The Call Out | Pastor Greg Ford Sermon | One Church Columbus

We're starting a series of messages that'll be for the next six weeks, and uh we're calling it the prophetic anthology.

We're gonna be looking at the six major themes of the twelve minor prophets.

Uh the twelve minor prophets are the last twelve books of the Old Testament, so it takes us from the book of Hosea through the book of Malachi.

And the term minor prophet uh can be a little confusing because it's not saying that these books are less significant.

Uh they're just saying that the books are shorter.

That's why they're called the minor prophets.

The books are concise.

So if you take uh Hosea versus like a major prophet like Isaiah, uh Isaiah's book is just much longer than the book of Hosea, but um they're just as important.

Uh you're gonna see then the 12 minor prophets that the books are actually really designed to be looked at not only individually, but as a collection.

And uh some of these prophets are contemporary of one another.

In other words, they they operated and worked at the same time, and some in different times, uh, but the books were uh really designed to be looked at together.

And what you find is that in the 12 different books, you'll see six themes that will come to the surface, and that's where we're gonna uh concentrate our time throughout the series.

So uh today I'm gonna look at one book within the 12, but throughout most of the series, I'll be jumping around from book to book and uh giving some context along the way.

Um, when you think about the word of God, so the written word, so the Bible, or a word from God, uh two different things happen from time to time.

One is the word of God comforts those who are disturbed.

If you've ever been in a place where you were struggling, you were suffering, you were confused, you needed some help, often you come across a Bible verse or a Bible story, or even somebody may give you an encouraging word that helps you when you're disturbed.

But the second thing that the Bible does is the opposite of that, which is it disturbs the comfortable.

And we all need from time to time to be comforted when we're hurting, but sometimes we need to be disturbed when we have veered off course, either on purpose or on accident.

When you look at the structure of the nation of Israel in the Old Testament, you have three key roles that represent essentially powerful people.

Uh, you had the prophets, priests, and kings.

The priests, their job was to maintain order in worship, consistency.

So, in other words, we need to be coming to the house of God, we need to become to the temple consistently, we need to be making offerings of gratitude to God, we need to be making offerings of repentance to God, uh, and consistently calibrating.

And there is something to be said for important things being done consistently.

Rituals uh are wonderful, but if you're not careful, you can get so ritualistic that you begin to check boxes, and the reason that you did the thing gets lost on you, and you need to be reminded of why we do what we do.

And it's not just that we're doing the right thing, but we're doing it for the right reason.

So the priest's job was to maintain that order of worship and consistency.

The king's job was to uh maintain order of in the civic life.

So, in other words, uh making sure that the economy is taking care of the citizens, making sure that the courts are uh executing justice, that the courts are not unjust, uh, making sure that the relationship with the with the uh foreign countries is appropriate.

And so uh that's the job of the king.

The prophet, their job, was when those two roles started to veer off course to disrupt the status quo by calling out the truth that was either uh a blind spot to those who who had gone off course or they had done so willfully.

And so they're calling that out.

So, in a sense, they were a disruptive force.

Um, I think it's worth us just taking a moment here to embrace the reality that I think we would all agree that no matter how sincere we are, we are at times going to need to receive messages that we don't want to hear.

From time to time, we're gonna have to be confronted with mindsets that we have that have gone off course, whether on purpose or on accident.

We're gonna have to deal with our motives.

Uh, we're gonna have to deal with our behaviors.

None of us, hopefully, would be so arrogant as to think in our humanity that our current point of view contains no blind spots.

The older that we get, if you grow in age, humility, and wisdom, you would be the first to admit that there were times you totally thought you were on course and yet you were blind to something.

And someone or something or some situation brought that thing into light, and it was a big deal.

It was something that you look back, may have hurt at the time, but you look and see, wow, I'm grateful for it because that was part of my formation.

So I think we need to pause just for a second to prepare our emotions, to prepare our spirits, to receive, to receive, and to just acknowledge that's part of being a human being is from time to time we get off course and we need to be receptive to messages that may at first hit us in a feeling of defensiveness.

One of the reasons that you see the 12 minor prophets constantly rejected is because messages that we don't want to hear often make us defensive, and our knee-jerk reaction is to reject it.

The vast majority of the work of the prophets was met with resistance.

Uh they were attacked often.

Um, they were ignored or dismissed, uh, written off as kooks and sent packing and thrown into pits.

