a good verdict.

And so this is what Judah's graph looks like.

Israel is the yellow, Judah is the blue.

Each of those dashes is one of the 19 kings of Judah.

It's better than the Israel, but it's not great.

There's a lot of evil kings.

And all throughout this descent, this up and down, again, God is speaking to Judah by his prophets, calling them to come back in faithfulness to him.

But again, Judah don't.

And so the X at the end is King Zedekiah.

When Babylon come and exile them, 2 Kings 25.

In the ninth year of Zedekiah's reign, he was the 19th king of Judah.

On the 10th day of the 10th month, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and we can pause right there, because that's really significant, Assyria were the ones who exiled Israel in the north, and now we've had a major world political shift.

Babylon have come through and pushed out Assyria.

Babylon are the new superpower, and it's Babylon that come and exile Judah.

Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon marched against Jerusalem with his whole army.

He encamped outside the city and built siege works around it, down to verse 9.

Nebuchadnezzar set fire to the temple of the Lord, the one Solomon built, the royal palace and all the houses of Jerusalem.

Every important building he burnt down, down to verse 21.

So Judah went into captivity away from her land.

Judah is lost as well.

This judgment, the up and down, has ended in the same place that Israel did.

And yet what I think is interesting to note is Babylon are the new power here.

Babylon have a different assimilation policy to Assyria.

Assyria's tactic was, find the people, pull them apart, spread them throughout the entire empire.

Babylon's tactic was, pick up the people and transport them to a new place, but let them keep some of their ethnic identity, not for altruistic reasons, so that they would work harder, produce more food and pay more tax to Babylon.

And so years later, when God prophesied that he will bring Judah out of exile, Judah still sort of exists as a nation with a distinct identity because of Babylon's assimilation policy.

So Israel, the 10 tribes in the north, are completely lost, assimilated into Assyria, but Judah remain even in Babylon.

So that's a 30,000-foot flyover.

We can just pause here and breathe for a second.

19 kings of Israel, 19 kings of Judah, every one of the kings of Israel was evil.

And 11 of the 19 were evil in Judah, and 8 of them were good.

So now we jump out of our 30,000-foot plane and parachute down into the story of Hezekiah.

Hezekiah lives in this moment on the graph.

That little yellow dot in the top, that's Hezekiah's kingdom.

So he was the king of Judah in the south when Israel went into exile.

You imagine being the king who watches your kin, your nation taken off into exile.

Hezekiah steps into this moment, and every single dot before him is his father's, father's, father's, father's, father's, father's father.

This is Hezekiah's family.

And now the kingship has come to him, and Hezekiah has a chance to either drive Judah down or take them up again.

Hezekiah has a chance to make a difference.

Hezekiah's time has come.

He is king now.

The question is, what kind of king will he be?

Will Hezekiah be another king like all of his forefathers?

Evil, evil, evil.

Or will Hezekiah turn back to Yahweh and be faithful?

Hezekiah determines which direction that line heads.

Danica read for us our passage, 2 Kings 18, verse 1.

In the third year of Hoshia, son of Elah, king of Israel, Hoshia was, sorry, back to the graph for a sec.

Hoshia was the red X at the bottom.

He was the 19th king of Israel, the one who was king when the exile happened.

In the third year of Hoshia, 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 here's the verdict.

We wonder, is it gonna say he did evil or he did good?

Verse three, he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, just as David his father had done.

So Hezekiah is one of the eight good ones of the line of Judah.

Verse five, Hezekiah trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel.

There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him.

So of those eight good kings, Hezekiah stands above them all as uniquely good.

Hezekiah was one of the good kings, one of the best kings of Judah.

Did you know the name Hezekiah means Yahweh strengthens, or Yahweh is my strength?

When we read the rest of the passage that Danica read for us, we see there's a bunch of verbs, things Hezekiah did.

Hezekiah reigned, he did what was right, he removed high places, he smashed sacred stones, he cut down Asherah poles, he broke into pieces the snake, he trusted Yahweh, he held fast, he did not stop following, he kept the commands, he was successful, he rebelled against Asherah, he did not serve them, he defeated them.

All of this that Hezekiah does is because Yahweh strengthened him.

When we see this graph up and down, there's a sense in which God is always wanting to draw them to himself, but also the kingship of the king matters.

If it's a good king, Judah will head up.

Yahweh was the strength of Hezekiah, the one who empowered him to do all that he did.

In our waveform series, probably 2 years ago, one of the lines we kept on coming back to is, without him, you can't, as in, you can't transform yourself without him.

Without him, you can't, but without you, he won't.

That sort of attention here in the kings is, God is always willing to strengthen, always willing to empower by his grace, and yet he wants the kings to turn to him, to respond to his grace.

