2 Kings 15: Evil in the Sight of God SEPTEMBER 9, 2026 Pastor Steven L. Anderson

to pray, amen.

Men, so 2 Kings chapter number 15,

we have just a lot of different kings listed

and their reigns.

And what you really see is just two different kings of Judah,

both of whom are getting a passing score of they did that,

which was right in the side of the Lord,

but it's kind of like a C minus or maybe even like a D minus.

And that's what we've seen in Judah

for the last several generations

is just these kings that are kind of just half in, half out.

They're never really serving the Lord with all their heart.

They're never really totally doing right.

And as we saw with the last few kings,

ultimately that kind of a person ends up

crashing and burning spiritually.

That's what happened to the last two kings

that we looked at.

Well, the same thing happens with Uzziah in this chapter.

Now in this chapter it calls him Azariah,

but most of the time we think of him as Uzziah

because in second chronicles,

his name is pronounced to Uzziah.

Over here it's Azariah, same person, okay?

And so we see kind of that same pattern again

of the guy who's not very zealous for the Lord,

not all the way in, not loving the Lord is God

with all his heart, mind, soul, and strength.

He screws up and gets messed up later in life.

So that's the beginning of the chapter.

Then the chapter ends on his son Jotham,

which is again, like for the fourth generation in a row,

again, just a lukewarm, watered down,

barely C minus kind of a king of Judah.

And then in between in this chapter,

you have just all the kings of Israel listed,

many of whom are only reigning for a very short time.

They're getting assassinated, they're all wicked,

every one of them is bad.

And so it's kind of a negative chapter in that sense,

but you know, it really just reflects

the reality of the world that we live in.

It kind of makes me think of my sermon on Sunday night

about how man is not basically good

and that we have a sinful nature

and that all the way back in Genesis,

all the way to the end of the Bible,

we see that human beings are prone to sin unfortunately.

So you have all the bad kings of Israel listed

and then at the very end of the chapter,

it talks about how Jotham died

and Ahaz's son reigned instead.

So we've had four generations or whatever

of just kind of C minus guys who ultimately went bad.

Now we're gonna get to Ahaz,

who's just a fully totally wicked guy

who's just gonna take Judah

all the way off the cliff spiritually.

So as I said, it's a pretty negative chapter.

We don't have time to go into all of these different reigns

because there are just so many people involved.

So we're just gonna kind of hit the highlights tonight.

But it says in chapter 15 verse one,

in the 27th year of Jeroboam,

King of Israel began Azariah.

And again, this is also known as Uzziah.

Son of Amaziah, King of Judah to reign.

16 years old was he when he began to reign.

And he reigned two and 50 years in Jerusalem.

And his mother's name was Jekaliah of Jerusalem.

And he did that, which was right in the sight of the Lord

according to all that his father Amaziah had done.

So basically saying to the degree

that Amaziah was right with God,

he was kind of the same way, like father, like son.

And it says that he did not remove the high places.

Verse four, the people sacrificed and burnt incense

still on the high places.

Now watch verse five.

It says, the Lord smote the king

so that he was a leper unto the day of his death

and dwelt in a several house.

And the word several here,

this isn't the normal word that we use several.

This is several as in like severed, like separate.

He had to live in a separate dwelling

because he has this contagious skin disease.

And of course, leprosy is kind of a theme in the Bible,

isn't it?

Jesus is constantly healing lepers.

In the Old Testament, you have famous stories

about lepers like Naaman and so forth.

And so this is kind of just the quintessential bad disease

that you get in the Bible.

It's just this skin flesh eating kind of disease

and it ultimately kills you and it's contagious.

So it ends up separating you from your fellow man

and you have to go live in the several house, et cetera.

And by the way, you know,

how did I know that that's what several meant?

Well, you know what?

Because it doesn't really take a rocket scientist,

even though we never in our lives in 2026 America

have ever heard anyone use the word several in that way.

You know, when you read in the context,

it's just like he had to go dwell in a blank house

because he had leprosy.

You're kind of thinking like, okay, he's being quarantined.

And then you think, okay, several, several.

Okay, yeah.

You know, people act like the King James

is just way too hard

and that it's just gonna just trip everybody up

and nobody can figure it out.

But the reality is that if you understand

95% of the text on the page,

your context clues are gonna fill in a lot of the rest.

You can always reach for the dictionary and look up

and it's gonna have these archaic meanings of words.

And so yeah, occasionally you're gonna run into a word

in the King James that is truly archaic.

It's a lot more rare than people make it out to be.

This is one of those times.

And here's the other thing is that,

let's say somebody runs into this word

and they get confused and can't figure it out.

It's probably not gonna affect the price of tea in China.

Meanwhile, the modern versions are over here,

attacking the virgin birth,

attacking the deity of Christ,

attacking the Trinity, removing the blood,

removing 16 whole verses in the New Testament.

The problems with the modern versions

tend to be serious problems that affect doctrine.

You know, you have verses that are teaching

works-based salvation or, you know,

attacking the Trinity or something.

Whereas the problems with the King James

are really just these minor issues

that don't really affect our faith and practice at all.

And again, reach for the dictionary.

Or, you know, look it up.

It's not that hard.

But like I said, I didn't have to look this word up

because again, you know, if you just speak English,

you can usually just kind of figure it out

from the context what these words are.

So it says here that he was smitten with leprosy.

This is obviously a severe punishment.

This is bad.

And if you remember, this is the same thing

that happened earlier in the Book of Second Kings

to Gehazi.

You know, Gehazi was the guy who basically lied

and cheated and stole and God smote him with leprosy

as a punishment.

So this is severe punishment from God.

And it says he had to go dwell on a several house.

So Jotham the King's son was over the house

judging the people of the land.

So even though he reigned for 52 years,

a lot of that time Jotham is kind of doing

the hands-on boots on the ground leadership

while he's just kind of ruling from behind the curtain

over at the leper colony in his own separate house.

And so it says in verse number six,

the rest of the acts of Azariah, also known as Uzziah,

and all that he did, are they not written

in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah?

