"Revival" 2 Kings 22-23 Sunday Evening Worship Service

For now, 2 Kings chapter 22, I'm gonna read the entirety of chapter uh 22 and 23.

2 Kings 22 · chapter mention

So this is a long script reading tonight.

Um yeah, this is so long, so long.

Why would I do this?

Uh 2 Kings 22, all the way through um chapter 23.

Uh and I'm doing it now because I do want to go through these verses as I'm teaching tonight without feeling like I need to read every um part of it as uh we're reading tonight, um, as I'm preaching tonight.

So it'll be good if we just read it now, and then we'll launch into our study of God's Word.

2 Kings 22, verse 1, Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign.

2 Kings 22:1

And he reigned 31 years in Jerusalem.

His mother's name was Jedediah, the daughter of Hediah of Boscah, and he did what was right in the eyes of Yahweh, and walked in all the way of David his father, and he did not turn aside to the right or to the left.

In the eighteenth year of King Josiah, he sent Shaphan, the son of Azileh, the son of Meshelem, the secretary, to the house of Yahweh, saying, Go up to Hilkiah the high priest, that he may count the money that's been brought into the house of Yahweh, which the keepers of the threshold have collected from the people, and let it be given into the hand of the workmen who have the oversight of the house of Yahweh, and let them give it to the workmen who are at the house of Yahweh, repairing the house, that is to the carpenters and the builders and the masons, and let them use it for buying timber and quarried stone to repair the house.

But no accounting shall be asked from them for the money that's delivered in their hand, for they deal honestly.

That's incredible, right there.

That's a miracle in the Bible.

And Hilkiah, the son of the high priest, said to Shapon the secretary, I found the book of the law in the house of Yahweh.

And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan and he read it.

Shapon the secretary came to the king and reported to the king your servants have emptied out the money that was found in the house and have delivered it into the hand of the workmen who have oversighted the house of Yahweh.

And then Shapon the secretary told the king, Hilkiah the priest has given me a book.

And Shaphan read it before the king.

When the king heard the words of the law, he tore his clothes.

The king commanded Hilkiah the priest, and Achaiakim the son of Shaphan, and Akabur, the son of Micaiah, and Shaphan the secretary, and Isaiah the king's servant, saying, Go inquire of Yahweh for me and for the people, and for all Judah concerning the words of this book that's been found.

For great is the wrath of Yahweh that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book to do according to all that is written concerning us.

So Hekiah the priest, and Ahiaakim and Akbar, and Shon and Asiah went to Hilda, the prophetess, the wife of Shalom, the son of Tikvah, son of Haras, the keeper of the wardrobe, and she lived in Jerusalem in the second quarter, and they talked with her.

And she said to them, Thus says Yahweh, the God of Israel, tell the man who sent you to me, thus says Yahweh, behold, I will bring disaster upon this place and upon its inhabitants, all the words of the book that the king of Judah has read, because they've forsaken me and made offerings to other gods, they might provoke me to anger with all the work of their hands.

Therefore my wrath will be kindled against this place, and it will not be quenched.

But the king of Judah, who sent you to inquire of Yahweh, thus you'll tell him.

Thus says Yahweh, the God of Israel, regarding the words you've heard, because your heart was penitent.

You humbled yourself before Yahweh when you heard how I spoke against this place and against its inhabitants, that they should become a desolation and a curse.

You've torn your clothes and you wept before me.

I also have heard you, declares Yahweh.

Therefore, behold, I will gather you to your fathers, and you'll be gathered to your grave in peace.

Your eyes will not see the disaster that I will bring upon this place.

And they brought back the word to the king.

I mean, how is that?

For she says, Because you repented, you're just going to die.

And the king sent, and all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem gathered to him.

The king went to the house of Yahweh, and with him all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and the priests and the prophets, and all the people, both small and great, and he read in their hearing all the words of the book of the covenant that had been found in the house of Yahweh.

The king stood by the pillar and made a covenant before Yahweh to walk after Yahweh, to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with all his heart, with all his soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in the book.

All the people joined in the covenant.

The king commanded Hilkiah the high priest and the priest of the second order and the keepers of the threshold to bring out of the temple of Yahweh all the vessels made for Baal and Asherah, all the hosts of heaven.

He burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron and carried their ashes to Bethel.

He deposed the priests, whom the kings of Judah had ordained to make offerings in the high places of the cities of Judah and around Jerusalem.

He also burned incense the those who burned incentives to Baal, to the sun and the moon, and the constellations and all the hosts of heavens.

And he brought out the Asherah from the house of Yahweh, outside of Jerusalem to the book of Kidron, and burned it in the book Kidron, and beat it to dust, and cast the dust of it on the graves of the common people.

He broke down the houses of the male cult prostitutes who were in the house of Yahweh, where the woman wove hangings for the Asherah, and he brought all the priests out of the cities of Judah and defiled the high places where the priests had made offerings, from Giba to Resheba.

He broke down all the high places of the gates that were at the entrance of the gate of Joshua, the governor of the city, which were on one's left at the gate of the city.

However, the priests of the high priest place did not come up to the altar of Yahweh in Jerusalem, but they ate unleavened bread among their brothers.

He defiled Tophith, which is in the valley of the sun of Hinnam, that no one might burn his son or his daughter as an offering to Molech.

He removed the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun, at the entrance of the house of Yahweh, the chamber of Nathan, Melech in the chamberlain, which was in the precincts, and he burned the chariots of the sun with fire, at the altars on the roof of the upper chamber of Ahaz, which the king of Judah had made, the altars that Manasseh had made in the two courts of the house of Yahweh, he pulled down and broke into pieces, and cast the dust of them into the brook of Kidron.

The king defiled the high places that were east of Jerusalem, to the south of the Mount of Corruption, which Solomon, the king of Israel, had built for the Ashroth, and for the abomination of the Sidonians, and for Chemosh, and the abomination of Moab, and for Milcom, and the abomination of the Ammonites, and he broke in pieces the pillars, and cut down the Ashereim, and filled their places with the bones of men.

