"The God Who Will Have No Rivals" - Micah 5:7-15

Bible, turn to Micah 5 with me. You don't have a Bible, grab one on the table there.

If there's not one on the table there, there's still one from your neighbor.

Where we are in Micah. So last week we got into the hopeful portion of Micah.

We spent the first four chapters pretty much learning about how awful the Israelite

situation was, how terrible the kings had been, that there was one king there at the end,

Hezekiah, who God used to turn the people back to the Lord, but that would only

last for about 100 years.

And at the end of 100 years, all the things that Micah said would happen,

that God said would happen through Micah do happen.

And so when we get into Micah 5, really it's written for these people that are

going to be in Babylonian and Assyrian captivity.

That's what Micah 5 is written for. Now, obviously it's written for the people

that hear it the day they hear it, but it's written for people that are in captivity,

that are looking for hope, that are looking for something to cling to when everything

in their life seems to be falling apart.

What we really want to look at when we look at Micah, he asked this question

in chapter six, who is like God?

Who is like God? Who is like the God of the Bible?

Who is like the sovereign ruler of the universe who has no peers or rivals?

God says this about himself.

To whom shall you compare me?

That's an incredible thing to say. I thought about this even when we were in

Bible study this morning, a study in 1 Peter.

A lot of times it's hard for us to understand how weird it would have been for

someone to have said, this God is unlike any other God.

Because for most of human history, everybody's had their own gods,

and they've all been interacted with in much the same way.

They had statues, they had idols, they had things that they would sacrifice to them.

They had things that burnt offerings, and they would go up to the altar and give them things.

And that was a transaction that they would make with their God so that their

God would bless them in whatever ways they wanted them to.

So you see in the Old Testament, if you read it very much, you'll hear things

like high places, Asherah poles.

You may have an Asherah pole in their house.

If you did, you probably wouldn't know what it was, right? We don't know those

things. Those aren't normal things. We don't go down the road and look at,

I was going to say the mountains.

We don't look on top of hills around here and see altars, quote unquote, to false gods, right?

There's no Baal worship going on. Nobody's worshiping Zeus.

I'm sure somebody is. But by and large, where we live, we're not.

And so it's not weird for us, especially in East Texas, to say,

well, who is like God? Well, of course we would say that.

We're from East Texas. We believe in God. We think that this God of the Bible is the only true God.

Now, that's not always true about everybody. I think what we've slowly but surely

morphed into is, we think our God is the best God, but we don't want to tell

you that your gods don't mean anything.

So yeah, we worship Yahweh. We worship the God of Abraham, Isaac,

and Jacob. We worship Jesus Christ.

But if you don't, well, I don't want to make you feel like you're less than.

So yeah, my God's really awesome and great. sovereign and good.

But if you don't want to worship him, that's okay.

That is, again, a category in the Bible that does not exist.

It's either you worship Yahweh or you worship a false god.

Those are the options of the Bible. Again, as Americans, we don't like binary things.

We love gray areas. We love to be able to say, you do your thing and I'll do my thing.

You have your house, you have your way of doing things, you have your way of

life and I have mine. You root for your teens. I'll root for mine.

We can hate each other on the weekends. We're cool during the weeks, right?

You have your hobbies. I have mine. You have the things you like to do, the things I like to do.

Again, this worldview is kind of foreign to the Bible.

The Bible really views things in black or white. You either worship God,

the true God, or you don't.

You either do what he asked you to do, or you don't.

So, as we get into the end of Micah 5, let me ask you this.

If you want to know the God of the Bible, the reason you want to know him is because he wins.

That's kind of the argument that the Bible makes in a lot of ways.

At the end of all things, when everything is said and done, it will be the God

of the Bible that every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, right?

God wins and everybody wants to win.

I can remember growing up if you want to know how Christian my household was,

we had an original Nintendo NES Nintendo Entertainment System right I got real

good at doing the all right we can do all that but we had a game that was the

only game my mom would play with us we obviously had the Duck Hunter game and Dr.