Now, here's the thing.

If we go over to Chronicles,

and we're gonna do that right now,

let's flip over there, Second Chronicles.

And we're gonna look at like verse 15

and onward perhaps.

But if we go over to Second Chronicles,

2 Chronicles 26 · chapter mention

chapter 26, we can actually get much more of the story

and we find out exactly why did God smite Uzziah with leprosy.

But the first thing I wanna point out

is that when you're reading the Book of the Kings,

it'll constantly say like,

hey, and the rest of his acts

are they not written in the Book of Chronicles?

And then when you're reading Chronicles,

it'll be like, hey, and other things that he did

are they not written in the Book of the Kings?

So these books are constantly referring you

to each other, to look at each other.

And really, I think that the reason why

God has that in there so many times

and they just left that in there so many times repetitively

is to teach us something

about how we should study the Bible,

comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

And so it's not a bad practice

to compare scripture with scripture.

Now, obviously if we read the Book of Matthew,

it's also good to just sit down

and read the Gospel of Matthew

without getting on rabbit trails

and going and comparing and looking things up.

It's good to sometimes just read the Book of Matthew

and just get what Matthew is saying to you, right?

Get what Mark is saying to you,

get what Luke is saying to you

and read the Bible and just read it from cover to cover.

That's a good way to read the Bible, okay?

But then there's also another way on top of that

to do some study of the Bible

where you compare scripture with scripture

and where you run into something in Matthew

and you say, oh, wait a minute,

I can go over to Luke and get another angle on that.

I can get another angle from Mark.

That is a legitimate way to read the Bible as well

when you're comparing these things.

So the same thing, you know,

I could just preach through the Book of Second Kings

and just never even look at Chronicles

and just get the message that Second Kings is giving us

and that would be a legitimate way

to preach through the Book of Second Kings.

But another legitimate way

would be to constantly take the rabbit trails

over to Chronicles and to go to places like Isaiah

and Jeremiah and to get other angles on the same story.

This is what the Bible is showing us

that that's a good way to study the Bible.

It's a good way to teach the Bible.

It's a good way to preach the Bible.

And so either way is legitimate.

You can either just look at the book by itself

and get the message right there

or you can compare scripture with scripture

and we ultimately need to be doing both.

But I would recommend that you

in your personal Bible reading time,

I think you're gonna get more out of your Bible reading

the less rabbit trails you follow.

You know, because I've known some people,

they get like two verses into their Bible reading

and then they're Googling stuff.

They're asking AI about stuff.

They're jumping all over.

They're following every little rabbit trail

in the column, all the different verses.

And the problem is that they don't end up

getting to the destination.

They constantly get hijacked.

Like they can't even get through the book of Genesis

because every couple of verses, they're getting hijacked.

So again, I think a good balance is that sometimes

it's good to just read the Bible and read it

and read it in order and just cruise through it

and not get hijacked.

But then other times, you know,

when you do want to kind of dig deep and do a deep dive,

then that's where comparing scripture

with scripture comes in handy.

And you know, the Bible also says this

in 1 Corinthians chapter two.

It says, which things also we speak,

not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth,

but which the holy ghost teacheth,

comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

But the natural man received not the things

of the spirit of God, for their foolishness unto him,

neither can he know them

because they are spiritually discerned.

And so what the Bible is saying there is

that when we teach and preach the Bible,

we want to use biblical terminology,

not words of man's wisdom.

Here's what he's saying.

Not a bunch of theological man-made jargon, right?

And so let me tell you this,

a lot of people spend way too much time

reading about the Bible instead of reading the Bible.

There's a huge difference between reading the Bible

and reading about the Bible.

And so when you're just constantly reading commentaries

and devotional booklets that tell you about the Bible,

a lot of those are just giving you a lot of philosophies

and wisdom of man and traditions of man.

So it's good rather to speak with the words

that the holy ghost teaches, meaning biblical terminology,

not getting bogged down in philosophy and vain tradition

and also just comparing spiritual with spiritual,

comparing second kings with second chronicles.

Not necessarily second kings with this theologian,

second chronicles with this scholar, with this philosopher.

We need to a lot of times just leave that stuff out

and just stick to the Bible itself.

And so let's do that.

We're gonna compare right now.

We're gonna jump over to Chronicles

and get more detail on the story.

It says in verse number 15 of chapter 26,

it says he made in Jerusalem engines

invented by cunning men to be on the towers

and upon the bulwarks to shoot arrows

and great stones with all.

So this is kind of primitive technology to us,

but at the time it was pretty groundbreaking,

innovative stuff, crossbows and giant harpoon guns

and catapults and trebuchets and whatever, right?

And so this stuff at the time was pretty cutting edge

and it says his name spread far abroad

and he was marvelously helped till he was strong,

but when he was strong his heart

was lifted up to his destruction.

And so what we see in this chapter,

and we're not gonna read the whole chapter

for sake of time, but before this,

Uzziah is just having all kinds of successes.

I mean, he's having agricultural successes,

military successes and technological successes.

I mean, this guy is on the cutting edge,

he's thriving, he's doing great

and the Bible says that his name spread far abroad.

I mean, he's also not just got power,

but he's got fame.

People are hearing about it.

People are hearing about what an awesome king he is.

I mean, he reigned for 52 years

and he builds up a great reputation

and the Bible says that it's because of God.

You know, God is the one who did this for him.

It's not just because he was just such an awesome guy.

The Bible says that he was marvelously helped.

That's why he got famous.

That's why he had all the successes

to God be the glory, great things he had done.

And you know, the Bible says every good gift

and every perfect gift is from above

and coming down from the father of lights

with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.

And so we see here that all of the credit

really ultimately goes to God.

God is marvelously helping Uzziah,

but then once he gets strong,

instead of thinking to himself, wow, this is great.

God's blessing me and I don't even deserve this

and I just need to stay humble

and realize that God gives and God takes away.

Blessed be the name of the Lord.