Moreover, the altar at Bethel, the high place erected by Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, that altar with the high place, he pulled that down, burned it, reducing it to dust, and he also burned the Asherah.

As Josiah turned, he saw the tombs on the mount.

He sent and took the bones out of the tombs, and burned them on the altar, and defiled it, according to the word of Yahweh that the man of God had proclaimed, who predicted these things.

Then he said, What is that monument I see?

And the men of the city told him, Well, it's the tomb of the man of God who came from Judah and predicted these things that you've just done against the altar at Bethel.

And he said, Let him be.

Don't let any man move his bones.

So they left his bones alone with the bones of the prophet who came out of Samaria.

Josiah removed all the shrines of the high places that were in the cities of Samaria, which the kings of Israel had made, provoking Yahweh to anger.

He did to them according to all they had done at Bethel.

He sacrificed all the priests of the high places who were there on the altars, and burned human bones on them, and then he returned to Jerusalem.

The king commanded all the people, keep the Passover to your God, as is written in the Book of the Covenant, for no such Passover has been kept since the days of the judges who judge Israel, or during all the days of the kings of Israel, or of all the kings of Judah.

But in the eighteenth year of King Josiah, this Passover was kept to Yahweh in Jerusalem.

Moreover, Josiah put away the mediums and the necromancers and the household gods and the idols and the abominations that were seen in the land of Judah in Jerusalem, that he might establish the words of the law that were written in the book that Hilkiah the priest found in the house of Yahweh.

Before him there was no king like him, who turned to Yahweh with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might according to all the law of Moses, nor did any arise like him afterwards.

Still Yahweh did not turn from the burning of his great wrath, by which his anger was kindled against Judah, because of all the provocations with which Manasseh had provoked him.

And Yahweh said, I will remove Judah out of my sight, as I have removed Israel, and I will cast off the city that I have chosen, Jerusalem, and the house of which I said, My name shall be there.

The rest of the acts of Josiah and all that they did, are they not written in the book of the Chronicles of Kings of Judah?

In his days, Pharaoh Niko, king of Egypt, went up to the king of Assyria to the river of the Euphrates.

King Josiah went to meet him.

Pharaoh Niko killed him at Megiddo as soon as he saw him.

And his servants carried him dead in a chariot from Megiddo and brought him to Jerusalem and buried him in his own tomb.

And the people of the land took Jehoaz, the son of Josiah, and anointed him and made him king in his father's place.

This is the word of the Lord.

And it is quite a remarkable story.

Let me pray for us and then we'll start tonight.

God, again, we ask for your grace to help us think rightly about your word, about how you are at work in the world.

We want to be used by you and we want to honor you and how we live and to think.

We want to be those who discern the times and understand clearly what you are doing in our midst.

So help us do that tonight.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Well, tonight my topic is that of revivals.

Revivals have been in the news with, of course, what's happening at Asbury in Indiana and the uh excitement there, or in Kentucky, sorry, and the excitement there with what's taking place on that campus.

And as you think about revivals and how they're presented in the news, you are mature enough to know, of course, not to believe everything you read online.

Just because something is on your computer screen does not make it true.

Amen.

Revivals are, in many ways, a distinctly American phenomena.

Of course, there have been reports of revivals and religious out uh uprisings and outbreaking of repentance and conversion globally, but the way revivals factor into American history is unique.

Probably any book on American Christianity chronicles this, and revivals go back to before our country was even officially formed, with the first great awakening starting in uh precisely 1741 when Jonathan Edwards preached the sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in Enfield, Massachusetts.

It was a place that he had uh been before.

It was a sermon that he had preached before, although not in Enfield.

He had preached it in his own church to little effect in Northampton.

Uh, but he had gone up for an evangelistic sermon up in Enfield, preached the sermon, Sinners in the Hands of Angry God, and people had uh were deeply affected.

There are reports that they were shouting, they were praying out loud, they had their hands raised, they didn't want to leave the place, and from their revival spread.

It spread to Boston, uh, other parts of New England, and the stories of revival there, what's known now as the Great Awakening, were that of prolonged, not just evangelistic campaigns, but prolonged prayer services in churches.

Gospel presentations, people becoming contrite and repenting over their sin.

When you understand what New England was like in the 1740s, this makes uh sense.

This is the third generation of Americans.

Uh, most of these people were.

They were not, by and large, believers.

Uh England at the uh New England at this point was relatively unchurched.

There were churches everywhere, but the attendance of the church versus the population of the city was there was a great delta there.

Um I've read some books that describe it not at all unlike today, where every city in New England has a church, um, more or less, but very uh infrequently attended.

Well, this revival changed that, and people started pouring out to churches and uh wailing over their sin and praying for prolonged periods of time.

That was happening in New England.

In the southern part of the United States, in Georgia and North Carolina, and in Virginia, there were other revivals.

The Wesleys were traveling through uh um uh Georgia, preaching down there.

George Whitfield had come down there before.

George Whitfield eventually would go up and minister with uh Jonathan Edwards in Boston.

Um, but the Wesleys were down uh down south.

They too were met with massive crowds, and there was preaching and there was um conversions.

The first revival to take place in Virginia took place in Hanover, Virginia, around this time, which is down by by Richmond with Samuel Davies.

He preached and he saw slaves coming to faith in Christ.

The revival that was experienced in the U.S.

transcended all that.

But what they did all have in common was these prolonged periods of prayer and singing and even uh ecstatic outbursts and uh movements of the Spirit, depending on what kind of language is used to define it.

Some would define it as just aesthetic and uh more language of uh uh craziness, you know, hands raised and strange sounds and strange languages, and others describe it uh with more religious sounds like prolonged praying or worshiping.

Uh so it's tough to tell what was really happening in that.

But Edwards sought out to do so.

Jonathan Edwards, the one who preached the sermon that started this, sought out to evaluate what was happening in the churches around New England.