Mario and Mario we had a Barbie game that I

was telling my boys the other day they're like you played the

Barbie game I was like yes I did and here's why our copy of

Mario got broken and Barbie was just Mario

skinned in Barbie stuff exact same game

so yes I played the Barbie game proud of it but

there was one game that my mom would play with us and that game was Noah's Ark

so you would like there was two players and you would like bounce over there

and try to get all the animals and bring them back I don't even remember what

killed you if you were trying to get the animals what was against you I don't

know if like the devil came down.

I don't know. It was a weird game. But my mom would play this game with us.

And my mom did not ever let us win anything. And one time my mom beat me in

Noah's Ark. I thought I was going to beat her. She beat me and I threw the remote down.

And I'm not going to say what I called her. But I called her a word that I had

heard from someone else that I didn't know how bad it was.

And I called her when I threw it down. And of course, she's laughing at me because

she knows that's going to make me even more angry. And she was right.

And so I took that Noah's art game the next day and I hid it in my room where

no one could find it and everybody was looking for it.

I hated to lose. I don't want to lose.

We all want to win. And for many, this is where God's message really stands

out, is we want to win. We want to be on the winning team.

I'm going to submit to you, that's not a bad thing. You shouldn't want to lose.

That would be weird. You should want to win.

And so when we read this passage this morning, that's a lot of what we see.

In Micah 5, starting in verse 7, he says, Then the remnant of Jacob shall be

in the midst of many peoples, like the dew from the Lord.

So remember, he's just talked about the shepherd that'll come to shepherd his

people, that what he's going to do when the shepherd shows up is this remnant

of Jacob is going to be like dew from the Lord, like showers on the grass.

It says in verse 8, and the remnant of Jacob shall be among the nations in the midst of many peoples.

What is that remnant going to be like? What are the winners going to look like?

It says, like a lion among the beasts of the forest.

That's what I want to be. I want to be a lion.

Right? I don't want to be a dumb sheep. I want to be a lion.

Then he says, like a young lion, I'll take young lion, okay?

Young lion in the midst of sheep, which when it goes through,

treads down and tears in pieces, and there is none to deliver.

That's what I want. I want that when I show up, I'm like a lion in the forest,

like a young lion in the midst of sheep, that wherever I go, I win.

Wherever I go, things go my way. Wherever I go, I get the raise.

I get the opportunities.

Everyone likes me. Everyone wants me to be in charge. Even if they don't like

me and don't want me to be in charge, I'm still in charge.

That's what I want naturally in my life.

He finishes at verse 9, your hand shall be lifted up over your adversaries and

all your enemies shall be cut off.

Man, listen, that's not a bad thing. I want to be on the receiving end of that.

I want to win. I want to win.

The question is, how does God make quote unquote winners out of you?

How does God bring us to victory?

How does God bring us to this place where our enemies are like sheep and we're like lions?

Because I think that's really the question. We know that God wins,

right? If you've read your Bible, if you know that God always wins,

if you've read Revelation, you know that God wins.

You may have different views on how he gets to that point, but in the end, Jesus wins.

But how does he bring us with him? How does he get us from where we are to this?

That's the question I want to ask you this morning.

Because how God does that is usually not how we want him to do that.

We've been studying 1 Peter, the Bible study, and one thing that shocked me

this morning, just as we were reading through 1 Peter, it's to elect exiles

and dispersion, and they're under a ton of persecution.

I started thinking, I don't know why I expect my Christian life to be easy.

Now, again, you say that out loud, Everyone's like, yeah, man, it's going to be tough.

But then when it actually is tough, I rarely respond to Christianity being tough

with, well, this is what God said would happen.

I usually respond with, but why is this so hard?

Aren't I doing all the right things? Aren't I saying all the right things?

Aren't I going all the right places?

So here's what I want to do. I just want to look at these last five verses here.

And again, as we read these last five verses in chapter five,

think about who it's written to.

It's written to a people in exile. They're reading these verses from Micah,

and they are looking for this shepherd, man.

They are the sheep in the midst of lions in Assyria and in Babylon.

They are not winners in any regard. They have no property. They have no rights.

They have no ability to do anything that their captors tell them they can't do.

And they read this, and you got to know that they're thinking,

oh, how I want the shepherd to appear because I'm so tired of being in exile. I'm so tired of losing.

Well, this is what the Lord says he's going to do.

And on that day, declares the Lord, I will cut off your horses from among you

and destroy your chariots.