So I better mine my P's and my Q's

so I don't lose everything.

Because look, it doesn't matter how famous you are,

it doesn't matter how successful you are,

how much money you have, how healthy you are,

what kind of achievements and technology you have.

You know, at the end of the day,

God can always take you down.

So you should always serve the Lord with fear

and rejoice with trembling

and not just think that you're untouchable

or invincible or yeah, I don't need God anymore.

No, we always need God.

Every single day, we need God to be on our side.

We need God to be blessing us

or we are in peril, my friends,

because any of us could crash and burn at any moment

if the Lord's not on our side.

So we don't want to get all puffed up thinking like,

oh, I'm untouchable, I'm invincible, I'm the greatest.

You know, and there's just nothing

that anybody can do to take me down

because look, this guy financially is doing great,

militarily, everything else, but here's the thing,

he got struck with a physical disease.

I mean, this is an incurable disease.

Any one of us could be struck

with an incurable disease at any time

because God is the one who holds our very breath

in his hands.

So we don't want to get puffed up.

We always want to thank God and glorify God

for all the successes in our lives

and not just take the credit for ourselves,

like it's somehow worse special or something.

You know, no, the only thing that makes you special

if you're saved and if you're dedicated to serving God,

yeah, that does make you special

because unfortunately a lot of people

aren't that dedicated.

So if you're saved and dedicated,

but at the end of the day, him the gloryeth,

let him glory in the Lord.

And realize that as soon as you stop

doing right in the side of the Lord,

the blessings are often gonna stop flowing at that point.

And so what we see here is that

when he was strong, his heart was lifted up.

I mean, just that phrase alone says so much.

When he was strong, his heart was lifted up.

Look, I don't want God to have to keep me weak

and keep me poor and keep me lame

just so that I don't get puffed up.

You know, we want God to be able to bless us

with a little bit of success,

little bit of career success,

little bit of family success,

little bit of money in the bank or whatever

without it just going to our heads

and making us crazy.

But if you're the kind of person

who's gonna get prideful and arrogant,

then God's just gonna have to keep you lean all the time.

And obviously we don't want that.

We want God to be able to bless us.

We want to be strong without it going to our head

because when your heart's lifted up,

guess what, it's to your destruction

because pride goes before destruction

and a haughty spirit before the fall.

And so his heart was lifted up to his destruction

for he transgressed against the Lord his God

and went into the temple of the Lord

to burn incense upon the altar of incense.

This might not really seem like a big deal

to think like, well, so what?

Uzziah, he gets puffed up so he decides

to just go light up some incense in the house of God.

What's the big deal?

What you have to understand is that he is

the king of the nation.

He is the political authority, if you will.

He's the secular authority, if you will.

And what he's doing is he's getting out of his lane

and invading the office of someone else.

It's kind of like a separation of church and state here

that basically the house of God

is supposed to be run by the high priest

and the priests are the ones who are supposed

to be doing the stuff in the house of God,

not the political leader.

The king isn't supposed to go in there

and take over the job of the high priest.

But again, because he's puffed up,

he's just like, well, I want to have it all.

It's not enough for me to be the king.

I also want to be the religious head

as well as the political head.

And of course, that's not right.

There's supposed to be that separation there.

And so it says that he went into the temple of the Lord

to burn incense upon the altar of incense.

And as a rye of the priests went in after him

and with him forescore priests of the Lord

that were valiant men.

So he takes 80 priests to back them up

and he picks guys that are actually

not just religious guys, but these guys

are valiant men, meaning that these guys know how to fight

and that they're actually going to be able

to put the herd on if they need to.

And so he goes in there with 80 guys

and they withstood Uzziah the king

and said to him, it appertaineth not unto thee, Uzziah,

to burn incense unto the Lord,

but to the priests, the sons of Aaron

that are consecrated to burn incense,

go out of the sanctuary for thou hast trespassed,

neither shall it be for thine honor from the Lord God.

He's saying, look, the whole point of worshiping God

is so that God will bless you.

The whole point, if you're gonna burn incense

in the temple to God, it's because you're trying to please God.

You want it to be a sweet smelling savor in his nostrils,

but if God specifically told you not to do it,

then why would you do it?

The whole point is to please God.

Well, guess what?

Disobedience doesn't please God.

The Bible says that to obey is better than sacrifice.

And obedience is what God's looking for.

For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft

and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.

So what good is it to do some spiritual activity,

to do some missions trip or ministry or whatever,

if it's against God's will,

if it's in disobedience to the Lord,

it's like, how's God gonna bless that?

And you say, well, how do I know

if I'm disobeying the Lord?

Because you're disobeying the Bible.

You know, if you're stealing, committing adultery,

bearing false witness, coveting,

those are things that God forbids.

That's how you know you're not right with God

when you're doing that kind of stuff.

And so what does the Bible say?

It says in verse 19, then Uzziah was wrong.

So, you know, this is Uzziah's chance to get right.

You know, as our eyes confronting him,

he's got 80 rough necks behind him

and he's telling him why he shouldn't be doing it.

He's explaining it to him.

Look, this doesn't make any sense.

Stay in your lane, don't come and invade God's house.

And instead of actually just saying, you know what?

I don't know what I was thinking.

This is stupid.

I'm sorry.

Instead, Uzziah just gets mad, right?

And you know, this is how people often react

to being corrected.

They could either get mad or they get right.

But remember, the reason why he gets mad

is because he's puffed up.

He feels invincible.

He's had so much success

that his heart is lifted up

when he's strong and to his destruction.

So he gets mad and he had a sensor in his hand

to burn incense and while he was wrothed with the priest,

the leprosy even rose up in his forehead

before the priest in the house of the Lord

from beside the incense altar.

So it's kind of like symbolic.

Like you can see the anger that Uzziah has

and the anger is like being converted

into actual disease on his face.

Think about this.

So, you know, when somebody gets mad,

their face will turn colors, right?

Like somebody will get really mad

and they'll turn like bright red

and get angry and whatever.