Now, I mentioned this because if revivals are an old American phenomena, there's something else that's an old American phenomena too.

Critiquing revivals.

They're both the same age.

And there is a tendency to say, oh, if you are discerning what's happening in a revival, or if you are critiquing it, or if you are questioning it, or if you're showing caution or anything less than full-throated endorsement, you must not want people to get saved.

You must be one of those anti-supernaturalists.

And nothing could be further from the truth.

And so the main books that came out of the Great Awakening critiquing revivals were written by Jonathan Edwards, who again preached the sermon that launched the revival.

So it would be a tough argument that Jonathan Edwards, who was preaching revival sermons, was anti-revival.

Ditto with George Whitfield, who by and large embraced the rubric that Jonathan Edwards used to discern what was true and what was false in these revivals.

Whitfield also, you could say, was a little bit more of a skeptic than the Wesleys were about what was really happening in these meetings.

And Whitfield loved revivals.

Whitfield rode himself to death, literally killed himself, riding all over the United States, preaching multiple times a day.

And he was told repeatedly, You could, brother, you gotta slow down or you're gonna die, and he just died.

So again, it would be very difficult to say, yeah, but when he's critiquing revivals, that's because he doesn't want to see people get saved.

He poured his life out to that end.

Well, Jonathan Edwards thought that it was indeed possible to tell the difference between true and false religion.

He said, in this world so full of darkness and delusion, it's of great importance that we should be able to distinguish between true religion and that which is false.

So understand that's the introduction to this kind of thinking.

We live in a dark world.

This dark world has true religion in it.

Because true religion shines like a bright light in a dark place, it is super critical for us to be able to distinguish between that which is true and that which is false.

That's Samuel Hopkins who wrote that in his introduction to Edwards' book, uh, Religious Affections, as he described what Edwards was arguing.

Edwards himself wrote, uh, I'm bold to assert that there never was any considerable change wrought in the mind or a conversation of any one person by anything of a religious nature that he ever read, heard, or saw that did not have his affections moved.

And that's gonna be the rubric that Edwards uses to critique revivals, that any kind of true change in a person is going to be seen in that person's affections.

Now I'm gonna park on the screen for a second because this quote is very foundational to understanding what is taking place.

In these revivals, there is a mixture of positive response towards Christianity where people are coming to faith with a mixture of craziness and a mixture of prolonged prayers and ecstatic outbursts.

And let me just tell you one story from Jonathan Edwards' life.

He heard of uh revival in a place in Connecticut called the Valley, and he went to check it out for himself.

He went there in his mind as a neutral, dispassionate observer, and this is 1735, and he went there and he saw what was happening there, and he said at one side of the church building, he stayed there for 30 minutes, an hour or so, in one side of the church building, there was a man who was just over and over and over again saying, Come to Christ, come to Christ, come to Christ.

And on the other side of the church building, there was a woman who was shouting at the top of her lungs, all lawyers are crooks, all lawyers are crooks, all lawyers are crooks.

And so there's this battle between come to Christ and all lawyers are crooks.

And in the middle is the congregation of people with their hands raised, praying and ecstatic utterances.

And that I think is a fairly good representation of what was happening all over the United States under the banner of revival.

So you encounter this.

Now, you want to ask yourself some questions.

Those are three different things praying and ecstatic voices, all lawyers are crooks, and comes to Christ.

Is any of those three the gospel?

And I mean Edwards quips that at the very least, all lawyers of crooks has an undertone of repentance to it.

Come to Christ has an invitation to it.

And you start to view it through that lens, you think is one good, is one bad, is one incomplete, at least people are praying, and how do you discern this?

And so Edwards looks at this and he he's walking away saying, clearly this is not simply about people praying.

It's you can't measure what is true based upon the volume or the velocity of how fast the person is speaking or the crowd that is there.

Those can't possibly be the right rubrics.

If there's 30 people in a building, is that more of a revival than if there's a hundred people?

I mean, how can you even begin to discern?

And so Edward Edwards actually wrote three books about this uh Religious Affections, Thoughts Concerning the New England uh revival, and the title of the third one escapes me right now.

But in those uh in those books, he basically keeps the same thesis that I have on your screen.

That wherever you see the change in a person, you see that change in their affections.

And he will go on to define what true religion is and true affections are.

In Edwards's mind, it is hope, joy, fear, zeal, compassion.

All of those things together define religious affections.

I'll read that list again.

Hope, joy, fear, zeal, compassion.

And Edward's mind, those are all under the rubric of love.

So love for Edwards is a supreme emotion.

Your faith produces a fountain of love in your life.

That love flows from your heart to everything else.

So the faith gets into you through your head, your affections are affected in your heart, the outpouring of that is joy, fear, zeal, hope, compassion.

All those subsets of love.

And that's what true conversion is.

You are called to distinguish between these because of 1 John 4, verse 1, beloved, don't believe every spirit.

1 John 4:1

But test the spirits to see whether they are of God.

This is the biblical command to you.

Don't believe everything you hear.

Especially when something intersects with spirituality.

Don't believe everything spiritually you hear.

You test what you hear against the word of God.

And so Edwards notes that you have a two-fold task when it comes to this.

And this is very important to understand because, you know, Luther joked earlier, before Edwards, a couple hundred years, Luther joked that human beings are strange creatures.

They fall off of one side of the horse and they get back on and they vow with all their might to fall off the other side side next time.

And that's where people go with revivals.

And Edwards is aware of this.

So Edwards says the twofold task of the person trying to critique revivals is to understand on the one side.

You have people who say religious affections have no place in discerning true and false, that the affections should be taken out of the equation.

That you can measure the truthfulness of something based simply on the words that are spoken there.

And so you listen to the recordings of what the sermon said and the measure of the veracity of what's happening in revival, it can be identified and outlined and charted and quantified based on the words that were actually spoken.

And Edward says that's a that's a big error because that error discounts the nature of affections.