I will cut off cities of your land and throw down all your strongholds.

I will cut off sorceries from your hand. You shall have no more tellers of fortunes.

I will cut off your carved images and your pillars from among you.

You shall bow down no more to the work of your hands, but I will root out your

Asherah images from among you and destroy your cities.

And in anger and wrath, I will execute vengeance on the nations that did not obey.

When we think of the Lord's victory in our lives, I don't think of that.

I think of that Mandisa song, You're an Overcomer, and it's just like,

man, this is super poppy. I love this. It makes me feel really good about myself.

I think about some of the VeggieTale songs I learned about being a Christian and how awesome it is.

But the truth is, if we want to be victorious, if we want to think,

what is God going to do to make me victorious?

This is what that looks like.

It looks like God removing everything from your life that would keep you from

trusting in him for salvation.

So again, let's just walk through this list. It says he will cut off their military

might. In other words, he's going to cut off their ability to protect themselves.

The Israelites to this point in their history had experienced a lot of military victories.

They look back and they could go, have you heard of Jericho?

We literally beat a whole city with some trumpets.

We're kind of a big deal. Yeah, have you heard about the promised land,

those giants that were in there? No problem for us.

Maybe you've heard about David, our king. He killed Goliath and then cut off his head.

So God says, I'm going to take away that military mind, that ability to protect yourself.

Number two, he says in verse 11, you will cut off their cities and strongholds.

In other words, those places where you feel the most safe and the most secure,

Israel, I'm going to tear them down.

You think, this is him talking to Israel, you think that because Jerusalem is

a holy city that I won't take it from you?

You think that if you hide inside of Jerusalem that the Assyrians can't find

you in there? God says, I'm going to tear down that city.

Sure, the Assyrians may be the hammer that I used to do it, but I'm going to

wield the hammer to cut off that city.

He goes on, he says, he will cut off their sorcerers and fortune tellers.

What the Israelites had come to love is people who could tell them the future,

who could tell them how things were going to end.

So instead of trusting the Lord, instead of trusting his hand in their lives,

they would go to other seers and literally other, we'll call them.

Fortune tellers, and try and get them to tell us, hey, how's this battle going

to work out? How are these things going to work out for me? How's my life going to work out?

God says, I'm going to cut that off from you so that you'll trust me and me

alone. He says, after that, he will tear down their false gods.

When we worship false gods and when the Israelites worship false gods,

what they were trying to do is

bend the world to their will instead of submitting their will to the Lord.

That's why we worship false gods. That's why they worship false gods, right?

Maybe they wanted something that their God wasn't giving them,

that Yahweh said to them, you don't get to have that.

Maybe they were going through a drought. Maybe they were having some infertility.

Maybe they were having whatever it was, whatever situation in life came up,

instead of trusting themselves in the Lord, what they would do?

Well, if you won't give it to me, God, the Assyrians, the Babylonians,

they say that their God will do that if I give than X, Y, or Z.

So I'm going to worship you and that's fine, but since you won't give me what

I want, now I'm going to go on Monday to this high place where I have an Assyrian

friend and he's going to show me what I need to sacrifice so that that Assyrian

God will give me what I want.

So again, idolatry is in essence a desire to bend the world to our will instead

of realizing that it belongs to the Lord.

So again, these are some pretty serious things that the Lord levies against his people.

And yet this is the quote unquote winning formula.

This is what God says, I have to do this.

I will do this because if I don't, you will continue to run.

You will continue to flee from me. You will continue to worship false idols.

You will continue to disobey until I come in and take away.

Again, I ask people to do this all the time when they read the Bible.

I would encourage you to do the same thing. When you read the Bible and you

see that God's doing something or something is happening to someone,

ask yourself this question, who's doing it? Who's doing it?

Verses 10 through 15, there is not one thing in there that says anyone but God is doing it.

I will cut off. I will cut off. I will throw down.

I will root out. I will destroy. In anger, I will execute vengeance.

I will, I will, I will. This is the Lord's work in his people's lives.

But again, if I was having the Lord draw up a play for me in my life,

if he was my coach, you know, and I'm on the sideline, I'm saying,

coach, we got one shot to win the game.