And Hezekiah was not a perfect person, but he did turn to Yahweh, and he made use of the strength that Yahweh gave him.

The title of this message is Not On My Watch.

You're familiar with that expression.

Not On My Watch, as in, I assume it comes from military days, or someone is on a watch, and they say, Not On My Watch.

While I am here, while I am in charge, we will not do something.

I think Hezekiah has a Not On My Watch moment.

Because finally, in the long line of generations of kings, Hezekiah becomes king, and on his watch, he decides with the strength that God gives him, we will not be faithless.

We will follow God.

In fact, I think Hezekiah makes 3 commitments, and the commitments that apply to us too.

Because your life is your watch.

My life is my watch.

No one dictates the course of your life but you.

And God is always ready and willing to strengthen you to turn back towards him, but he waits for us to respond to him and to take a step toward him.

So 3 commitments Hezekiah made.

Hezekiah's first commitment, On my watch, I will remove the high places.

2 Kings 18 verse 3, Hezekiah 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 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 Nehushtan.

Firstly, that's just insane.

They still have the snake.

This is way back in Numbers.

The Book of Numbers, they set up the bronze snake.

They're still worshipping the snake this whole time.

Messed up.

In the ancient Near East, mountains were symbolic of the overlap between heaven and earth.

You can imagine down here on the plains, we live in earth.

Up there in the sky is the realm of the gods.

And mountains were this sort of meeting point between heaven and earth.

And so all throughout the first, the ancient world, ancient Near East, they would set up monuments to worship the gods on hills.

And this particular monument, the Asherah Pole, Asherah is a word in Hebrew which is related to the word for blessing.

And it was a goddess, one of the goddesses of the pagan nations.

So, Israel and Judah had set up Asherah Poles on every high place in all of the kingdom of Israel and Judah as a way of appealing to the blessing of the pagan gods.

They thought if we could put an Asherah Pole on this hill and if we could offer sacrifices and pour out blood and do terrible things, we will receive blessing.

The high places were all around Judah.

But the terrible thing is even the good kings of Judah never removed the high places.

We see 1 Kings 15, King Asa did what was right in the eyes of the Lord.

So he was a good king, one of the kings that go up.

He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord as his father David had done.

And then verse 14 said, although Asa did not remove the high places, Asa's heart was fully committed to the Lord all his life.

We see that all of the kings before Hezekiah, even if they're good kings, they do not remove the high places.

1 Kings 22, Jehoshaphat son of Asa became king of Judah in the 4th year of Ahab, king of Israel.

In everything, he followed the ways of his father Asa and did not stray for them.

He did what was right.

This is a good king.

The high places, however, were not removed.

All of the kings, the good kings that come before Hezekiah, even though they're faithful in every way, they do not remove the high places.

Until we get to Hezekiah, and Hezekiah says, not on my watch.

He says, I'm king, we will remove the high places.

It says in 2 Kings 18 verse 4, Hezekiah finally removed the high places.

He smashed the sacred stones and 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 Nehushetan.

Not a single king did that before Hezekiah.

Every other king, even the good ones, would worship God, but also keep the Asherah poles just in case.

Like, let's just keep offering sacrifices to the other gods to hedge our bets that God won't provide for us.

But it came to Hezekiah and he said, not on my watch.

Hezekiah's first commitment was, I will remove the high places.

And what he was saying is, we have one God, and we are all in on this one God.

We will not appeal to pagan gods, but we will trust in Yahweh.

I think that's applicable to us, because many of us profess faith in God.

We follow Jesus, and yet, and when we follow Jesus, we have been transformed.

We have become a new creation.

And yet, I've experienced this, many of us might have, parts of our old life linger.

We hold on to things.

We say, I follow you, God, but I also have this little thing that God doesn't see, and I don't really think about, but I hold on to it.

Hezekiah's commitment was, I will remove the high places.

I'm all in for God.

I will hold on to nothing else.

Do you remember Jesus said in Matthew 5, the Sermon on the Mount, the best part of the whole Bible, Jesus said, if your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out.

If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off.

He's saying, make no allowance for the flesh.

He's saying, it's hyperbole, don't cut your hand and gouge your eyes, but He's saying, do not make any allowance for sin.

There's no place for holding on to the way that we used to be.

Hezekiah kind of did this thing that Jesus was saying.

He removed the high places.

He cut them off.

He smashed everything that was not glorifying to God.

So what does it look like in your life to remove the high places?

What are you holding on to instead of trusting God?

What door are you keeping creaked open in the back of your life?

You just head out there sometimes when you need to.

Hezekiah was a good king because he said, on my watch, I will remove the high places.

Hezekiah's second commitment, on my watch, I will keep the Lord's commands.

2 Kings 18, Hezekiah trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel.

There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him.