And the other error, of course, is these are Edward's words again, to let religion degenerate into emotional fanaticism and false enthusiasm.

So he says if you have too much discernment in a sense, you eliminate the role of affections.

And if you have too little, religion becomes all about the noise and the smoke.

Hey, there's a line around the block for three weeks, something true must be happening.

And religion degenerates into that kind of emotional fanaticism.

So that's Edwards.

Now, not everybody agreed with this.

The Wesleys, for example, did not like this approach to discernment about what was happening in revivals.

They sort of rejected the importance of ferreting it out.

And this would eventually, although not necessarily, I don't want to imply this existence, this divide happened in Edwards or Whitfield or Wesley's lifetime, but that divide eventually gave rise to the distinction between the Methodists and the Presbyterians.

This is oversimplification.

There's a lot more theology that goes into this and an approach to evangelism and all this, but those distinctions are seen in their approach towards revivals.

The Presbyterians highlight, underscore the normal means of grace, the normal week-in and week-out worship service, the normal preaching of God's word, normal singing and praying, the normal gathering of the church, the Presbyterians would generally argue that that is more effective in changing affections than an immediate outpouring of God's Spirit.

The Wesleans, on the other hand, this is again oversimplification just to make the point, the Wesleans generally embraced those kinds of outpourings.

In Westlean theology, which would become the Methodist movement and the Methodist Church, remember there's this kind of a twofold stage here.

You come to faith at some point, it's infant baptism, you know, you're baptized into the church, and at some point you come to faith and you accept Jesus or whatever language you want to use, that would be your conversion.

But then there's a different experience in Wesleyanism that you have later, where there's an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on your life, and it enables you to have this experience of the Lord that is perfecting.

This is the perfectionism.

Wesleans are sometimes called the perfectionists.

It's not because they want everything just so on the table.

They're called perfectionists because they believe that second experience is what enables your sanctification.

And so you'll notice that I haven't actually defined what a revival is yet.

Like, isn't there a definition?

And the definition certainly changed between the first Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening.

And the first Great Awakening, the way like Edwards and even the Wesleys defined revival was an unusual outpouring of God's Spirit on God's people.

And when they say God's people, they're not talking conversion.

They're talking about people that are, you know, baptized into the church.

Everybody in town is a member of the church, so to speak, but they're not attending there.

And there's something happens where God is unusually kind to those people.

And that's the language that everybody uses, this unusual outpouring of God's Spirit.

Church is happening week in and week out, and then one day there's a drastic change.

And you can see this through the prayers and through the static utterances and through the external signs.

That's revival.

The Wesleys would embrace that as well.

And this is why in a Wesleyan revival, the presence of like a gospel message or uh, you know, the actual gospel being explained is not that significant in a Wesleyan revival because a Wesleyan revival is taking place in the context of people that on the outside at least are believers.

They're inside of the church.

And this, by the way, it's so I think it's so important to understand the 1700s, that's what a revival was.

A revival took place inside of the church.

This is the Psalms, like Psalm 80, Psalm 85, these Psalms that say, Revive us again, O Lord, it's talking about God's people.

It's praying to God, take this church that is uh dying or dead and revive us.

Restore to us our first love.

There's personal revival in the Psalms.

When the sons of Asaph or the or descendants of Korah, when they're writing these Psalms, that's what they're after.

When they use the word revival, revive us again.

This is where the some of the reformers got the adage sempre reformonda, that the church is always reforming.

That's a reformation motto, Semper Reformonda.

We are always reforming the church.

There's always revival happening in the church.

We're always purifying the church, but that is internal.

By the second Great Awakening, things change.

The second Great Awakening is more externally focused.

And revival then is more about non-Christians getting saved.

Second Great Awakening is the 1800s as Finney, and it starts those kind of evangelistic crusades.

And here's just a very basic question to test your understanding or your thoughts about revival.

If you haven't thought about this before, here's, I think, the best question, this comes from Ian Murray, the best question to ask yourself about revivals.

In your understanding of a revival, can you schedule it?

You know, think about that.

Can you say, can you put up a sign, revival next Thursday, 7 p.m.?

Because that's what happened in the United States with the Second Great Awakening.

People started scheduling revivals.

And I have heard people, even to this day, say that kind of thing, like, oh, you know, I wish our church would schedule a revival.

Sorry, no water up here.

I wish our church would schedule a revival.

That starts to peel back.

What that's the second Great Awakening.

I'm more of a Jonathan Edwards guy.

First Great Awakening.

And once you start the Finney approach to scheduling a revival, that's going to lead into how revivals have been embraced in American history to this day.

That leads you to, you know, Billy Sunday and some of those evangelists, and you start to see the word evangelist and revivalist merge.

The definitions get mingled.

It's no longer about restoring life in the church, but about doing crusades.

You get the Billy Graham crusade, which had this revivalistic flavor to it.

You know, you schedule a revival for four days and there's an unusual outpouring of God's Spirit, and you extend it five, six, seven, nine days kind of thing.

This leads to a massive divide in evangelicalism, of course.

Over do you embrace that approach, which is very methodologically driven?

You know, I received the Billy Graham Crusade training, and it is a it is a heavy focus on the methodology.

Like you're in the stands and the altar call comes and all the counselors got to flood down first, and you've got to hide your name tag, you can have your name tag out, name tag in your jacket.

So it's the wave of counselors, and that starts the wave of others that come.

And it's very, it was very programmatic.

I'm not saying that people don't get saved from Billy Graham Crusades, of course they do, and you probably know lots of them.

And if I could add, I'm not gonna have you raise your hands, but I could ask you to raise your hands.

If you got saved at one of them, I'm sure there'd be lots of hands that go up.

But think about how the concept of revival has changed between the first Great Awakening, where, you know, all the stories about Edwards just reading his notes to avoid fanning the flame of emotion.

Think about how the difference between that and structuring something to produce a result.