What's the play that you're going to call? He's like, here's what I'm going

to do. I'm going to take away all your protections.

I'm going to take away all your safeties. I'm going to take away any knowledge

you could have in the future.

I'm going to remove everything in your life that isn't valuable to me and to

you and to our relationship. I'm going to get rid of all of it and flatten your life.

I'd go, do we have to do all of that? Can I keep some of it?

Do you really need to do everything that you're saying?

Romans 1 verse 24 and 25 say this about idolatry.

Romans 1:24

It says, God gave them up, them as just Gentile sinners, in the lust of their

hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.

Because why? They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and

served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever. Amen.

That's what idolatry looks like. The first thing you do is you exchange the

truth about God for a lie, you have a Bible in front of you,

which means you have an advantage over the first 1,500 years of Christians that ever lived.

You have an advantage over every single Christian that ever lived for about

1,600 years because you have a Bible, a full Bible in your language that you can read.

And to know the truth of the word and to say, you know, I know what it says,

but I'm going to insert my own truth.

I'm going to decide, well, God really couldn't mean that.

That can't be what God really said. There's no way that God really means for that to be true.

I'm going to import my own lies into it.

What happens when I do that? Well, now I'm worshiping and serving creature rather

than the creator because I've created a God that I love.

I don't love the God of the Bible at that point. I love the God that I've created,

This frankenstein God where i've taken some pieces that I like in the Bible. Oh, God is love.

I like that one Oh, God wants to bless me like that one Oh heaven really like that one.

That one seems cool Obedience depends on what you're asking me to do And for

years People have been saying Well, you know You just got to love him It's all about love.

If you just love everybody, everything will be fine.

Romans says, well, no, it's about truth. It's about being honest and truthful.

Because if you love someone based on lies, you don't love them.

You love some version of them. You love some awkward, honestly,

false version of that thing.

So when we take something that god has given us When we take something that

god created and begin to live our lives in light of that instead of,

God we have idolatry and again, I would say that most of us would look at our

lives and go brady I don't have any asherah poles in my house Right,

like there's no statues of bale.

I don't even have a buddhist statue, right? I don't even have those things.

So how does this apply to me again a quick exercise?

Using just the list in micah He says that he's going to take away their military

might. Well, where does your power and strength rest?

Where do you feel like you have the most control? The Israelites looked at their

military and their might, and they said, well, we have control of our own fates

because if somebody were to test us, we'll test them back.

My gun's bigger than your gun. My dad's stronger than your dad.

This is the first my dad's stronger than your dad argument we've seen in scripture,

right? But they think that way.

Does what you have in place to protect yourself, whether that's a gun or a bank

account or a house or a family,

whatever it is, does what you have in place to protect yourself give you more

confidence that you could never be harmed than God's hand on your life?

When you feel unsafe, where do you run? Because when the Israelites felt unsafe,

they ran to the military and they said, hey, listen, these people are starting

to kill us and we really need you guys to go out and handle that.

They didn't run to the Lord.

Again, God is not against having an army or having guns or the ability to protect

yourself and your family.

Very pro second amendment. Okay. If you needed to know where I was at on that,

very pro all of those things.

What I do worry about though, is that sometimes I think people feel like because

I have these things, I don't need to depend on God for my protection and my

wellbeing or my family's protection and wellbeing.

Because if somebody wants to test me, good luck.

God says to them, listen, I'm going to remove that from you.

So you can't think that anymore.

Psalm 118 verse 6 says, The Lord is with me, I will not be afraid.

Psalms 118:6

What can mere mortals do to me?

That's written by David. David had no problem going to war. He had no problem fighting battles.

But he understood, if the Lord is with me, I will not be afraid,

whether I have a gun or not, whether I have a fat bank account or not,

Whether I have everything I think I need or I don't The Lord is with me,

Verse 11 He's going to take away their cities Again, where do you retreat to

when things get difficult?

When life gets hard Where do you run to?

You run to the Lord or do you run to your favorite show? Listen,

this week we watched Lord of the Rings two nights in a row.

Big day for the house. Okay. Big day for the house.

Thanks. Big day for the house. Okay. We watched a lot of Lord of the Rings this

week, not the extended editions.

So, so sue us. Okay. We only had three hours, not four. We can only do what we can do.