I mean, you're talking uh it's hard, hard to receive sometimes a message you don't want to hear, but let's be humble enough to go, even the most sincere, even the most sincere of us, even the most mature of us, will have times that there's a message that God's gonna try to get to us and we've got to be willing to receive it.

I would also say, in addition to that, there are times that God will not only uh send a prophet, a prophetic word to you, but that God will use you to have a vantage point into somebody else's life that they don't see, to help them to bring something to light, a message they don't want to hear.

So, what I want to concentrate this first week is I want to I want to look at uh some scripture and learn how we can both give and receive important messages from God, even the ones that are the most difficult to give and to hear.

Uh we're gonna start in the book of Amos.

So today is gonna be, we're only gonna be in the book of Amos today.

Uh and I want to give you a little bit of background.

So the book of Amos was written during a time that the nation of Israel, they had had a civil war and they were divided.

So you have both a northern and southern kingdom.

So in the text, when you when you see uh in the book of Amos the the name Israel, Israel is referring to the northern kingdom.

And when you see the name Judah, Judah is referring to the southern kingdom.

Um these kingdoms were divided into north and south, and they were um, the relationship between the north and the south was uh they weren't friends, but they had worse enemies than one another.

In other words, we've got bigger fights than one another, we're not going to really help each other, we're not gonna hurt each other, but they certainly didn't like each other.

Um the for a uh this around that period of time you have pressure coming from empires.

So the northern king uh the north was the Assyrians, and then in the south it was the Egyptians.

And there was this period of time where Amos prophesies, it's about a 30-year period, where the Assyrians were dealing with internal trouble within their own empire, and so they had to back off.

So there was this power vacuum that it opened up, and so this was like a golden age for both the northern and southern kingdom, but particularly the northern kingdom, they took more territory.

They actually had an influx of wealth that came into the northern kingdom that normally would have gone to the Assyrians, but they were able to keep it.

So you had a bunch of new rich people, like a lot of money came in really fast.

And of course, theologically at that time, when you got a bunch of money or you took new land or your military prowess was was uh where it needed to be, they couldn't see that as anything other than the blessing of God.

Okay, so if you if if you're uh prospering, then then they go, God's blessing you.

And so the Amos actually comes to them in a time they were especially hard to reach because they were so convinced that their wealth and their might and their expansion, their growth, was equal to the blessing of God that actually God sent him to show them that even though on the outside you're flourishing, on the outside you're prospering, the underbelly of evil is God sees it, he's not missing it, and he's going to judge it.

Okay, so this is uh it's it's an interesting task that he has.

Uh in Amos 1:1, it comes right out of the gate, it says the words of Amos, one of the shepherds of Tokoa.

Amos 1:1

Now let's pause there real quick.

When you see Tokoah, what's significant about that is that Tokoah was a city in the southern kingdom.

Okay, so he's gonna go to the north.

So you have a guy going across a fortified border from the southern kingdom to prophesy to the northern kingdom.

And then here it says that he's a shepherd, which would be really easy to read over because most of the shepherds at that time were what were called subsistence shepherds or subsistence farmers.

Essentially, you're just doing enough to take care of your family.

All right, this isn't some large business, it's just taking care of your land and your family.

But the word that's used here in Amos 1.1 for shepherd is uh is not a subsistence farmer.

It's actually only used one other time in the entire Old Testament.

So the word shepherd is used a lot in the Old Testament, and it's mostly used as kind of again a uh kind of a poor, humble shepherd.

This term that's used uh is actually used only one other time, and it's in 2 Kings 3 4.

So I'll show you this real quick.

It says, now uh Meshah, king of Moab, raised sheep.

So by the way, some of your Bibles didn't say shepherd, it might have said breeder of sheep or sheep breeder.

So this word here says that the king of Moab was a sheep breeder, same word, and had to pay the king of Israel a tribute of a hundred thousand lambs and the wool of a hundred thousand rams.

Okay?

So the other time that it's used, and it and by the way, in other uh texts around that time that are outside of the Bible, this was used for someone who had an industrial operation in a sense.

This isn't just a guy with a few sheep.

This is a guy with who is an agro-businessman, an agro-business executive, um, had huge, huge herds.

Um, in it later on in in uh Amos 7, 14 and 15, and we'll come back to this in a in a minute, but he when he's identifying himself, he says, I was neither the prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd.

