2 Chro No.14 Revival

Holy Spirit fill us, each our Lord divine. Make us more like Jesus, gentle, pure, and kind. Holy Spirit fill us, daily by night.

What is wrong to offer, and to choose the right? This morning's reading comes from 2nd Chronicles chapter 29. We take up the story at the beginning of the reign of Hezekiah. We read in verse 2 that he did right in the sight of the Lord, and in verse 3 that he opened the doors of the temple and repaired them.

He also called the priests and the Levites together so that he could speak to them. We take up the reading at verse 5. 2nd Chronicles chapter 29, verse 5. Hezekiah is speaking to the priests and the Levites. Listen to me, Levites.

Consecrate yourselves now, and consecrate the temple of the Lord, the God of your fathers. Remove all defilement from the sanctuary. Our fathers were unfaithful.

They did evil in the eyes of the Lord our God and forsook him. They turned their faces away from the Lord's dwelling place and turned their backs on him. They also shut the doors of the portico and put out the lamps.

They did not burn incense or present any burnt offerings at the sanctuary to the God of Israel. Therefore the anger of the Lord has fallen on Judah and Jerusalem. He has made them an object of dread and horror and scorn, as you can see with your own eyes.

And this is why our fathers have fallen by the sword and why our sons and daughters and our wives are in captivity. Now I intend to make a covenant with the Lord, the God of Israel, so that his fierce anger will turn away from us. My sons, do not be negligent now, for the Lord has chosen you to stand before him and serve him, to minister before him and to burn incense.

Then the Levites set to work. I'm going to jump over those names with the permission of the pastor, because I don't think they will mean a great deal to us with great respect to God's word, and go to verse 15, referring to them as the Levites. When they had assembled their brothers and consecrated themselves, they went in to purify the temple of the Lord, as the king had ordered following the word of the Lord.

The priests went into the sanctuary of the Lord to purify it. They brought out to the courtyard of the Lord's temple everything unclean that they found in the temple of the Lord. The Levites took it and carried it out to the Kidron Valley.

They began the consecration on the first day of the first month, and by the eighth day of the month they reached the portico of the Lord. For eight more days they consecrated the temple of the Lord itself, finishing in the sixteenth day of the first month. Then they went in to King Hezekiah and reported, We have purified the entire temple of the Lord, the altar of burnt offerings with all its utensils, and the table for setting out the consecrated bread with all its articles.

We have prepared and consecrated all the articles that the king Ahaz removed in his unfaithfulness while he was king. They are now in front of the Lord's altar. Early the next morning King Hezekiah gathered the city officials together and went up to the temple of the Lord.

They brought seven bulls, seven rams, seven male lambs, seven male goats, as a sin offering for the kingdom, for the sanctuary, and for Judah. The king commanded the priests, the descendants of Aaron, to offer these on the altar of the Lord. So they slaughtered the bulls, and the priests took the blood and sprinkled it on the altar.

Next they slaughtered the rams and sprinkled their blood on the altar. Then they slaughtered the lambs and sprinkled their blood on the altar. The goats for the sin offering were brought before the king and the assembly, and they laid their hands on them.

The priests then slaughtered the goats, presented their blood on the altar for a sin offering to atone for all Israel, because the king had ordered the burnt offering and the sin offering for all Israel. He stationed the Levites in the temple of the Lord with cymbals, harps, and lyres, in the way prescribed by David and Gad the king's seer, and Nathan the prophet. This was commanded by the Lord through his prophets.

So the Levites stood ready with David's instruments, and the priests with their trumpets. Hezekiah gave the order to sacrifice the burnt offering on the altar. As the offering began, singing to the Lord began also, accompanied by trumpets and the instruments of David, king of Israel.

The whole assembly bowed in worship while the singers sang and the trumpeters played. All this continued until the sacrifice of the burnt offering was completed. When the offerings were finished, the king and everyone present with him knelt down and worshipped.

King Hezekiah and his officials ordered the Levites to praise the Lord with the words of David and to Asaph the seer. So they sang praises with gladness and bowed their heads in worship. Then Hezekiah said, You have now dedicated yourselves to the Lord.

Come and bring sacrifices and thank offerings to the temple of the Lord. So the assembly brought sacrifices and thanked offerings, and all whose hearts were willing brought burnt offerings. The number of burnt offerings the assembly brought was 70 bulls, 100 rams, 200 male lambs, all of them for burnt offerings to the Lord.

The animals consecrated as sacrifices amounted to 600 bulls, 3,000 sheep and goats. The priests, however, were too few to skin all the burnt offerings, so their kinsmen, the Levites, helped them until the task was finished and until other priests had been consecrated, for the Levites had been more conscientious in consecrating themselves than the priests had been. There were burnt offerings in abundance, together with the fat of the fellowship offerings and the drink offerings that accompanied the burnt offerings.

So the service of the temple of the Lord was reestablished. Hezekiah and all the people rejoiced that God had brought about for his people because it was done so quickly. Amen.

If you seek me, you will find me. If you search for me with all your hearts, break up your fallow ground. It is time to seek the Lord till he come and rain righteousness upon you.