But I look at those things and I go, listen, is there anything wrong with Lord

of the Rings? Obviously not. It's the greatest trilogy to ever exist.

But I can remember times in my life where things like the Lord of the Rings

or as dumb as it sounds, shows like The Office, right?

Things would be, I would have a terrible day. Something wouldn't be going my way.

Instead of dealing with that, instead of trying to sit with the Lord and go,

Lord, I feel like you're being unfair. I feel like my life shouldn't be going this way.

I feel like those people shouldn't have treated me this way.

It's easier just to go home turn something on and shut it all off And go man legolas is cool,

Now there's a hundred different things you could run to again I'm always hesitant

to make a list because I won't name whatever is on your list.

You're going to go like Oh, you can talk about me But where do you retreat to

when things get difficult?

There's plenty of people that go to a screen Some people go to the job and some

people just work 80 hours a week because to go home and deal with the things

that they have to deal with would be awful. So let's just go to work all day.

People drink, people do all the things that they need to do.

It doesn't matter what the list is.

Just because yours doesn't seem as bad as theirs, it's a good question to ask.

Where do you retreat to when things get difficult?

Psalm 32, 7, David says, you are a hiding place for me. You preserve me from

trouble. You surround me with shouts of deliverance.

Again, David had the ability to build safe cities and safe places,

but he understood it doesn't matter what I have.

If the Lord is in my hiding place, I have nothing.

God's people idolized their cities and fortresses. And God said,

I'm going to get rid of them.

Sorceries and fortune tellers. Now, again, this one's a little different.

I can remember growing up. This will date me. Miss Cleo.

Okay. I got one. Miss Cleo. Okay. So it was a really interesting time,

but there was this lady named Miss Cleo.

You could call in a 1-800 number and Miss Cleo would tell you your future.

And if you stayed up till about 11 o'clock, like you could watch this infomercial

for like an hour and it was hilarious because obviously it seemed like this

can't be real, right? There's nothing real about what's going on here.

But the truth is we have examples in Israelite history of them going to these

sorcerers, going to these other things and trying to find out what's my future

going to be like? What's it going to look like?

Now there's different takes on this. I'll give you mine. I think a lot of that

is just demonic. I think it's real.

I think we see that in the Bible. There are times when there are true,

false, we'll call them sorcerers or fortune tellers that are empowered demonically

to tell you things about your future, to tell you things about what's going

on in your life that they should not be able to tell you.

Most notably, we see this with Samuel coming back, but you see it in other places as well.

And I thought, well, what's the equivalent to that today? I don't know that

we have a specific equivalent.

Certainly if you go to New Orleans or you go to some of these places,

you can still see some of this very blatantly out there.

There is some tarot card readers in Tyler, but again, not as much.

But I think even things like this can, I'm not saying they do,

I'm saying they can fall into this category, right?

If you think taking a personality test is going to help you learn everything

there is to know about you, if you think taking a personality test or figuring

out what your sign is or doing something like that.

You go, if I knew that, if I had that information, I'd be able to make every

decision in my life easier because I would know how I'm going to respond.

I would know what I'm going to do.

I would know what's good for me and what's bad for me.

And I think one of the problems with personality tests is that once you tell

me what your personality is and I tell you what mine is, then we can both just

throw up our hands and go, well, now I know everything there is to know about you.

You know everything there is to know about me. And I don't really need the Lord

to trust. I don't really need the Lord to love.

When we were at DBU, you had to take the Myers-Briggs.

See, again, I don't know if you know what that is. They would literally place

you in classes, place you in jobs, place you in churches.

Like they would recommend churches to you based on your personality type. It's a DBU.

And I'm thinking, I thought we were just supposed to love people.

I don't really care if you're an ENTJ or an INTP or whatever that is.

I don't really care if you're a six, an eight.

I don't really care what you are. I'm just supposed to love you.

Now, is there some good in those things about learning some tendencies and some

things we're good at, some things we're bad at, maybe some areas we need to

improve? Certainly there is.

But what God's really going after here is saying, do you trust your future with me?

Do you trust your future with me or do you not? Right?

God's people had failed to trust him with their tomorrow. So they sought out

these false fortune tellers.