And you know, and so it's like, you know,

instead of turning bright red with anger,

it's like the anger is just translating

directly into disease.

He's just like, and just breaking out

in this horrible, deadly, you know, contagious disease.

And so the priests are looking at this

and they're freaked out.

It says in verse 20,

and as a riot, the chief priests and all the priests

looked upon him and be told he was leprous in his forehead

and they thrust him out from thence.

Yay, himself hasted also to go out.

So like at this point, he's not trying to stay anymore

because they go to shove him out of the house of God

because he's defiling it.

Because remember the whole point of the house of God

being, you know, a sanctuary, which means holy place,

is they weren't supposed to bring in that

which is unclean and defiling.

And obviously leprosy is super unclean, super defiling.

So they're like, we gotta get this guy out of here.

But then he's like, hey guys, I'm leaving.

Trust me, because he knows what's happening

to his forehead also.

So he realizes, what have I done?

I screwed up, but at that point it's too late.

And so, you know, the smart thing to do

is just listen to the word of God

when the Bible's warning you.

Don't wait to get punished by God.

You have to wait until you get punished

and then now I wanna get right with God

because sometimes the damage from the punishment

is permanent.

So it's a lot smarter to get right with God

before the punishment comes.

When the verbal correction comes,

that's when you wanna get right with God,

not when the physical punishment comes.

Now obviously when the physical punishment comes,

yeah, you better get out of there

because otherwise, you know,

God might just kill you on the spot here, Uzziah.

So Uzziah is like, yeah, I gotta get out of here

before something even worse happens to me,

but it's already bad.

He's gonna spend the rest of his life

quarantined the rest of his life.

He's on lockdown because of this stupid thing that he did.

And so, you know, the Bible talks about how

a rebuke, a reproof enters more into a wise man

than a hundred stripes into a fool, right?

You could beat a fool a hundred times

and they don't get the message,

whereas you could just tell the wise man verbally,

hey, this is why you shouldn't do that.

Here's what the Bible says, oh, okay, yeah, okay,

let me get that fixed right away.

And you know, at the end of the day,

people need to care what the Bible says today in 2026.

And you know, the most frustrating thing for me

is just Christians not caring about

the absolute truth of the Bible

and everything's just based on feelings.

Just all based on feelings.

And if you think about it,

if you judge this story by your feelings,

it's just like, oh, what's the matter?

He's just trying to burn a little incense under the Lord.

He's just worshiping God the best he knows how.

I mean, his heart's in the right place.

I mean, he's just trying to worship the Lord.

Is he doing something bad?

I mean, hey, we should just be happy

that he's just worshiping the Lord at all.

We should just be happy that he's even in church.

But no, because there's some absolute lines

that you just don't cross, right?

God has all these lines in the sand.

Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery,

thou shalt not steal,

thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,

thou shalt not covet.

That's not make unto thee any graven image.

Oh, but you don't understand this little carved

plastic Jesus just makes me feel so close to the Lord.

Oh, I just love this little bobble head Mary

on my dash or whatever.

Look, my friend.

Just don't do it.

There's certain lines that you just don't cross.

We need some moral absolutes in this country

instead of just this fluid, emotion-based,

whatever kind of seems right in your own eyes

and whatever.

That's the problem with Christianity today

is that we just have lost our thus sayeth the Lord

and just, you know, this is what it is.

Don't cross that line.

And so what he did here is he's crossing a line.

Now you could also read this story

and think about it metaphorically

and think about the fact that this is kind of like

the government invading the church house in a sense.

Now here's the thing.

Throughout history, you've had state-run churches.

They're all bad.

They're all bad.

Which one's good?

The Church of England?

You know, the state Roman Catholic Church in Germany,

the state evangelical Lutheran Church in Germany.

Are those great churches?

Are those great success stories spiritually?

No.

Okay?

And you know, the Armenians,

they brag about being the first Christian country

because they're basically the first ones

with a state church.

I wanna say it was like 309 AD.

It was like 306, 309, somewhere in there.

You know, the Armenian Apostolic Church

which is a state-run church.

And of course, it's an apostate church.

It's idolatry.

You know, it's all the kind of false doctrine

that you're gonna find in like a Greek Orthodox Church

or a Roman Catholic Church or something like that.

You know, and then just a couple years later,

they're just like, bro, we were first,

we did it before, it was cool.

Because a couple years later in 313 AD,

of course, you have Constantine

making Christianity, quote, unquote,

the official religion of the Roman Empire.

And then you end up with the Roman Catholic Church.

And you know, at the end of the day,

these are all ending up being apostate.

Whether it's a state Lutheran church over here.

You know, when I was soul-winning in Norway in 2008,

pretty much every single door we knocked,

you'd ask them if they are a Christian

and they said, they didn't say, yeah, I'm a Christian.

I believe in Jesus Christ.

You know, I'm saved by the blood of the crucified one.

No, no, you knocked the door

and this is what they say.

Hey, are you a Christian?

Are you saved?

Do you know for sure you're gonna have it?

This is the answer you get.

Yeah, I till her, I start here again.

You know, everybody knows what that means, right?

They're just basically saying,

I belong to the state church.

That's pretty much what everybody,

it's like, are you a Christian?

Well, I belong to the state church.

I belong in the state church.

And I don't know what the statistics are now,

but at the time in Norway,

which country of about,

at the time maybe 4.7, 4.8 million people

to put it in perspective,

that's how many people live in Maricopa County.

So, you know, in this big, giant,

long country of Norway,

it's basically less than the population

of Maricopa County.

And basically it was like 94% Lutheran at the time,

I believe, like 94% of people belong to the state church.

And yeah, we went door to door,

you know, for four days, like pretty much all day.

And yeah, that statistics accurate.

Cause that's what everybody was telling us all day long.

But you know what, do they know they're going to heaven?

Well, this is what they say.

They say, yeah, I know I'm going to heaven.

Why are you going to heaven?

Oh, I'm going to heaven cause I,

and it's such a weird answer,

but I got this answer so many times.