There's a huge difference between Edwards saying, I don't want to do anything that might accidentally make somebody respond in a programmatic way, to we've got the program.

Schedule it and fly in the speaker.

Well, this becomes, I think, part of the difference between the Wesleys and the or the Methodists and the Presbyterians.

And this is so important back for Jonathan Edwards, because Edwards is looking at these outbursts of the Spirit that come with actual change in affections.

Edwards is not saying the first great awakening didn't exist, of course.

He's embracing a lot of the changes, and he's saying, you know, you have to discern them.

And the verse that Edwards kept going to is Luke 17, 20, which is the verse didn't really hit me even until today, the importance of this verse in this discussion, but it was important for Edwards.

Luke 17, 20 is Jesus talking to the Pharisees, and he tells the Pharisees, look, listen, you better be careful.

The Pharisees were focused on the casting out demons, and Jesus saying they're coming back and bringing friends.

And Jesus tells the Pharisees, listen, when the kingdom comes, it's not coming in ways that can be observed.

That's a bit of a warning shot to the Pharisees, but that echoed in Edward's mind as he's evaluating all these revivals.

When you're looking for what's true in there, it's very difficult to measure what's true based on what can be observed.

Edwards said, quote, I'm gonna read you a long quote, I don't have it on the screen.

Work is not to be judged by any effects on the bodies of men, such as tears or trembling or groans or loud outcries, agonies of the body, or the flailing of bodily arms, or the failing of bodily strength.

The influence of the minds that persons are under is not to be judged one way or the other by those things.

It could be the Spirit of God that makes people act that way, he says, or it could be more bodily reasons.

The Scripture gives us no such rule.

We cannot conclude that persons are under the influence of the true spirit because we see effects on their bodies, because this is not given as a mark of the true spirit.

Nor, on the other hand, can we conclude from outward appearances that those persons are not under the influence of the Spirit of God because there's no rule of Scripture that says that.

Nor does reason exclude them.

So Edwards is looking at the room.

All lawyers are crooks, come to Christ, praying with hands raised in the middle, and he says, okay, we can eliminate the hands raised in the middle part.

Because, I mean, that's his Edwards even talks about soldiers in the in battle, their knees will quake.

They'll have bodily responses, but does that mean they're under conviction of the Holy Spirit?

Probably not.

I do think, though, tonight that the Bible does give us a way to measure and see and discern true revival.

I want to do that by looking at what I would argue is probably the most famous revival in the Bible.

We read all of it earlier in our scripture reading, 2 Kings 22 and 23, both of them together.

And this is the story of Josiah's revival.

The Puritans often referred to this as Josiah's Reformation.

Richard Sibbs wrote a very well-known book called Josiah's Reformation on this, but if you take the concept of revival as an unusual outpouring of God's Spirit in the life of his people to fan into life, you know, a dead church or a dead group of believers, this is what you're seeing in 2 Kings 22.

And the chronology of where this takes place is what makes it so fascinating.

It's the end of 2 Kings.

And you know what happens next in 2 Kings, by the way?

They get the he-ho.

You know, the Babylonian sheriff shows up and evicts them.

They're tossed onto the street, they lose the promised land.

This is kind of their last gasp here of true religiosity.

We're 12 generations out from David.

And there has not been true religion in Israel really since.

There's been a few instances here and there of some kind of outward expressions of faith towards the Lord, but there hasn't been anything like this.

And it begins in 2 Kings 22 when Josiah was having the temple renovated.

Josiah is a kid.

He's young.

He was eight years old when he began to reign.

He was a boy.

He was in the 18th year of that reign.

So that'd make him 25 or 26.

Remember Jews, part of one year.

Could be off by as much as three years with that.

He could be as young as 23 here by how the Jews count time.

But in that time period, 23 to 26, is when he decides he wants the temple renovated.

He sends money to the temple and tells the contractors you don't even need to count it.

I trust you guys so much.

And the the contractors, just imagine how much religion has fallen in Israel when the king, it's like the 18th year of his reign, says, What's going on with the temple?

If you've been to Jerusalem, you recognize the temple is the center of Jerusalem.

I mean, Jerusalem goes up on hills, everything funnels down to the temple.

You're not going to miss the temple.

And I know that Solomon's temple was perhaps not as big as the temple that Herod the Great built.

But even today, when you go there and you see the mount that Herod built his temple on, you can't miss it.

For 18 years, Josiah's king.

Nothing's happened to it.

And so he calls some contractors.

He gets people from the parking lot at Home Depot.

And he sends them over and says, get to work, man.

See what happens.

And they go there and they find the Torah in the temple.

They find a book.

You know, if you've ever cleaned out your garage, maybe you've had this experience.

I remember cleaning out my parents' garage once, and I came across like things from when I was a kid.

You know, like soccer trophies and stuff, and it's kind of odd.

It's like, oh, this is me from a long time ago.

They've kept this a really long time, this trophy from when I was seven.

I think I can throw it away without getting caught.

I hope my parents aren't listening.

They found the Bible, the Torah, the first five books, the law of Moses, rolled up in the corner.

And they don't know what to do with it.

So they dust it off and they bring it to the head contractor who gives it to the secretary, who brings it over to Josiah and says, Hey, temple temple work's going great.

By the way, you're not gonna believe this.

We found the word of Yahweh.

And I think this is a great marker.

True revival is fanned into existence by the word.

You could go to the revivals or the evangelistic outreaches where there's massive response in the book of Acts, you would see the same thing.

This is because faith comes by hearing, and hearing comes by the words about Christ.

God works through his word.

God can saying this, I've heard people say, hey, when you say that God only brings about revival through his word, you're putting God in a box.

I'm not putting God in a box.

God can save people whoever he wants to save them.

God can also reveal to us how he's going to save them, and the means through which God has revealed to us is his word.

He tells us that faith comes by hearing, and hearing comes by the words about Christ.

Faith comes through the word of God.

And this is true, and you'll see why this is so important in a second.

You saw this with Edwards, you see this with Josiah.