Psalm 31 15 says, my times are in your hand.

Rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from my persecutors.

What is the recognition here? My times are in your hands. It's my time to go. It's my time to go.

For these Israelites and Micah. If it's my time to be in Assyrian exile, it's my time to be here.

Whatever our time is, our prayer is rescue me from the hand of my enemies and

from my persecutors, but that's up to the Lord.

Lastly, this is the easy one, right? Idols. I think an easy way to identify an idol in your life,

is to look at what do you live your life around, thinking that if you serve

it, it will give you what you want.

I'll say that again. What do you live your life around thinking that if you

serve it, it will give you what you want?

If you serve in a certain way at your job, that it'll give me what I want so

I can have the life that I want.

So I'm going to pour everything I can into that. I see people do this with their kids.

Their kids become their whole life. It's all that matters to them.

It's all that obsesses everything in their life. If my kids make it into the

NFL or the NBA, if they make it into Harvard, if they make it into Yale,

if they have everything they need

to have, then my life in turn will have everything that I need to have.

If I could just make enough money, if I could just get enough attention,

if I could just have enough power,

whatever it is, but we'll look at your life and examine it and say,

well, what am I serving every week that I think serving this thing,

giving my time, money, and effort to this thing will give me what I want out of life.

Says in five straight verses, I will cut it off. I will cut it off. I will cut it off.

I will cut it off. And I will cut it off.

Here's the truth. God will do that for you.

If you belong to the Lord, he will cut those things out of your life,

forcibly remove them from your life.

Just like when Paul prays in the New Testament for him to remove this thorn

of the flesh from him, God's answer to him is no, because if I did that, you'd be prideful.

At the end of 1 John, the last verse, 1 John 5, 21, John says, little children.

Now, again, he's not talking to

little children. What he's saying to this church is, you're like my kids.

I love you in such a way that you're like my kids, that I've watched you grow up.

I've watched you come into the faith. I've watched you get bigger.

And I'm praying that you get bigger. I'm praying that you grow into Christian adults.

He says, little children, keep yourselves from idols.

And the question always becomes, well, how do we do that? How do we keep ourselves from idols?

Outside of the Lord coming and forcibly removing them from my life,

which is never pleasant, how can I keep myself from idols?

I think this is often where legalism can take over, right? There's no better

place to hide from God than by being religious.

The safest place that people think that they can hide from God I promise you is in a church,

I promise you I've never

met more people hiding from God than inside the church now granted part of that

is because I grew up in East Texas and everybody goes so there's not a lot of

option right but most people I meet that don't go to church especially in East

Texas like they're very honest about the fact that they don't care about the

Lord that you know I just don't I just don't think it's important,

or I worship God in my own way, or I'm doing my own thing,

or I think it's me going out in the woods and hanging out as my church.

And I get that. I'm glad they're honest.

That's way easier than most of the church people I'll talk to when you're going

like, man, how's your relationship with the Lord? And they're like, well, it's fine.

And I'm kind of doing this, I'm kind of doing that. And I gave money to the

children's thing yesterday, and I did this, and I did that.

Religion is an incredible place to hide from God because we can make ourselves

feel really good about doing it.

It's like, yeah, I've got idols in my life, but I worked the nursery and that's

got to count for something.

It's like, yeah, I got idols in my life, but I put up 50 chairs yesterday.

This was the youth group exchange. It's like, yeah, I mean, yeah,

I'm doing things with my girlfriend. I probably shouldn't.

But did you see me carry six chairs at a time? That's got to count for something.

See pretty clearly in John 3 and 4 how God and really how Christ handles this.

You have two people. We'll close here. Two people, Nicodemus in John 3 and the

woman at the well in John 4.

In Nicodemus, you have the religious leaders. You have not just a churchgoer,

but the pastor of the pastor of the pastor at the church.

Nicodemus is incredibly high up the Jewish food chain.

He would know the Bible better than every single person in this room combined, I promise you.

If you drop someone like Nicodemus in a church like this, he would be the person up here tomorrow.

Incredibly smart, knows the word incredibly well. Fluent, obviously,

in Hebrew, because he is a Hebrew.

And yet, when Nicodemus comes to Jesus and he's asking him questions like,

well, what must I do to be born again? And how do I get into the kingdom?