There he uses another word for shepherd, and that word actually means cattleman.

So this is really, again, starting to build out who this guy Amos was.

Um He was a guy who really had an expansive business.

He not only had a you know many, many sheep, but he had large cattle as well, oxen and cows.

And he said, and I took care of sycamore fig trees, which also seems like you could easily read past it.

But what's interesting is there the sycamore fig trees were not in Tocoa, they were actually uh on an in another part of the country, and they were used as mostly as cattle feed.

So you're talking about a guy who has a spread-out business and uh you know understands, like he's got a unique perspective because he's working in the agrarian society, but he's also seeing uh he has a vantage point based on his position as a businessman to be the economic equal of the powerful people he's calling out, but at the same time to see the corruption that's happening beneath the surface to call it out.

So this is who Amos is.

Uh let's look what he does.

Amos 1, verse 3, he starts doing something that's absolutely masterful, and he's he starts by giving, essentially uh declaring God's judgment.

Amos 1:3

And so he says this in verse 3.

He says, This is what the Lord says, for three sins of Damascus, even four, I will not relent.

Okay, so without getting too far into the literary element, just to keep it simple, he's using what's called an X plus one literary formula, which is what's significant is the number seven.

So three plus four equals seven, which in their language what they would have heard is full fullness or to the max.

So he's saying, for these reasons, these people, so he starts with Damascus, are going to be punished by God to the max, to the brim.

Okay, and he says for this reason, because uh she threshed Gilead with sledges having iron teeth, right?

So he's giving just kind of gory imagery of like a plow that would plow up the hardened ground with, you know, with um sharp uh plows, and he says, you know, they did that, they ran over people with that.

Uh verse six, he says, This is what the Lord says uh for three sins of Gaza, even four, I will not relent, because she took captive whole communities and sold them to Edom.

Okay, now here's what he's doing.

He goes to the northern kingdom, he comes up from the south, and he essentially grabs a pair of binoculars.

I was like, why am I not seeing very far?

He grabs a pair of binoculars and he starts calling out all of the northern kingdom's neighboring foreign nations.

And he starts calling out real sins.

These are things they would have known about, and he's saying, just so you know, God sees them, and of course, you know, he's throwing red meat to the wolves here.

I mean, this is exciting, yeah, baby, like Damascus, they're terrible.

And they did that to Gilead.

This is what this foreign power did to that foreign power.

And then verse uh six, Gaza, yeah, yeah, we don't like them either.

Verse nine, this is what the Lord says, for the three sins of Tyre, even four, I will not relent, because she sold whole communities of captives to Edom, disregarding a treaty of brotherhood.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tyre, they're terrible.

Verse 11, this is what the Lord says, for the three sins of Edom, even four, I will not relent.

Because he pursued his brother with a sword and slaughtered the women of the land because his anger raged continually, and his fury flamed unchecked.

So he's going, calling them out.

We're here now on the fourth one.

They're expecting seven, because he's given them the number seven, and they want the complete sermon, and so they're on the edge each time, and he's calling out their crimes against humanity.

These are war crimes, but these are things even outside of their own text, their own Torah.

This is just stuff that everybody would say is reprehensible to sell somebody or to you know gore somebody or to you know run them over with a plow.

And okay.

And so they're all, I mean, they're fired up about this.

This is just, they're pumped.

Verse 13, this is what the Lord says, for the three sins of Amon, even for four, I will not relent, because he ripped open the pregnant women of Gilead in order to extend his borders.

Flip to Amos 2, verse 1.

Amos 2:1

This is what the Lord says, for three sins of Moab, even four, I will not relent, because he burned to ashes the bones of Edom's king.

Now this is tied to their belief about the afterlife that if you burn the king's bones, he can't rest in peace.

So not only did you kill him in this life, but you killed him in the next life.

And so, okay, so here's what's going on.

Go ahead and pull up that, um, pull up the you think you already did, the map.

So he's taking them around the map.

He's going around the map with his uh binoculars, and he's calling out all of them, them, them, all the foreign nations, and everything they did bad, and everything they know about, and he's got everybody pumping their fist, and he's done six of them now, and now we get to number seven, which is going to be the number of completion, which they think is the last point in the sermon, and he gets to verse four, and it says, This is what the Lord says, for three sins of Judah, even for four, I will not relent.

So he goes six, six judgments with the binoculars.