They'd say, well, I'm going to heaven

because I used to believe in Christianity when I was a kid.

So they said that basically like,

they got baptized as a baby.

They're like, I got baptized as a baby.

And when I was a kid, I went through the process.

And so like, I think that my childhood faith

is going to save me.

But here's the thing, people who,

and look, obviously getting saved as a little kid

is great believing on the Lord Jesus Christ

as a little kid is great.

And if you truly understand the gospel

and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ as a little kid,

you are saved for life.

Of course, cause you can never lose your salvation

cause God gives us eternal life

and we shall never perish.

Neither shall any man pluck us out of his hand

and we, you know, nothing could separate us

from the love of God,

which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

But the thing is that, you know,

their, you know, childhood faith though

is in just a bunch of

pagan mumbo jumbo.

They don't actually get the gospel, you know.

I got saved when I was six years old,

but when I was six years old,

I understood that I was a sinner.

I understood that there's a heaven and hell

and I believed that Jesus Christ

is the only way to be saved.

And that if I put all my faith and trust in him,

I'll be saved, not by works, not by earning it.

It's just by putting my faith and trust in Christ.

And that if I believe in him, I'll be saved forever.

Now look, if that's what they believe

when they were little kids, they're gonna be saved.

But they're flat out telling you right now

that they don't believe in it.

They say, well, I don't believe in it now, but I used to.

Well, here's the, anybody who says

I don't believe in it now,

but I used to never really believed in it.

Because, you know, the Bible says they went out from us,

but they were not all of us.

For if they had been of us,

they would no doubt have continued with us,

but they went out, that they might be made manifest,

that they were not all of us.

Once you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ

as your Savior, whether you're six or 16 or 106,

the Holy Spirit moves in

and he will never leave you nor forsake you.

And so you have Christ in your heart,

Christ in you, the hope of glory, the Bible says,

that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.

So when you truly believe in the Lord Jesus Christ,

you have Christ living inside of you.

You have the Holy Spirit in dwelling you.

You also have your new man that was quickened,

not the old Stephen Anderson, but the new Stephen Anderson,

the inward man, these things are permanent.

So you don't just later just go,

nah, I don't believe in it.

People who later say, nah, I don't believe in it,

were never saved in the first place.

Anybody who quote unquote stops believing,

it's because they never truly believed in the first place.

Because, you know, and I kind of use this illustration

to people sometimes is like when you're a kid,

you might be told that Santa Claus is real.

So you believe in Santa Claus, right?

And then at some point you realize

that Santa Claus isn't real.

You learn that at some, now my mom never taught us

Santa Claus because she said,

I want to get credit for these presents that I'm buying.

I don't want Santa taking the credit.

I bought this stuff, you know,

I want you to know it's coming from me.

So the thing is, we never learned about Santa Claus,

but here's the thing, once you get to a certain age,

you'll learn that Santa Claus isn't real.

But let me ask you this,

do you think that anybody later in life

goes back to believing in Santa Claus?

And goes like, nah, you know what,

I'm starting to think Santa Claus really was real.

No, it's kind of a one way valve, isn't it?

You go from believing something that's totally wrong,

that makes no sense,

that's just a goofy, stupid thing to believe, right?

And then you actually get the truth.

And here's the thing, have you ever heard people say this?

You can't unsee this, you can't unhear this.

Once you know the truth, you can't unknow it.

You can't unsee it, you can't unhear it.

And here's the thing, the Bible calls being saved

being enlightened.

Move over Buddha, right?

Because the real enlightenment

is believing on the Lord Jesus Christ.

You don't have to sit under the lotus tree,

in some kind of a pretzel position

in order to get enlightenment, my friend.

You just believe on the Lord Jesus Christ,

and you know what, you get illuminated.

You get enlightened.

And you understand the truth.

It's like, I once was lost, but now I'm found.

I was blind, but now I see.

So here's the thing, when you get saved,

it's like the scales fall off your eyes.

You go from blindness to sight,

you're saved, the Holy Spirit lives inside you,

the new creature.

You don't just go back to believing in Santa Claus.

You don't go back to, oh, I changed my mind,

I don't believe in Jesus.

It's like, anybody who does that was not truly enlightened.

The scales did not fall off.

They were not truly illuminated.

They did not actually go from blindness to sight.

They have not been passed from death into life.

And the evidence is that they did not continue

in the faith.

And again, I'm not talking about works,

because you could get saved and believe in Christ

and do no works and you're still saved.

That just means that you're not walking in the spirit.

It means you're not putting on the new man.

It means you're walking in the flesh,

so you're gonna continue to fulfill the lust of flesh.

And look, there are people that we know

that got saved and they spent a decade or more

after getting saved, living a very sinful life.

Nothing outwardly changed.

If you looked at them from the outside,

you would say this person didn't change at all,

yet they were saved.

And let me tell you something.

On the inside, there was a dramatic change

of being passed from death to life.

Dead spirit is quickened.

Christ is dwelling within.

But here's the thing that, unfortunately,

that change on the inside did not manifest on the outside

because they didn't get any discipleship or growth

or anything like that.

You take that same person.

And if you talk to that person, here's what they'll tell you.

Oh, well, that whole time I knew I was saved,

I knew the gospel, I knew I believed in Jesus,

and I knew that the way I was living was wrong.

And I felt bad about the way I was living.

They're not just going through life with no conscience.

If you're going through life and just live

in a super simple life and have no conscience about it,

that's another sign that you're not saved.

So they're going through life

and doing all the same things that they used to do,

but they feel bad about it.

They know they're saved.

They believe in Christ.

They're just not living it, unfortunately.

Because guess what?

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

And then that same person,

after being in that kind of condition for 10 years

or more sometimes, will all of a sudden

get plugged into a church like Faithful Word?

And they get plugged into a church like Faithful Word?

And all of a sudden it's like, boom,

they're getting baptized.

Boom, they're going soul-winning.

They're listening to preaching.