And how do I get, Essentially, he's asking, how do I get saved?

And Nicodemus is wanting him to give him religion. He's wanting Jesus to say,

what do I need to do to get into the kingdom, Jesus? What is the formula?

In the same way that you may be saying, well, how do I get rid of idols?

How do I have these things in my life? I can see areas in my life where when

I get stressed and when things aren't going my way, I run to this or I run to that.

I can see areas in my life where I'm a nervous wreck when I don't know the future,

when I don't know what tomorrow holds.

Nicodemus has that same sinking feeling where he's going, man,

I'm this Jewish leader and I'm coming to you. I'm asking you, what do we need to do?

What's the formula here? And Jesus goes, you must be born again.

Nicodemus goes, how does that work? Like literally ask Jesus a medical question

I don't think I'm going to be able to do that Jesus How does this work,

as the wind blows, wherever it wills, so is the Spirit of God.

That is not a religious answer.

That's a terrible pastoral answer.

If one of your kids came up to me and asked me, how do I get saved?

And I told them that, you would call me and be like, really, the wind?

You said the wind? That's what you're going to do?

You'd be mad at me. Rightfully so.

Here's what Jesus knows, and here's what Jesus wants Nicodemus to understand.

You need me to do what you're asking of yourself, right?

Jesus knows when Nicodemus asked that question, Nicodemus needs Jesus to do

something for him that Nicodemus cannot do for himself.

That's why in Micah, he doesn't say, and in that day declares the Lord,

I'm going to call on you to cut off your horses.

I'm going to ask you to cut off your cities. I'm going to ask you to cut off

sorceries and fortune tellers.

I'm going to really beg and plead with you, people of God, that you would get

rid of your idols. He doesn't say that. He says, I will do it.

In John 4, you have the woman at the well who could not be more different than Nicodemus.

She is the exact polar opposite of who Nicodemus represents.

She comes to the well in the midday, which is not common.

She comes because to come in the morning with all the other ladies means she

would be ridiculed for who she is.

And so as she comes to the well, Jesus and the disciples show up and Jesus sends

his disciples into town. It's just Jesus and this woman.

And Jesus knows why she's there in the afternoon. Again, he knows the customs.

He knows why she would have been there and no one else.

And he starts this conversation with her about worship, about who God is.

And he asked her this terrible question that she probably hated answering,

well, hey, why don't you go get your husband?

Jesus wants to cut through all of the nonsense in her life and say,

I know exactly what your idol is.

I know exactly what you worship. I know exactly what you run to for acceptance.

I know exactly what you run to when you feel hurt and when you feel pain.

I know exactly where you run. Why don't you go get your husband?

And she said, yeah, I don't have one. He goes, yeah, you don't have one. And you've had too many.

That doesn't feel loving when Jesus does that, doesn't, to call someone out

like that. What is Jesus doing?

Jesus is doing exactly what Micah says he would do.

He is cutting to her heart to say, listen, if you want to worship,

if you truly want to worship the Lord, you will not get there by simply trying to do this yourself.

You'll never make it. And so he exposes her idols.

He exposes her sin and says, listen,

if you would drink of me, if you would drink of this living water,

if you would come to me, if you would do what I'm asking you to do,

if you would serve who I'm asking you to serve, if you would love who I'm asking

you to love, that is how you tear down idols.

Realize Jesus never tells her what to do.

He never tells her what to do. In other words, he doesn't say,

now go back and don't ever marry again.

Now go back and don't do the things you've been doing. Now go back and fix all

the things that you've done wrong.

Jesus says to Nicodemus, you must be born again.

He says to the woman at the well, you must drink of this living water.

To each and every one of us the same type of thing. Listen, if you want to get

rid of the idols in your life, the worst thing you can do is go home and try

and figure out every single idol and figure out every single thing.

And Brady said that there was a safety thing. Do I have some of that safety

thing? And Brady said that there was some idols. Do I have some idols?

Listen, I think Calvin was right when he says your heart is like an idol factory.

You'll create idols out of anything, so will I. What the Bible calls us to is

to trust and serve the Lord.

1 Thessalonians 1.9, Paul writes to this church at Thessalonica,

and he's hearing reports about this church.