They're like, there's one more left, and he sets down the binoculars and he picks up the mirror at himself.

And yeah, Israel, northern, this is where he's at.

He's in Israel.

And he goes to the seventh point, Judah, and calls out his own people.

His himself, to which they're like, we like this guy.

This is a great guy.

Not only does he see how bad all these other countries are, but this is our, I mean, we're not enemies, but we're not friends, and how objective of a guy to not only call out all the nations and then to call out his own nation, he said, Here's what my people have done, uh, because they have rejected the law of the Lord and have not kept his decrees, because they have been led astray by false gods, by idols.

So they think the sermon's done, and they think it's the best sermon they've ever heard, but he has uh an eighth point, okay, which they didn't see coming.

So he's essentially set a rhetorical trap.

And with the eighth point, he says uh in verse six, this is what the Lord says for three sins of Israel, even four, I will not relent.

And so now he has put down the binoculars, he's taken the mirror from himself and his people, and now he's turned the mirror to them and said, Hey guys, now it's your turn to look in the mirror as to what you've done.

And it says, uh they sell the innocent for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.

We're gonna talk more about what this stuff means in a few weeks.

They trample on the heads of the poor as on the dust of the ground and deny justice to the oppressed.

Father and son use the same girl, and so profane my holy name.

They lie down beside every altar on the garments taken in pledge.

In the house of their God, they drink wine taken as fines.

He says, You were hooting and hollering when I was pointing out all of the binoculars, all of the binocular perspectives of the countries outside of you and everybody, everybody else, them, all the thems, you got very excited about of even what they did to each other.

But he says, your crime and your sin is what you've done to your own people.

Sometimes God uses messengers that you don't want to hear from to deliver messages that you don't want to hear.

And often it's the very message that you need to hear, that I need to hear.

But one of the things that we learn from the prophets is that those messages that don't want to be heard are often delivered by someone that you don't want to hear from.

He spends the next several chapters in Amos calling out, calling out the northern kingdom.

And when you get to Amos 7, it says in verse 12, then Amaziah said to Amos, and Amaziah is the priest in the northern kingdom, the priest in Bethel.

He says, Get out, you seer.

Go back to the land of Judah.

Go back to the south, cross back over the border and go back to your place, earn your bread there and do your prophesying there.

So they reject it.

Accept everything that you said until it got to me, until it got to us, and now I'm gonna reject it.

I want to take the rest of my time and give, based on the text, three pieces of advice when you have a word from God, when you have a perspective of truth, and you're the deliverer of that word.

I want to give you three pieces of guidance, and then I'm gonna give one piece of advice of guidance for those who are the receiver when someone is speaking something to you or you're receiving that message.

The first thing is this motive matters.

Motive matters.

Um, what we just read in Amos 7 12, Amaziah says, get out of here, you seer, go back to your land, uh, earn your bread.

There and do your prophesying there.

Okay, what he thinks is he thinks that he knows Amos's motive.

Okay, at this time, Amos isn't the only prophet.

There are a lot of prophets.

In fact, there were as was a guild of prophets.

It was a there was an educational process.

And like we said at the beginning of the message, the whole point of a prophet is to not be seduced by power, but to speak the truth to power when on purpose or on accident they've gotten off course.

But what was happening is these prophets were profiting off of the power of the king or wealthy business people by giving them a word from God that they wanted.

So they would give them, it wasn't necessarily the word from God.

They just said, Thus saith the Lord, here's this.

That's what the people wanted to hear, that's what those powerful people wanted to hear.

So they're telling them what they want to hear, and then they're making a lot of money from it.

So when he tells Amos, go back to the south where you came from and make your money there and make your bread there, he's assuming that Amos is a prophet from the southern kingdom who probably has some benefactor who's given him a bunch of money to go tell those northerners what's up.

Go up there and just give them the tough message.

And uh Amos says to him, I'm not a prophet or the son of a prophet.

Dude, I'm an agro-businessman.

I actually stepped away from my business to come here and do this.

Not only is no one paying me to do this, I'm losing money to do this.

I stepped away from my business to do this.

I'm giving you a word from God.

Let's go back real quick to verse uh 12 and 13.

So Amos 7, 12 and 13.

So Amos said uh Amaziah says to Amos, get out of here, go back to Judah.

Look at verse 13.

He says, Don't prophesy anymore in Bethel, because this is the king's sanctuary and the temple of the kingdom.