At the beginning of chapter 22, for Josiah, it's all just rumors.

It's just echoes and rumors, nothing more.

Rumors of godliness, rumors of what David would have been like, rumors of Yahweh, but there's no access to God's law, no access to God's prophets.

Even, did you notice when we read this earlier, they go looking for a prophet to figure out what the word of God means and they can't find one?

They get the wife of a prophet, she's home.

This is a super unusual call.

It's been generations since anybody has sought the face of the Lord.

Where are the prophets?

What happened to Israel?

What happened to the Assyrians?

What happened?

Judah is left, and they're about to go down, and Josiah doesn't know what's going on.

Josiah's heart was inclined to the Lord.

He was inclined to listen to the Lord, but he didn't have the word, and they discovered in the temple.

And this is where revival begins.

It was William Tyndale that said, We're better to be without God's law than the Pope's.

William Tyndale prayed for revival to come to England, and he knew he dedicated his life to this.

The only way to get revival to England was to get the word of God to England, because revival wouldn't come if the Pope comes.

I found a very interesting line about Jonathan Edwards today.

Jonathan Edwards said he was fine with people raising their hands and these ecstatic utterances, although he didn't think it was a genuine expression of faith, but he said he's actually fine to see people with their hands raised in church and these ecstatic utterances because the Pope wouldn't be fine with it.

So it's a demonstration they had moved away from the Pope.

William Tyndale would have agreed.

We're better to be without God's law.

We were better without the Pope's law and with God's law.

That's what he wanted so bad.

And you see this all over the chapter.

Look at verse 8.

I found the book of the law in the house of Yahweh.

Verse 10, Hilkiah the priest has given me a book.

Verse 11, when the king heard the words of the book of the law, this is what did it.

And notice what the king did back in chapter 23, verse 1, in the next chapter, sorry, verse 2, 23, verse 2, the king takes the law and he reads it for everybody else.

That's a critical part of this revival, chapter 3, verse 2.

He read in the hearing all the words of the book of the covenant.

He wanted everybody to see and to hear with their own ears what God had said.

And at the end of this whole story, verse 25 of chapter 3, he purposes in his heart to do everything according to the law of Moses.

He clung to it.

This is the spark of all true revival.

But of course, not every church with the Word of God has revival.

So what else goes with it?

Well, revival is sparked by the Word, but you can discern things beyond the mere presence of the Word.

Edwards focused on this.

He distinguished between outward manifestations based on an inclination of a heart that an animal might have, and those which are based on a changed heart that only a Christian can have.

And Edwards notes that at first glance they might be impossible to decipher, but he says you can pull back the layers and discern what's happening.

And the first mark that he gives you is that true revival, it's sparked by the word, but it is seen in sorrow over sin.

This is the real launching point of this.

Revival is seen in sorrow over sin.

You see this here in our text, verse 11, when the king heard the words of the book of law back in chapter 22, the first thing he does, he tears his clothes.

That's his initial response.

He's hearing the word of God for the first time in his life, and he rips his clothes.

He was broken over this.

Verse 19.

God tells him, I can't believe how you're responding.

Regardless, because your heart was penitent and you humbled yourself before Yahweh, you'll receive mercy.

Verse 19, because you've torn your clothes and you wept before me, I've heard you.

Notice what God is telling him.

God, God, it's like the prayer line to heaven from if you picture the king of Judah with a prayer line direct to heaven, that phone hasn't been touched in hundreds of years.

And now it rings.

And God says, I wasn't expecting your call.

I know God knows all things and wouldn't be expecting this call, but you know what I mean.

Are you serious?

You're praying to me now?

And then God sees him and says, I see your heart is penitent.

That word for penitent is a word for tender, malleable.

I see your heart is impressionable.

It's soft.

It can be molded by the word of God.

Hebrew words, very interesting word.

It's what you use for putting wax on a stone.

You can shape wax around a stone and you can make an impression.

You could seal it.

It's the word you use for putting a signet ring into wax.

And God says, I see your heart, and your heart is like that.

The book of Deuteronomy is being pressed against your heart and it's leaving its mark.

And God sees that, and God notices the outward signs.

Notice it starts with the inward, your heart was penitent.

The outward, you c you tore your clothes and you wept.

Lots of people tear their clothes without conversion.

King Ahab, when he walked around the wall and he saw the Israelites cannibalizing themselves, he ripped his clothes.

Lots of people weep before God.

But when the weeping and the torn clothes are the result of the inward, humbled heart before the word of God, that's a sign of true revival.

Josiah was humbled.

He was laid low.

He wasn't blaming other people.

He didn't say, How come I, how come nobody taught me this?

It's all your fault.

Where are the prophets anyway?

No, he owned this.

This was all him.

And he went low and he wept.

He turned to the Lord, verse 25 of chapter 23 says, He turned to Yahweh with all his heart, with all his soul, with all his might.

He went down low.

He looked, the word of God is a mirror.

He looked into the mirror and he saw the face of a wicked man.

And he was humbled by it.

Notice he doesn't argue with God.

I had mentioned earlier that, you know, all of his humility and the Lord says, I'm hearing your prayer.

By the way, you're going to die.

And he's like, okay.

And you think that's an odd response.

That's the response of a humble person.

He knows he deserves it.

Some people mourn when they're caught in sin.

But what they mourn is that they were caught in sin.

They don't mourn the loss of God's favor.

As we read this earlier, I hope you notice.

I'm not going to read through it all again, but I hope you notice that his emotions, it keeps saying the narrator, he keeps saying that all of his emotions were because he recognized he lost God's pleasure.

He recognized that God was not pleased with the Israelites.

He wasn't pleased with the tribe of Judah.

He wasn't pleased with those in Jerusalem.

God was removing his name from them and it crushed him.

And he mourned.

Sibbs in his book, Josiah's Reformation, says the main point of his reformation was to teach us the virtue of self-mourning.

How about that?