There shall be showers of blessings sent from the Saviour above. There shall be seasons refreshing if we let God have his way. Lord, we come to you and our cry is for you, the Church, and as part of the Church our cry is for the world, for all its problems, for the Middle East cauldron that continues to boil, baffling us as to how men in the 20th century can contemplate throwing weapons at one another of mass destruction.

So we come before you and we pray because we believe that it's the only answer, that you will use your Church in these days, the message of the evangel, to reduce men to humility and confession before your throne, and through the gospel of Jesus Christ for men to be rejuvenated. Hear us then, blessed God, and speak to us through your own inerrant and inspired word for his name's sake. Amen.

Well, let's turn to that complicated passage of Scripture, which has a number of long names. So let's go to that complex and yet challenging chapter from the 29th of the second book of Chronicles, God's inspired word, which tells us of a man who was used in a most remarkable reformation and piece of renewing of a contract with God, he himself being a sort of Old Testament John the Baptist preparing the way for the blessings of the Lord. Look at that last verse, will you, of 2 Chronicles 29, the last two verses.

So the service of the temple of the Lord was reestablished. Hezekiah and all the people rejoiced at what God had brought about for his people because it was done so quickly. Are you concerned about revival? Is it a word that's in your vocabulary? Dr. Lloyd-Jones, I've often quoted his definition of revival.

He says that revival is when a mass of people are baptized in the Holy Spirit on the same occasion. In commemoration of the revival in the 1850s, Lloyd-Jones, when he was in the pulpit in Westminster in the 1950s, had a series of revival addresses which spanned, I think, half the year. And he implored his people in the center of London to come before the Lord and to ask for a further outpouring of the Holy Ghost.

In one sense he went to his grave as a disappointed man because the revival that he longed for and preached for, yearned for, it never came, not in his day, at least in this country. Another definition of revival is that given by the Apostle Peter when you find him preaching in the Acts of the Apostles in the third chapter and the 19th verse, when he calls this remarkable outpouring of the Spirit as the times or the seasons of refreshing. The times, the seasons of refreshing.

There have been great occasions in history when God, in an unprecedented fashion, sometimes in a nation, sometimes in a city, sometimes in a town, sometimes in a hamlet, sometimes amongst a handful of people and more often than not for individuals, has released his Spirit and the net result has been utterly spectacular. I refer to the 1959 revival in Northern Ireland, last century, in which hundreds of thousands, and that country is not that populated, were swept into the kingdom, which gives you some sort of indication of what happens at a time of revival. Edwin Orr was a great student of revival.

I only once ever heard him. I never met him personally, but he researched revival in Southeast Asia. I have amongst my treasured books a little volume that's very rare of his work in Pakistan and how he determined that when God moved in the Principality of Wales in 1904 in this part of the world, so he poured out his Spirit in 1904 in Pakistan and most of the denominations, the Christian denominations in Pakistan, owe their origin to that mighty outpouring of the Holy Ghost.

I come from the north of England, as many of you know. There's a lovely little coastal resort called Whitby, a rather nondescript town in many ways, although quite beautiful. In a remarkable fashion, God once visited Whitby, just Whitby alone.

The tremendous revival. The same sort of thing happened in Lowestoft. One of the greatest men of God, I think, that we've had this last part of the 20th century was Duncan Campbell, whose life actually spanned almost the whole of the century.

If you read of his ministry, he will tell you in some of his books about the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Isle of Lewis. If you went to those northernmost isles, just off the northern tip of Scotland, to this day you will find the results of the revival in terms of church attendance being a majority thing and not a minority. Isn't this what you would like to see? Do you ever pray for revival? Do you ever ask the Lord in the words of the prophet Isaiah, O that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down? Christian friend, in one sense there is nothing that will act as a barometer and indicate your spiritual maturity as your response to this question.

Do I ever pray for revival? Is it in my vocabulary? Is it in my earnest search after the Lord that he would, in a very wonderful way, demonstrate, manifest his power, the greatest sign, the greatest wonder, in all the cauldron of debate in that terminology, science and wonders today, I speak with dogmatism. The greatest wonder is when people are swept into the kingdom of God, not just in their ones and twos, but in the hundreds and thousands. I met up with a man called Kim, Billy Kim, some while ago, last November.

He was in a place called Taejeon in southern Korea. I wanted to speak to Kim and I had great problems actually just getting an interview, but we had some time together. And I said, look, can you tell me, and tears were in my eyes, I'm not exaggerating, I was almost broken.

What is it that you are doing, that men of your caliber are doing in Korea that's causing, in the grace of God, the church to mushroom like it does? And Kim, I think, emphasized with my emotion, but he couldn't give me a logical answer. All he could say is, well, Billy Graham came to us in 1960 or thereabouts and God, in a remarkable way, took his ministry and the whole church in Korea took off. So I asked Presbyterian leaders and Baptist leaders and Pentecostal leaders wondering which branch of the church was being affected by this massive growth.