This is the Lord's temple.

This is Yahweh's temple.

What are you talking about?

We're in the king.

When did the king lay claim to Yahweh's temple?

And yet, what you have here is Amaziah's motive coming to the surface, whether he meant to or not.

If you ever had something blurted out, something that you're like, whoa, it it's like it comes out of your mouth, you're like, I can't believe I just said that.

And yet, what does he say?

His real motive, what was really driving him, what was really his God, what who he was really following, who he was really obeying, he says, get out of here, this is the king's temple.

That's how far they had fallen that he thought that this is the sanctuary of our kingdom and the temple of our king.

And again, this is the very reason God had sent Amos.

So Amos's motive, he says, uh, when you go to verse 14, Amos says to him, I'm neither the prophet or the son of a prophet.

I'm not from your, I'm not from your uh group of prophets.

He says, I actually have my own business.

Verse 15, but the Lord took me from tending the flock and said to me, Go prophesy to my people Israel.

You gotta check your motive.

When God gives you a word, are you doing it uh to be obedient to God, to call out truth, and for redemption and not destruction?

Think about this concept.

And we're talking about these prophetic voices that are disruptive.

Well, you know what else is disruptive?

Satan.

Satan is also disruptive, he's the accuser of the brethren.

Uh Satan is the one who's the author of confusion.

Okay, um, the thief, it says in John 10, 10, the thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy.

But Jesus says, I've had come that you may have life to the full, he's speaking to leaders about motives, and sometimes people can have motives that are actually to disrupt for the point of destroying.

If the prophetic word is disruptive and the satanic word is also disruptive, how do I know when I'm being disrupted whether it's coming from God or from the enemy?

And I think if you're not careful, what happens often is when the word is something that offends me or something I don't like or could cost me something, we just very easily write it off to the devil.

Well, that's the enemy.

Yeah, see, it's created confusion.

Uh it's created chaos, see, it's it's causing division.

No, it might cause a disruption that needs to be here.

Some sometimes these prophets get run out of town, go back, you know, and instead of being able to objectively look at the message that's being given, um, you have to expect, even when a word from God comes to you, it doesn't mean it's going to taste good.

It doesn't mean that it's going to feel good.

But when you're giving it, now, as the giver, when you're giving a word from God, before you open your mouth and say anything, I don't care how true it is, you need to dig into your own motive.

Why am I doing this?

Am I doing this to spite someone?

Am I doing this to throw an elbow?

Am I doing this to destroy someone?

Or am I doing this ultimately with a redemptive purpose?

Uh, you see that uh, again, John 10, 10, you see, even in the book of Revelation, uh, chapter 12, verses 10, that talks about the accuser will ultimately be uh struck down.

But motive, the the motive matters.

Think about what we looked at a few weeks ago in the book of Jonah.

The whole climax of that story of Jonah is not the belly of the whale.

It's definitely not uh, it's it's not even the the revival in Nineveh.

The point of that story is chapter four, where you have Jonah who gave a word from God, and then redemption happened, and then he was mad because destruction didn't happen.

It's really a call to anyone who's gonna be giving the word of God that we look and examine our own hearts.

I mean, Jonah's not he's not really a hero in the story because you see him at the end, actually, he his his heart and God's heart were not aligned.

So there's gonna be things that you see that need called out.

They're gonna need called out in the church, they're gonna need called out in your family, they're gonna need called out in your business, they're gonna need called out in your community, they're gonna need called out in the country, they're gonna need called out in the world.

But before you open up and become a vessel, you need to check your motives because motives matter.

Are your motives redemptive or destructive?

The second is tone matters.

So one of the things you'll notice with uh many of the prophets is they have a blunt, provocative, inflammatory, sometimes tone, sometimes sarcastic.

And um a couple things to think about.

When you're reading particularly biblical narratives, you want to be asking and really thinking carefully about is what I'm reading, what part of what I'm reading is prescriptive and what part is simply descriptive.

So in other words, it's describing what happened, but it isn't necessarily giving uh you know just a complete license to do it exactly that way.

So let me give you an example.

Um, Elijah, you remember the story of Elijah where he goes on Mount Carmel, 450 prophets of Baal.

Okay, we'll see who's real, you make your sacrifice, I'll make mine, see which God can bring fire.

And the prophets of Baal, they're trying everything, they nothing's happening.