The virtue of mortifying your own sin, the virtue of just mourning for your fallen condition.

When you mourn over your sin, the Lord hears you and comforts you.

Richard Sibbs writes, quote, If I should lose my wife or my child, my naughty heart would weep and be grieved at their funeral.

But now there is greater cause of mourning my own sin, and yet my heart is silent.

Augustine in Confessions wrote that if the woman he loved killed herself out of love for him, he would weep.

But he finds in his own heart a lack of weeping for his own limits on his love for God.

Sibs and Augustine are saying the same thing.

Well, Josh Hayah's heart was broken down.

His heart was not just had sorrow over sin, but that produced a submission.

A submission to the word of God.

Or if you want to roll with the alliterations here, a submission to the sword, the sword of the Spirit.

His heart was brought into conformity to the word of God.

He was, as he gets after the rebuke and after he's told he's going to die, notice that he doesn't just stay there and weep in a sackcloth and ashes.

No, he gets up and he starts doing stuff.

He becomes obedient.

He submits his life to the word of God.

Look at verse 3 of chapter 23.

He stood by the pillar, he made a covenant before Yahweh to walk after Yahweh.

Remember, every king when they came on the throne was supposed to write out the book of Deuteronomy.

That's what they're supposed to do.

So there's no excuses.

With their own hand, they're supposed to write it.

Just I'd never even seen it.

So he first of all has it read to him, and he's like, oh, there's a lot of curses in there for people who don't obey.

Oh, this makes sense now.

So he makes a covenant before God.

I'm going to walk after you, Yahweh.

And then he says, to keep your commandments and your testimonies and your statutes with all of his heart, with all of his soul, and perform the words of the covenant that were written in this book.

That's the godly response.

The godly response is, God, I want to do whatever your word says.

Here I am.

Locked and loaded, God.

I will obey.

That's true revival.

That's the disposition of true revival.

When a person is coming out of a religious encounter with the Lord and their affections are changed, their affections are going to go through the period of mourning over their sin, but they don't stay low.

They go low, they are humble because of their sin, but then they grow up in submission to what the word says.

That's true revival.

Tears are not simply true revival, although true revival certainly has tears, but it's not simply that.

It produces then spiritual growth, an eagerness to be pleasing to the Lord, an eagerness to do what the Lord commands.

Also in chapter 23.

Look down at verse 24.

Josiah desired that he would establish the words of the law that were written in the book.

That's what he wants to do.

He wants to establish those words in Israel.

He wants everybody to obey the word like he obeys the word.

That's true revival.

Thirdly, radical repentance.

With the growing comes the taking off.

With the putting on comes the taking off.

He repents.

That was the longest part of this chapter when we read it earlier.

You're like, man, is there anything else this guy can break?

He repented over all.

He left Jerusalem and started traveling to Israel, which by the way is in exile by the Assyrians, and he starts tearing down their idols.

That is 200 years late, but he's doing it.

Look at verse 4, back in chapter 22.

The first thing he does is he tells the contractors to bring out of Yahweh's temple, verse 422, all the vessels made for Baal.

So just stop and be astonished for a second.

That Yahweh's temple, no wonder they couldn't find the word of God tucked in the back corner, because the temple is filled with Baal idols.

You think, man, why did God exile Israel?

Here's why.

Temple's filled with Baal idols.

Asherah, which is a pole that would be erected.

It was a celebration of sexual deviance.

That's all in the temple.

He doesn't just kick them out of the temple or put them in the closet or whatever.

He brings them out and burns them in the brook of Kidron.

That's the valley in Jesus' lifetime.

They'd burn trash there.

That's right down the hill.

So he takes them out the temple, down the hill to the brook and burns them there.

He deposed the priests.

Why didn't he do that in the 17th year of his reign?

Because he didn't know it was in the temple.

Had he known the temple was filled with idols, he would have fired the priests yesterday.

He just found out today the temple is packed with idols.

Who's running that place?

All the priests run in.

Here we are.

You're all fired.

He's going to do more to them than the fire, though, by the way.

Verse 6.

He brings out the Asherah from Yahweh's house.

We covered that.

He burns that at the book of Kidron, beats it to dust, and casts the dust upon the graves of the common people.

The whole hill there.

People are buried on the hill looking towards the temple because they think, you know, when the when the resurrection comes, those will be resurrected first are those closest to the temple.

So all these, you know, the, and he is.

I love that the author here calls them the common people.

All those graves right there.

Josiah burns the idols and sprinkles the dust on their graves.

That's how good your religion is.

You paid more for a close burial spot, you get idol dust on you.

The male cult prostitutes in verse 7.

He brings them out along with the priests that had made those offerings.

Bad things are going to happen to them.

Verse 9.

I'm sorry, verse 10, he defiled the Topith, which is in the valley of the Sun of Hinnam.

That's a place where people would take and burn their children to Molech.

They'd offer their children as a sacrifice to Moloch.

And remember, this was the idea that if you sent your offspring, your firstborn, to the grave ahead of you, then when you died, you'd have somebody to welcome you from your family.

That was this religion.

That's just like grotesque.

Sacrificing your child so you have somebody who recognizes you in heaven.

That's what they did.

And so Josiah goes there, deals with that.

Then he goes to his own horses, recognizes his horses, have all these, which is warned about in Deuteronomy, by the way.

His horses have all these dedications.

He gets rid of them.

Verse 13 defiles the high places, verse 14, cuts down more pillars, finds more places with the bones of men, deals with that.

Verse 16, sent and took the bones out of the tombs and burned them on the altar of Nephile.

That's some people buried in the tombs above the ground, on the mountain right outside of the temple, destroys those.

Now, this had all been predicted, of course, 300 years earlier by a prophet.

We don't have time to go into that narrative.

But remember, a prophet rebuked the king of Israel for this, and the king of Israel pointed back at him and said, Don't you know, don't you rebuke me in his hand withered?

And the prophet says, You know, this is gonna happen.