He says, they report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you and

how you turn to God from idols to serve the living and true God.

That's it. You don't go and try to turn from idols.

You go and turn to the Lord. You trust the Lord.

I think I'm probably preaching to the choir a lot in here this morning when I say that.

I think by and large, most of you in here are doing that. You're trying to serve

the Lord. You're trying to seek Him. You're trying to know Him.

You're trying to love Him.

And when the Lord puts before you an idol, you go, yeah, get rid of that. Yeah, let me crush that.

I'll just encourage you to say, it doesn't matter where you are,

it doesn't matter if you're 8 or 12 or 20 or 40 or 80, there is still idols to be crushed.

There are still things in your life that the Lord is working out.

Don't give up on those things.

To repentance is the cure for idolatry.

Repentance is the cure for idolatry. In other words, what is repentance?

Turning to God. What did he just say in 1 Thessalonians 1, 9?

Turn to God. Do that. Turn from the Lord.

An unrepentant heart is the most fertile ground for idols on planet earth.

What do I mean by unrepentant heart? I mean, holding onto sins,

not confessing your sins, not forgiving someone else, not turning to the Lord,

not doing what he asked you to do.

Listen, if you want to have a surefire way to have idols in your life,

never repent from anything.

It'll be the most fertile ground for idolatry you've ever seen.

This is why you wonder when I say, well, I think most of the idolatry that takes

place today are in and around us as in churches. That's why.

Because you can go to church, you can sing songs, You can hear a sermon You

can work in kids ministry You can work in youth ministry You can do outreach

events You can do all those things And guess what?

You're rarely asked to do Repent Repent Because that's not super positive.

That's not super inviting What are visitors going to think If we get up there

and tell them That they're sinners And they need to repent,

I hope what they think is We love them And we care for them That we believe

in the God of Micah 5 that says he will do this for his people.

That's what I hope they think it was.

So let me encourage you to do that. Don't just go home and self-examine your

life and try to figure out where are all the areas that God really wants me

to stop doing this and start doing this and take hold of that and get rid of that.

Just go home and repent of what you know you need to repent of,

turn and follow the Lord.

That's what Micah 5 is the culmination of. He says that in the end of all things,

when the Lord comes back and the shepherd appears, what he's going to do for

his people is he is going to remove every single thing from their lives that

does not help them depend on him, trust in him, or serve him.

And if the idea of that is, I don't really sound like a good thing,

just say this as loving as I can, then you don't know the Lord.

If you think that removing everything from your life that would keep you from

knowing him and loving Him and obeying Him, if you think that losing all of

those things would be a net negative to have Christ, you don't know Christ.

Because to know Christ is to say, you can have it all. I don't care what you take.

I don't care what idol you need to tear down. I don't care what comfort you need to remove from me.

If it means getting to know the Savior, if it means coming closer to the Lord, take it.

And that's my prayer for us this morning. Let's pray. Father thank you as always

for this morning God I pray for Trinity Bible Church As we've reached a point.

Decisions to make as far as children's and worship and all these things that

I know are on our hearts and minds as we come in here this morning.

But God, I pray that those decisions that we need to make would never cause

us to lose sight of the fact that the reason that we meet here this morning,

is not to be a place where people gather to sing and to have their kids watched

and for their kids to have a safe place to go.

The reason we gather this morning, the reason we gather every week is to come

to know our God and King better.

But our main priority when we step in these doors is not that we feel great about everything.

It's not that we love every single thing that goes on, that our main priority

is, do I love Jesus more when I leave than when I got here?

Do I know his word better?

Do I trust him more? Have I repented of my sins?

Have I drawn near to the Lord and received forgiveness so that I can be boldly

living my life Monday through Saturday?

God, that's our goal when we're here.

I pray that when we read a passage like Micah 5, we all want to be winners.

We all want to be on the winning team. I think that's a God-given trait to every single person.

Nobody wants to be on the losing team, that God, I pray that we would receive

the instruction from you that we need to receive so that you can mold us into

what it is you would have us be.

God, we want to reign with you in eternity, but we know that to do that,

you have to remove the things from our life that would keep us from coming near to you.

God, we ask that you would do that. You're a prayer. Amen.