And Elijah starts to mock them.

He starts to taunt them.

Hey, maybe you're God's relieving himself, maybe he's asleep, get louder, blah, blah, blah.

He's he's taunting them.

Okay, if you're not careful, you would read that and go, yeah, yeah, that's what prophets do.

You know, that that's when you're a prophet and you're speaking the truth, you can say it any kind of way you want.

Who cares what anybody thinks?

Who cares how they feel?

But you got to keep reading in the story because a couple chapters later, he's gonna go from Mount Carmel to Mount Horeb, which is the mountain of God, and have an encounter with God, like he had never had in his life.

And in that encounter with God, God sends fire again.

And it says he wasn't in the fire.

And then when the fire and the earthquake and the wind and everything went away, everything that Elijah thought he knew, God shows up in a whisper and teaches him silence.

I think in many ways you see the maturation of a prophet, okay?

Yes, there's a time to use a blunt metaphor.

Yes, there's a time to shoot it straight.

I think what's prescriptive in the text is to tell the truth and to speak the truth courageously to powerful people, okay, to be courageous and to be honest and to call it out when you see it.

But I don't think it's prescriptive in the text to just be as blunt and rude as you want.

Refer to point number one, motive.

And if you're not careful, if your motive is actually I want to spite these people, and the sarcasm is drawn out of that, and and the the tone is wrong, then what'll happen is when it's rejected, you'll go, yes, see, they can't handle the truth.

And often it's actually no, your tone was bad.

When you look at Amos, okay, yes, he comes in and says some really shocking things.

By the way, sometimes you need to say shocking things because nothing else is working.

I said it this way, you didn't listen.

I said it, whoa, okay, that was shocking, and now you're paying attention.

So there is a time to do that from time to time.

But, friend, look at the rhetorical process he went through.

This was a masterfully done.

He didn't just bust through the doors and start pointing fingers.

He went binoculars for six countries.

He turned the thing back and called himself out and his people, and then he turned the mirror.

This was not, he didn't just go start blowing off steam.

This was very intentional.

Every word was on purpose, and and he did it well.

So listen, your tone and your motives, when God gives you a word or gives you a vision, lets you see something, uh, a blind spot in another person or another community or another country, whatever, make sure that your heart is right, make sure that your motive is right, and make sure that your tone is right.

Uh the third thing, when God gives you a word, if you're willing to tell the truth about them, you better also be willing to tell the truth about us and to hear the truth about you.

When it comes to our brain networks and how we what's going on in here for each of us, we have three things going on.

One, our brains are trying to survive, right?

So your brain consciously, subconsciously has all these survival mechanisms, and your brain just trying to keep you alive.

Number one.

Number two, your brain wants to be connected in community.

We have parts of our brain network that literally wants, doesn't want to be lonely.

We want to be in relationship.

And then the third is our brains want to be significant, we want to have purpose, want our lives to have meaning.

And those three things are happening at the at the same time.

Um, yes, you and I, like Amos, will have a unique vantage point to a group of people who are them.

So Amos says, you know what?

I have a unique vantage point to your you group of prophets because I'm not part of your guild.

I don't get any money from y'all.

I don't really want to be in your clique, I don't want to be in your group, I just see what you're doing and I'm calling it out.

So there will be times, there is a certain better perspective sometimes you have with the binoculars, you can see things.

So there may be times that it's appropriate for you to call out something that's outside of yourself.

But refer to point number one motive.

If you're not careful and all you ever do is call people out from the binoculars, and and you're going, you know what, my group here actually, if I take this and I call out them, them, them, them, them, they'll actually king me.

They'll king me because I'm calling out them.

So so now my my survival and my community and my significance, I'm just throwing red meat to my own people and never turn the mirror back to us.

Certainly there's a time to do this, but if I'm only doing this because I don't want to do this, then you're only half a prophet.

You're only half a prophet.

I'm just calling everybody else out.

Hey, sometimes you gotta call everybody else out, but if if you only ever call out another country, you only ever call out another church, you only ever call out another community, you only ever call out another political party, you only other call out them, the other family, never gonna call out us, and not gonna be open to me, you're no prophet.

You're no prophet.

You gotta you gotta be willing to do all of it.

So, so often people that are, you know, have this intense, antagonistic rhetoric, and it's always them, them, them, them, them have just as much a problem as the person they're talking about because it's all about them, them, them, them, them.