He held fast to the Lord and did not stop following him.

He kept the commands the Lord had given Moses.

So there's a sense in which the first commitment Hezekiah made was to chop off all of the pagan worship that was happening, and the second one is to recommit himself to follow the law of God.

And this is what the prophets had been saying.

All throughout the, well, Israel was this, Judah was more like this.

All throughout the descent of the kings, the prophets were saying, come back to God, come back and he will bless you.

Follow his word, do what he says, be obedient and blessing will flow.

Psalm 1 says, blessed is the one who does not walk and step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord.

The one who meditates on scripture day and night, that person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither.

Whatever they do prospers.

The good life is life with God.

God's commands are not burdensome.

He's not leading us down a narrow path.

It's a terrible path.

It's the narrow path that leads to life.

And so when Hezekiah burns the Asherah poles, he cuts them down and he commits himself to hold fast to the commands of God, he chooses life, the good life of knowing God.

Dallas Willard is my hero.

He has this thing called the Vim Principle in his book, Renovation of the Heart.

Vim, V-I-M, vision, intention, means.

He uses Vim Principle as a way of thinking about how human beings change.

Vision is the first thing that if you are gonna change and become something, of course, you need a vision of what you are trying to become like, who you're trying to become like.

And so for Hezekiah, he filled his mind in his heart with a vision of who God is, what God is like, what God has done.

He meditated on scripture day and night.

Secondly, you need the intention.

Hezekiah not only had the vision of where he wanted to take the kingdom of Judah, he had the intention to step out and do it.

And here it was the strength of Yahweh which helped him, which brings us to M, means God is always ready to empower those who would take steps toward him by his grace.

Hezekiah means Yahweh strengthens.

Hezekiah had a vision of God, of what scripture says.

He had the intention to follow, the intention to say, not on my watch.

And God gave him the means, the strength.

So what does it look like for you to say, on my watch, I will keep the Lord's commands?

Firstly, do you have a vision of the Lord?

Do you have an image of what God is like, of what life with God is like?

That's the first step.

And for that, I suggest the Sermon on the Mount.

Read it all the way through and then read it again all the way through and don't stop doing that.

Fill your mind with a vision of who God is, who he is revealed himself to be in Jesus.

And then with the grace that he gives us, set your intention to move in the direction of the kingdom of God and God will empower by his grace.

Hezekiah's second commitment was, on my watch, I will keep the Lord's commands.

Last one, Hezekiah's third commitment, on my watch, I will serve no other king.

Verse 7, and the Lord was with Hezekiah.

He was successful in whatever he undertook.

He rebelled against the king of Assyria and did not serve him.

From watchtower to fortified city, he defeated the Philistines as far as Gaza and its territories.

All of the previous kings of Israel and Judah had made terrible alliances with the people around them, which led them astray.

But Hezekiah comes in and he says, On my watch, we will serve no other king.

We are faithful to God alone.

We will not make treaties with our neighbours.

The idiom in the scripture, from watchtower to fortified city, it's a picture of the entire kingdom.

From watchtower, meaning the furthest outskirts, from the watchtower all the way to the fortified city in the heart of the capital.

From all of the kingdom, Hezekiah was faithful and God gave him in his kingdom success.

They routed their enemy out of the entire kingdom.

Hezekiah said, I will serve no other king.

There's always a king asking us to bow down to him.

For Israel, it was Assyria.

For Judah, it was Babylon.

For Daniel, it was Persia.

For Jesus, it was Rome.

For moderns, it was truth.

For postmoderns, it is self.

For you and I, it might be money or power or success or sex or family or fame, anything.

There are so many kings in the world that you could bow to.

I think the greatest king today is self, that we wanna elevate ourself to become king or queen of our own life.

But Hezekiah was a good king because he said, On my watch, I will serve no other king but God.

Hezekiah was faithful to God.

Paul, thousands of years later in the New Testament time, defined Christianity by the declaration, Jesus is Lord.

Romans 10,9, Paul says, If you declare with your mouth, Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

The kingship, the lordship of Jesus, is the heart of what it means to be a Christian.

This commitment, I will serve no other king, is Christianity.

And yet in my life, I say, yes, Jesus is my king, but I also have little princes, little other parts of my life.

Hezekiah was wholehearted.

He said, I will serve no other king.

And if we serve King Jesus, we're not guaranteed blessing or money in this life or power, but we get God himself.

Jesus defined eternal life like this in John 17 verse 3.

Jesus said, this is eternal life.

And I bet you it went silent in the room.

All the disciples leaned in, they said, what is it?

Is it eternal youth?

Is it unlimited power, infinite money?

What is eternal life?

Jesus says, this is eternal life that they know you.

The only true God in Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

Eternal life is to know God, to know his goodness and to serve him as our only king.