They're reading the Bible every day.

They're praying.

And then they just start growing like crazy.

Now, people who misunderstand spiritual things

and the gospel would look at that and say,

well, that's when they really got saved.

It's like, no, no, they got saved a long time ago.

It's just that's when they start putting on the new man.

That's when they start walking in the spirit.

That's when they start growing in grace

and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

You know, and of course there's the cliche about,

you know, there's two wolves inside of you or whatever,

you know, and whichever one you feed the most

is going to be in charge of some Indian, whatever.

But really, at the end of the day,

not your kind of Indian, other kind.

But talking feather, not dot.

But the thing about this is that when it comes to

the spirit and the flesh,

the new man and the old man, it's true.

If you feed the new man,

the new man's gonna take over.

And if you're feeding the old man,

the old man's gonna be in charge.

So, you know, listen, Kimo Sabe,

you know, throw the meat to the white dog,

not the black dog.

You know, whatever.

So, and I'm just teasing, we love Indians at our church.

And so, we always have.

From the beginning, we've been getting them saved

and loving going up there and spending time with them

and preaching to them.

At the end of the day, you know,

it's which one do you feed the most

is gonna be the one that takes over.

And so, you know, yeah, you could have someone

who is truly saved on their way to heaven,

just as much as I'm on my way to heaven,

just as much as you're on your way,

still living terribly if they're walking in the flesh.

But, something dramatic has changed on the inside.

We want that change to work its way out.

We want to work out our salvation

and we want it to manifest publicly

so that we can show other people our faith by our works.

Okay, but at the end of the day, unfortunately,

most saved Christians are not living for God.

And most of them never will get serious

about their walk with God.

Most of them, at best, are gonna be these like C-guys

that we're reading about in 2 Kings 15.

That is just the reality of the world that we live in.

And it's like the rare exception

when you get these people that really love the Lord,

their God, with all their heart, mind, soul,

and strength in the Bible, the Davids of this world.

You know, not that they're perfect,

but at least they love the Lord 100%

and they're zealous for God, okay?

So that's the thing, these people in Norway

that are part of the state church,

they're basically just growing up

with a bunch of Bible stories

and a bunch of false doctrine

and whatever, they don't actually get the gospel

explained to them because newsflash,

the Lutheran church, despite their slogans,

does not teach that salvation is by faith alone

and they do not teach the eternal security of the believer.

They believe you can lose your salvation

and just, if you don't believe me,

go out soul winning, knock the doors of Lutherans

and how many of them are gonna give Christ

the glory for their salvation

and tell you it's all by faith?

Now, they're trusting works, which is ironic

because Martin Luther is the one

that goes down in the history books

for talking about how salvation is all by faith

and yet it's amazing how his followers

don't believe that, unfortunately.

And so that's what it's like with these state churches,

that's just one example, Norwegian state church,

but I guarantee you that if we talked about

the state church in Sweden,

I mean, that's the ones where you just see

news stories probably, but I don't know,

they're probably like a Muslim, lesbian, transgender.

I don't know what else to tag onto that list,

but anyway, you know, there was just wild things

going on in the Church of England.

I mean, Church of England is super apostate,

super liberal, super messed up, okay?

Why? Because we don't need a state church.

What we actually need is we need the house of God

to be run by people who are all in spiritually.

So basically, here's who you want running the church.

You want a guy running the church

who eats, breathes, and sleeps the Word of God.

This is what he does, this is what he's into, right?

You want the pastor, you want the deacons,

you want any leaders in the church to be people

who are walking with God every day.

They eat, breathe, and sleep the Word of God.

Christ is our life, okay?

The rest is just details.

That is who you want running the church.

You don't want some secular guy

who's running the government all day

to come in and start fiddling around with the church,

do you?

No, because the person who's running the church

needs to be 100% all in, this is their life, okay?

That's what you want.

So you don't want somebody who is just kind of casual

and it's a side gig.

No, look, I'm not saying that they don't have

a secular job, but here's the thing.

I guarantee you that my pastor friends

who have secular jobs though,

they're eating, breathing,

and sleeping the Word of God all the time.

Like even while they're at work,

they're still meditating on the things of God.

Even their secular job,

they're doing it as unto the Lord.

I did that for many years.

I worked and was bivocational for many years,

for the first, what, I don't know,

seven years of pastoring this church or something.

I actually worked a secular job.

That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about a guy where this is his life

and he's just loving the Word of God,

consuming it in mass amounts, really into it.

Not a guy who's like, well,

my main gig is government over here.

This is my life's work,

but here, let me just go in

and just light up some incense on the side.

Here, let me just tell you how to run the church.

I mean, do you want the Arizona state government

telling us anything about how we do our church here?

Like, do you want them coming in here

and talking to me about my preaching

and setting the policies for soul winning

and stuff like that?

And no, of course not.

Obviously, the government is involved

in like building codes or something like that.

Like, okay, at the end of the day,

that's not necessarily a problem.

I'm not saying that,

obviously I don't like big government.

I don't like dealing with regulations and stuff,

but at the end of the day, that's not like,

oh, the government's taking over our church

because they made us put up a handicap sign or something.

What I'm talking about

is when the government is telling you the doctrine

and they're telling you what you can and can't preach

and when they're telling you

what you can and can't do with regard to evangelism.

And for many years, there was a law in Tempe

that we couldn't go soul winning without a permit.

I mean, what is that?

Like, oh, you can't go soul winning without a permit.

And guess what we did?

We just kept going soul winning

and we're not gonna get a permit.

We don't need permission from the city of Tempe

to go soul winning to obey the Bible

because number one, we're commanded by God

and number two, even legally,

we're protected by the First Amendment.

We've obviously done a lot of soul winning

up on the Indian reservations

and the big one is the Navajo reservation.

Well, you know, many, many years ago,

we were doing tons of soul winning on the Navajo reservation.