Somebody else is gonna roll in here and dig up all these bones and just embarrass you all.

And 300 years later it happens.

Verse 19 removed all the shrines to the high places.

They're back in Samaria.

You know, this is why I mean he's going into Israel now, which hasn't been Israeli occupied in probably 150 years at this point.

He goes there, takes down idols that are in all their ruins.

I mean, this is radical repentance.

He goes on a march to find areas of sin that he hadn't thought of.

That's radical repentance.

He is broken down before the word.

One commentator says this passage shows that obedience to God is not just good intentions, but concrete implementation of the Torah by a heart that is determined to obey and put to death the sin that remains.

This is the attitude of tell me what to do, and I'll do it.

And he goes in radical, radical repentance.

And a fourth sign of true revival.

A true revival is sparked by the word, but it's seen in sorrow over sin, submission to the sword, radical repentance, and finally restoration of the means of grace.

Restoration of the means of grace.

Now, the means of grace, in the Christian context, or the preaching of the word, prayer, fellowship, giving, communion, celebrating the gospel through communion, celebrating the gospel through baptism.

That's the normal means of grace.

They didn't have the kind of congregational worship that we have.

They had the Psalms of Ascent and the pilgrimages, the temple, and all that.

But they didn't have what we would call the normal means of grace, but they did have the Passover.

And that's what he does in verse 21, of chapter 23.

He commanded all the people, keep the Passover to Yahweh.

This is his first positive command of the people.

Keep the Passover as it is written in the book of the covenant.

Notice verse 22, this is amazing.

No Passover had been kept since the days of the judges who judged Israel.

That's insane.

But he brings it back.

Because he wants his people to experience the grace of the Lord.

If you're doing Passover every year, you're not forgetting about it.

They hadn't been doing Passover and they forgot.

This is why, by the way, I mentioned earlier, this is so critical when it comes to revivals.

I mentioned earlier the difference between Presbyterians and Wesleyan's.

This is one of the key differences over the role of the ordinary means of grace.

And Presbyterians don't use the, they don't blush when they call it the ordinary means of grace.

The word ordinary is taking on a positive connotation there.

It's the normal thing that God has given the church to strengthen and encourage you, is the ministry of the word of God.

And you guys get that because you are the Sunday night congregation.

I mean, you ask yourself, why do you come to church on Sunday night?

What are you hoping to get out of it?

And it's just the normal means of grace that God gives you through his word and through singing and through seeing other Christians.

It's just the there's nothing in that sense super extraordinary about this.

But it's the normal way that God changes your affections over time.

And sometimes you might hear something in a sermon or in a song or an experience that changes your heart in a moment.

Then you finally have the courage to repent from a certain sin or you finally have the courage to obey in a certain way.

But more often than not, it's the gradual erosion of sin from your heart and the gradual conformity of your heart to God's word.

It just takes place over time, normally, for the Christian.

Josiah is aware of that.

And he establishes the Passover for them to keep it and follow the Lord.

Those are all the signs he gives of true revival.

Now, notice a sign that is not given.

Things don't get better.

We stopped reading when Josiah died, but how'd you go?

I mean, he died in a terrible way.

But you keep going through the story?

Things go bad.

They go into exile, they lose the land.

God doesn't erase every all the temporal consequences still happen to them, even though the revival was true.

Even though this is a real heart change.

Given in the scripture to be a model for it, that didn't mean that all of God's curses went away from them.

Of course, those who put their faith in Christ have their sins forgiven and are restored, have a right relationship with the Lord.

But that doesn't mean the temporal consequences of sin go away, even in revival.

They remain.

What happens in this world, in that sense, stays in this world, but it's in this world.

Josiah's reformation ends with his death.

Judah's reformation ends with their exile, as all stories of reformation in this world must.

This is why the reformers said the church was sempre reformanda.

It is always restoring.

We haven't arrived.

We're 2,023 years into this thing.

You are not gonna hear me say, stand up here and say, Emmanuel Bible Church has figured it out.

We finally figured out how to do church.

This morning's worship service, I mean that was that was it.

We sang Revelation 5, Apostles' Creed, it's not gonna get it.

Pack it up, boys.

We're going home, because that was it.

No, you're always purifying the church.

There's always work to be done.

And it happens through everything you just heard about.

The normal means of grace, submission to the scripture, repentance from the sin through the word of God.

So should you pray for revival to take place?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Because our history has been marked by unusual outpourings of God's Spirit.

You pray for revival to come, pray for God to save people.

But when you hear any reports of revival, should you check your discernment at the door because you don't want to be critical of something?

Listen, you don't need to pass judgment on everything in the news, right?

You don't need to render your verdict from a thousand miles away about this or that.

Sometimes the best virtue is to keep your mouth shut.

I'm learning.

But also, when something concerns true religion, you are to test the spirits, and you're not supposed to be naive, and God's word has given you enough information to discern if something is spiritual or not.

You don't know the motives of every person's heart, and this is why time and truth go hand in hand.

Some people with their hands raised, you know, they may walk out of their changed person.

And those changed affections will manifest themselves in their lives.

And I hope that's true for you.

And some people will grow up like a a weed.

They'll grow quick.

And then the first sign of trials or opposition from the world, and they will melt and they will die.

You can't know at the moment.

All you can do is trust the work to the Lord.

God, that's what we want to do, is trust you with your work.

This is your church, we're your people.

We do pray that you would save people in our world, that you would save people in Springfield, save our neighbors and our co-workers and students of school.

We do want to see you use us to bring other people to faith in Christ.

We pray for those believers who are attending church regularly but who are spiritually dead.

We pray that you would revive them.

When we talk about revival, that's what we mean.

There are plenty of people that come to church every Sunday but are spiritually stagnant.

As the psalmists say, Lord, we pray that you would revive them.

Bring them back to spiritual life.

In the meantime, Lord, we're not in control of that.

We can only study your word and sing with your people and just cherish you.

And so we pray that you would help us cherish you more.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now, for parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.