So what does it mean for you and your life to say, on my watch, I will serve no other king?

These are the three commitments Hezekiah made.

He said, on my watch, I will remove the high places.

On my watch, I will keep the Lord's commands.

On my watch, I will serve no other king.

What's your commitment?

This is your life, your money, your marriage, your studies, your job, your family, your life.

You live on this graph of the generations, and it is to a mysterious and scary degree up to you, whether you will respond to God and move closer toward Him or further away.

This is your life.

So on your watch, what are you going to say?

Will you with Hezekiah make those commitments?

Will we as a church make these commitments?

James 4 verse 8 says, Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.

God is always wanting to draw near to us, but He invites us to turn to Him and to, with intention, step toward Him.

What are you going to do with your life?

On your watch.

On your watch, will your life go down?

Will you be faithless?

Will you turn away from God?

Or will you turn towards Him and come closer to Him?

This is your life.

And what are you going to do on your watch?

Well, we've come to the end of Kings and Characters Season 2.

We had 7 messages in the first and 7 messages in the second series.

14 messages.

We've surveyed a lot of the significant kings in the stories, lots of the characters of the Old Testament.

And I want to take a moment just to stand back and look at the kings and characters.

Look at the Old Testament as a whole and see what we learn.

What do we learn from kings and characters?

You can answer that question in your own time.

But for me, it's the fact that the story is going somewhere.

The story is pretty horrific at times.

We laugh because we have to find a way of dealing with how evil the kings are when they go down and down and down.

But the story goes somewhere.

The kings go up and down and up and down, but God is faithful.

The story of Judah didn't end in exile, but 400 years later, God sent his only son, Jesus, who is the true king.

When we turn from the pages of the Old Testament to the New, we turn to Matthew 1, and if you know the New Testament, you know Matthew opens with a genealogy that connects King Jesus to the line of Abraham, King David, follows all of the kings of Judah, down to Josiah, and then Jesus.

The kings of Judah were good and bad, but King Jesus is the king that we need.

He was faithful when all the other kings were faithless.

It was said of Hezekiah in our passage, there was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him.

Well, there is no one like King Jesus.

No one so faithful, no one so good, no one so just.

And the picture we see at the end of the Bible is the elders of the nations lay their crowns before King Jesus and say, You are worthy to receive the glory and power and honor and everything.

The picture at the end of the story of the Bible is all of us bow the knee to King Jesus.

And I mean Christians do, but Philippians 2 says, Every knee will bow, every tongue will confess.

When we see the Lord Jesus in his glory, whether you believed in him in your life here on earth or not, you will recognize he is Lord.

That's how the story of the Bible ends, with King Jesus worthy of all the praise.

And so as we come to the end of this Kings and Characters series, and we launch into 1 John next week, heading up to Christmas, I just invite you to give your life to Jesus, because he is worthy of it.

No one else is worthy of your life.

No other king can give you eternal life of knowing God other than King Jesus.

He is worthy of your life, worthy of your all, worthy of everything.

Jesus is our King.

We are his body.

We are a coaching community.

We're focusing on that, this verse.

We do this life of faith together.

Yes, we do it individually.

There's an individual component, but we follow Jesus together.

And so NorthernLife, can we make this commitment that on our watch, we will remove the high places.

On our watch, we will keep the Lord's commands.

And on our watch, we will serve no other King but King Jesus, because he's worthy.

Would you like to stand?

As we close this series, I'd love to pray for us.

We're going to sing a song in a moment called Is He Worthy?

It's quite a significant song, I think, in the life of our church in recent years.

It's a song that we sort of dedicated this building to the Lord with five years ago.

And we're going to sing it again, and the lyrics of the verse say, do you feel the world is broken?

We do.

Do you feel the shadows deepen?

We do.

But do you know that all the dark won't stop the light from getting through?

We do.

So we're going to sing this song and declare that Jesus is worthy of everything we have.

He is the King that we need.

He is everything we need.

So let me pray as the band come up, and we'll sing together.

Lord Jesus, we thank you for the story of the Bible.

We thank you for all the good kings and what we can learn from them.

And we thank you that you are still so faithful when the kings turn out bad.

And at this point, in this place right now, we turn back to you and we remind ourselves of who you are, that you are the king of kings and lord of lords, Jesus.

And we want to take a step towards you and we thank you that because of what you did in the cross and the empty tomb, that you have made a way for us to come into your holy presence.

So we commit ourselves again, Lord.

We will remove the high places.

We don't want to serve other gods.

We want to be wholeheartedly devoted to you, God.

And we will keep your commands by the grace that you empower us with.

Would you lead us in the way of eternal life?

And we will serve no other king but you, King Jesus.

So would you receive this praise and this glory now as we sing to you?

In Jesus' name, Amen.

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