Of course, we were just there last weekend,

but I mean, many years ago, we were up there

like every weekend and we were knocking thousands of doors

and handing out all of our Navajo music CDs

that we recorded with the gospel on them

and just going crazy up there,

giving out DVDs of after the tribulation,

marching design, and we really made a big impact

up there to the point where the Navajo tribal government

literally got together and they literally passed a law

against us coming up there and doing that.

You know, and we've never even thought about it.

Like mostly, who would say,

this is the first time I've ever heard that?

I don't remember ever hearing that,

that there was a law passed by the Navajo tribal government.

Yep, so look at all the hands.

These are people that don't care.

Don't care, we don't know, we don't care.

Who already knew that?

Who already knew that the Navajo government did that?

Yeah, virtually no one.

Nobody cares, because you know what?

I didn't get up and say like,

hey guys, we gotta stop doing it.

They passed, you know, just because the Indians got together

and made some law that we can't go up there

and preach the gospel to them,

doesn't mean we're gonna stop.

We didn't miss a beat, we don't care.

Come stop us.

You know, because hey, number one,

we obey God rather than men.

Number one, number two,

I don't care if your reservation is sovereign land,

you're in the United States of America.

You can't make a law against the exercise of religion

in America.

I mean, I could just own my property

and just say, well, on my property, murders allowed,

and you know, blood sacrifices are allowed.

It's like, what, no.

You're in America, you know,

the bill of rights applies everywhere, friend.

And so yeah, they passed some law,

it was in the news, how they passed some law,

because you know, people are going up there

and aggressively evangelizing

and they defended them about their traditional religion

because we're telling them

that there's none other name under heaven

than the name of Jesus of Nazareth,

whereby we must be saved.

And so you know, they're like, no, no,

we gotta pray to the great spirit

and great grandfather and peyote religion and whatever.

And that's literally, their religion up there

is literally called peyote religion.

Now, the official name of it is called, quote,

native American church.

And it's a religion that started in the 1890s

in Oklahoma by a guy who's half white, half Indian,

and it's like a hybrid of Christianity

and old tribal practices.

And it's a religion that is based on peyote.

So if you talk to the natives themselves,

they usually don't call it native American church.

Sometimes they do, but usually they'll just say,

I'm follow peyote religion.

That's what they call it, peyote.

I mean, can you imagine if I just said,

well, I'm just a member of LSD religion.

And I didn't say LDS now, I'm saying LSD.

Like, oh yeah, I'm part of the acid church.

Yeah, we drop acid, commune with the Lord, you know.

I'm a member of the Jack Daniels Baptist, you know.

Also known as Apology of Church, you know.

Like, oh, you know, I'm a member

of the marijuana religion.

I follow the religion of cocaine, actually.

I'm a member of the heroin church.

Now, isn't that weird?

And they say, well yeah, but you're making fun

of our ancient ancestral practices.

That's funny because peyote doesn't grow in Arizona.

So I'm trying to figure out how this can be

your ancestral practice when the Navajos and Apaches

came to Arizona from Northern Canada

in and around the year 1600.

So about 425 years ago, the Apaches and the Navajos

came down from the Athabascan regions

of Northern Canada and they came down into Arizona.

There's no peyote in Canada

and there's no peyote in Arizona.

How is this your ancestral religion

when peyote is something that grows in Mexico

and a very small part of Texas

but it mainly grows in Mexico?

But again, this religion goes back to the 1890s.

Their ancient religion goes back to 1890s.

But at the end of the day, we obey God rather than men.

We don't want the government telling us

where we can and can't go soul winning.

We don't want them telling us what to preach.

And so this image of Uzziah going in

and burning incense in the house of the Lord

could be also read as this is

the government invading church.

This is the government wanting to come in

and say, okay, we're gonna be in charge.

We're gonna move over high priest,

the king is coming in.

Now, we need the high priest running things, not the king.

And you know what, our high priest is Jesus.

The head of the church is Jesus.

And by the way, when we say

that the head of the church is Jesus,

we understand that Jesus is the word.

And so at the end of the day,

the words of Christ are the boss

because de facto, when we say Jesus runs the church,

what we mean is that his word is in authority.

Meaning this is the final authority

in all matters of faith and practice.

And then we have a human overseer, pastor, bishop.

The word bishop literally means overseer.

The human overseer is under the true head

which is Jesus Christ, the word of God.

And that human overseer, like I said,

needs to be somebody who lives, eats, breathes, sleep,

meditates on the word of God day and night.

I mean, you can't be a pastor

if you don't love the Bible, right?

And it's funny when you run into pastors

have read the Bible cover to cover like one or two times.

It's like, wow.

There are even some pastors in this world

that have probably never even read the whole thing

cover to cover, which is crazy to even think about,

but it's out there.

Yeah, okay, well, let's not bring that up,

but keep that under your hat.

But the point is like, you gotta love the Bible, right?

You gotta read it every day.

I mean, here's the thing, I think

that the average Christian man, woman, boy, girl,

as you know, obviously if you're old enough

to be this proficient, you know,

I think reading the Bible once a year

is a great standard, right?

I mean, it takes about 20 minutes a day.

You know, you pull 20 minutes out of your day,

15, 20 minutes, and you could even split it up

and do 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes at night.

You could do this on your commute,

you could do this, you know, on audio,

you can read it, whatever you do

to spend your time in the Bible.

You could get through the whole Bible cover to cover

in one year in about 15, 20 minutes a day.

I think that's a great baseline.

I think that's a great starting point.

I mean, nobody can say they're too busy for that.

Ain't nobody not got time for that, okay?

You know, reading the Bible once a year, cover to cover.

But here's the thing, as a pastor, you know,

you'd think, okay, that's just for the layman.

You gotta read more than that.

You know, you should be really dwelling on

the word of God, memorizing scripture,

reading the Bible for hours, you know,

getting really deep into it

to where you're cranking through it repeatedly

and you're going through it dozens of,

I mean, you know, we have a standard at our church.

No one's gonna be ordained as a pastor

unless they've read the Bible at least

10 times cover to cover.

That's our minimum standard.