Last piece of advice, and this is to the receiver.

Evaluate the message independently from the messenger.

So I just got done talking about the best way to deliver it.

Ideally, a prophetic word or a message from God would come from someone who searched their heart and their motives are pure, from someone who chose their words carefully and had a really healthy, godly tone.

It would be from someone that was not just willing to call out them, although they will for redemptive purposes, but also will call out us courageously, which is difficult because y'all might throw me out.

By the way, it the the goal of this community, wouldn't it be great to be a part of a community where if you saw something that you thought did not please the Lord, you could speak up about it without fear that you're gonna be marginalized or cast out or thrown out, but but that we could be a part of something that held one another accountable internally without it costing me my safety, security, and connection and significance.

Anyway, guess not.

Um, so the the uh the ideally it would come in that beautiful package that I just described.

But friend, I'll tell you, when God has a word for you, it might come from someone you don't want to hear from, and it might come said in a way you don't want to hear it.

Have the ability to disconnect the message from the messenger.

One of the logical fallacies is what's called the ad hominem fallacy, which is this when I get a message I don't like, I just attack the messenger.

Well, it can't be true it came from her.

It can't be true it came from him.

It can't be true it came from one of those people, from that group, from them.

Okay, listen, God can get a word to you, he can wedge it in any way he wants with anyone he wants, however he wants.

Have the discipline and frankly the integrity to say, I want God to speak truth to me, even if it comes from someone I don't want to hear it from.

And that might be someone from outside of my world, or it might be somebody so far inside uh connected to I really didn't want to hear that from you.

Either way, whatever message comes, whether you like how it's said or not, whether it's said eloquently or they say it in a way that's really clunky or or or not good, receive, look at the message and evaluate the message for the content of the message, regardless of the style or even the messenger and who they are.

Um evaluate it that way, and God will deliver truth to you.

And when you receive that truth, the truth will set you free.

So here's how I'm gonna in a moment we'll kind of take a moment to reflect it in, but I want to let you know where we're going in the series.

Um the six major themes of the 12 minor prophets.

I'm just gonna tell you what we're gonna talk about, and that way you can decide if you want to come and listen.

Um the first is idolatry, the second is religious hypocrisy, the third is predatory economics, the fourth is bad leadership, the fifth is false security, and the sixth is shallow worship.

Let's take a moment and quiet our hearts and let's allow the Lord to search us, and let's start with those that are feeling a need to deliver truth, to give a prophetic message, to speak forth.

Won't you take a moment to allow the Lord to shine a light on your motives?

Is your motive redemptive or destructive?

To allow the Lord to shine a light on your tone.

It could be that your messages have been consistently being shut down and you just think it's because people don't want to hear the truth, but it might be that your tone is really off and it's unnecessarily off-putting.

And that if you took some more time to think about your words and to measure what you're saying, that it would be a lot more effective, and maybe you need to tweak your tone.

The third is if if you're willing to tell the truth about them, are you willing to tell the truth about us and to hear the truth about you?

Maybe you've been spending all your time with the binoculars, and it's been a while since you picked up the mirror.

And maybe God wants to show you that, or maybe you've been spending all the time in the mirror, there's something in the binoculars.

Allow the Lord to show that to you.

And then if you're the receiver today, maybe God's been trying to get a message to you that you have allowed the messenger to distract you from the message.

Maybe God today wants to take your eyes off of who it's from and to focus on who it's for.

What is God saying to you?

Evaluate that and allow the Lord to give you some direction as to whether it's from Him or not.

Let's take a moment and pray.

Lord, we come to you in the name of Jesus.

We come humbly before you, knowing that from time to time, Lord, there will be messages that we don't want to hear, but that we really need to hear.

And sometimes those messages will come from messengers that we'd rather not hear it from.

But Lord, I pray that you would set us up for success in hearing your word, wherever it may come from.

Lord, I have a hunch that all of us here at the sound of my voice have probably something you've been trying to show us or that you are trying to show us, and help us to be able to uh digest the things we talked about today so that we don't get defensive and push something away that actually we need to receive.

And of course, there's something probably right now, but Lord, if you could help us to mature and grow in this way, it would set us up formationally for success for the rest of our lives because this isn't the last message we're gonna need.

So, Lord, help us to grow in wisdom, help us to be perceptive.

We thank you and praise you in Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.