It's like, obviously the Bible has its qualifications,

but also we have another standard that we just say,

hey, if you can't read the Bible

10 times cover to cover, you're not ready to pastor.

You know, and you got doctors over here

studying for years.

You got lawyers over here studying for years,

memorizing things, learning things, reading books.

Hey, you know, we're doing an important job here

and we need to be into it.

And so we don't want a casual running the house of God.

We want somebody who's into it.

And the government is more into governing

and the government and secular things.

So we need the church to be separate

in the sense that it's run by men of God,

not by government bureaucrats, okay, or government rulers.

And when we talk about the separation of church and state,

obviously we're not saying that we don't want religion

to influence government.

Obviously we want the Bible to influence government.

We want Christian to influence government.

If we have a representative government

and most of America are evangelical Christians, right,

then the government should reflect those Christian values.

We want the government,

but we want it to be a one-way valve.

We want the church to influence the government

in the sense of morality, basic Christianity, basic Bible,

but we don't want them coming in here

and telling us what to do.

And we also don't want one particular church

or denomination going down there

and running the government either.

So we do want there to be a separation

because we want the church to be the church

and want the government to be the government.

So do I believe in separation of church and state?

Absolutely, yes, I do,

because I don't want the Catholic church

running the government.

And I don't want the government running our church

or any church.

We don't need a state church.

The government tends to screw up everything that they touch.

Religion included.

What a shock, huh?

And so let's just go back quickly to 2 Kings 15

and just wrap up super quickly.

So we understand what went wrong with Uzziah.

He was doing great.

He got puffed up, it went to his head.

He ends up crossing a line.

He breaks the morality that's clearly laid out

in the Bible, the separation of powers.

God's word is broken.

When he's rebuked by the man of God

who's giving him a biblical reason to stop,

he just gets mad.

And then unfortunately gets punished.

And it's too late to fix it at that point.

He does repent because he's like,

oh yeah, you're right, I gotta get out of here.

But he spends the rest of his life suffering

in a several house due to his leprosy.

So if we go back to chapter 15 of 2 Kings here,

and we'll just go down to the very end of the chapter here.

And we see that in verse number 32,

it says in the second year,

Pika, the son of Ramaliah, king of Israel,

began Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah to reign.

And we're skipping all the northern kings

just for a second of time.

25 and 20 years old was he when he began to reign

and he reigned 16 years in Jerusalem.

His mother's name was Jerushah, daughter of Zedek.

He did that which was right in the side of the Lord.

He did according to all that his father Uzziah had done.

How be it, how many times are we gonna get this caveat?

It's like the fourth time, right?

How be it, the high places were not removed

and the people sacrificed and burned incense

still in the high place.

And he built the higher place

or the higher gate of the house of God.

So again, what you see here is just this pattern

of just never going all the way.

You know, for four generations in a row,

these kings of Judah,

it's like they just never will take that step.

And you know what's interesting is that all four guys,

it's like, oh, the people,

the people are still doing the high places.

The people are still sacrificing and gross.

The people with their high places.

So what you have here is a leader

who's not willing to say no to the people.

You know, it's like, we gotta go all the way.

We gotta get the Bible,

we gotta make the Bible the standard

and we gotta go all the way

and not be like, oh man,

I don't think people can handle us going all the way.

Yeah, we're gonna worship the Lord.

Hey, let's get a passing grade.

Let's get a 70.

Let's get a C minus.

Let's just get through it.

C's get degrees or whatever.

But just think when you're serving the Lord,

you want to be all in.

And what we need is a man of God who says,

you know what, I don't care

if the people can handle it or not.

I'm gonna give him the whole thing.

You know, I don't sit around

wondering like what people can handle.

You know, I just get up and preach the Bible.

I'm gonna preach the whole Bible

and certain things that I preach

are super unpopular in 2026 America.

And that just tells me I need to preach a more, not less.

Because we gotta change things.

We gotta fix things.

Because the people are sacrificing in the high places,

violating the word of God, disregarding the Bible.

And then God's looking at the leader and saying,

well, you know, he did right, but you know,

yeah, he was like Amaziah.

I mean, he was like these other guys

that are half in, half out.

He's like, you know, Joe Ash or whatever.

Like, why not go all the way?

You know, and so we need a pastor

who's willing to preach every word of the Bible

and not hold back and say, well, the people, you know?

And look, remember when Aaron failed as a leader

when Moses is up on Mount Sinai

and Aaron's left in charge, the second in command.

And he's like, oh, well, the people made me do it.

You know, I mean, we had a sermon on Sunday morning

called the devil made me do it.

We could have another sermon called

the people made me do it.

You know, and I guess that's just pastor's excuse

is like, well, the people made me do it.

Aaron says, the people made me do it.

But here's the thing, Aaron, it's your job, Aaron,

to get the people serving God

and don't let them get you into idolatry.

You know, and the whole point of being a leader

is that you're gonna go against the bad trends

amongst the people.

And because these guys just let the people do whatever

and did it actually go all the way,

getting the nation right with God,

well, then, you know, it just kind of

is a generational thing.

And then ultimately it goes from just lame,

C minus, C minus, C minus, C minus.

Then you get to the next guy,

A has is just an F.

A has is just totally bad.

Just do an evil in the side of the Lord

and just takes the country all the way off the cliff.

Because you know, when you're half in, half out,

you end up falling out, right?

And remember the guy in the book of Acts, Eutychus,

he's in church, but he's sitting in the window

of the church in Acts.

So he's half in, half out.

And Eutychus falls out and, you know,

he's basically dead, but then, you know,

the Lord ends up sparing him and he survives.

Let's bow our heads in our board of prayer.

Father, we thank you so much for this chapter

about all these failed kings in the northern kingdom

and about the compromised, watered down kings

of the southern kingdom, Lord.

Help us as a church to be all the way in.

Help us to be zealous for you

and help us personally, individually,

to love you with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength.

And Lord God, please bless us now

as we go our separate ways.

And in Jesus' name we pray, amen.