And I discovered, much to my astonishment, that it wasn't just the possession of one strata of the church. It was across the whole of the denominations. And I suppose the fact of the matter is that in the providence of God, following two bouts of intensive persecution because the Communists took over from the Japanese, the people of Korea have suffered so much.

They have come before the Lord in intercessory prayer, the quality of which we rarely see in the United Kingdom. God has allowed this to be the day of visitation for Korea. But I put to you the question again.

Do you ever pray for revival in our own country? I love Americans, really, and the way they handle our language. I love the optimism in the American mentality. In Los Angeles, when they have an earthquake, they don't call it an earthquake.

That's too pessimistic. It is an earth correction. Don't you like that? There's a restaurant in Los Angeles if you go to.

It's right on the line of the earthquake belt. And they've got a quip on their menu. If our menu does not suit your palate, it is not our fault.

Okay, well, it's American humor. If I was to define revival for you, I would plunder American terminology in reference to earthquakes and say that revival is nothing less than the correction of the church. I have argued four years ago from this pulpit that I see no valid reason to look on the Acts of the Apostles as purely transitional and therefore some of the things that happened we can no longer expect to happen today.

I make the caveat, the exception, that we today have a complete Bible. They didn't have that in the Acts of the Apostles. In this sense, we're one better off.

And the authoritative voice of God will be heard more in preaching the exposition of Scripture than in direct and naked prophecy, though I don't rule out the latter to this day. Now, it seems to me that revival is a correction of the church. It is a lifting of the church from the condition into which she has fallen back to that position that she ought to hold spiritually.

Revival is the correction of the church. So let's go to Hezekiah because here is a man who gives us some indication from the Old Testament and whose name actually means Jehovah strengthens. Here is a man who will teach us a lot about revival because it seems to me that essentially that's how you can interpret the movement of God's power in his life and amongst his people in his day.

Now, I'm not going to take you into the complexities of this narrative, nor to backtrack into Second Kings where you get further information. It's not really the detailed history of Hezekiah that I'm after that I think is important. It's trying to elicit, lift out principles in the experience of this man which hold constant throughout the Old Testament times, flow over into the new and are still prevalent today in understanding the outpouring of God's Spirit and that sort of situation in which God is more likely to move.

And if you want something for starters that will be of encouragement, then take this as a crumb for you to eat from the Word of God. There was hardly a bleaker time politically, militarily, let alone spiritually in the southern part of Israel known as Judah. Then Hezekiah found himself propelled into.

He's only 25 years of age. The temple worship is corrupt. The priests have neglected their office.

He has the same problem as King Hussein has in Jordan. Hussein is afraid because Saddam Hussein from Iraq could just at the flick of his fingers eliminate Jordan. Of that there is no doubt at all.

And Hezekiah has got a problem by the name of a man called Sennacherib, the leader of the Assyrian Empire. And his armies are sniffing at the borders. And at the human level there is nothing that Hezekiah can do to repulse the Assyrians.

So really as far as kings are concerned and reigns are concerned, Hezekiah drew the short straw. He got the worst bit, the worst deal of any of the kings of Judah. Now I say that's a crumb of consolation because as I look around the church today, at least in the United Kingdom and certainly in France and Belgium and Europe, then I am filled so often with a sense of pessimism.

I do believe that there are areas where God is doing something special but it's minority compared with the vast majority of people who are untouched. 30,000 villages plus in France have no gospel witness at all. Thank God for young people in Love Europe who were concerned to try to reach some of them.

And the situation though a little better is not that much improved in our own country. But sometimes it's on occasions like this when the church is in a minority position and when society is just careering like a drunken man from one bout of permissiveness to another that God does something spectacular. That was the case in the days of Whitfield and Wesley when it looked as though civil war would break out in our country as it did in France.

And it was the preaching of Wesley that stopped this. Secular historians will tell you. But the reason behind the effectiveness of the preaching of Wesley, both Wesley brothers and George Whitfield was the mighty outpouring of the Spirit of God released through their personalities but affecting the whole of the country, starting particularly in Bristol.

Did you know that? And then hitting London. Some of the great commons in London became sort of natural amphitheaters for the proclamation of the gospel. Cambuslang in Scotland, that too was affected.

Whitfield was careering all over the place and doing little trips across to the United States of America, journeys that took him 15 weeks, sometimes wondering if the boat in which he was sailing would be capsized. But God in a remarkable way, in the most unspectacular time in history, spiritually speaking, because things were so depressed, so bleak, used these men and met the needs of our country and the Commonwealth. Well, here is Hezekiah and he's going to be another sort of Whitfield, an Old Testament version of Whitfield and Wesley.

The time of his reign, I say, was one of utter declension, total barrenness. And he comes to the throne. He doesn't have a very good advantage in terms of his father's example.

His father was a dud, spiritually. But his mother, she was a spiritual woman like Susanna Wesley. And maybe he picked up some of his graces, as many men do, from mothers, godly mothers whose husbands have not been very good companions as far as equaling their spirituality is concerned.

And you read in tribute of his mother and also as an eternal epitaph to Hezekiah in the second verse of this chapter, he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, just as his father David had done. You get almost the same sort of expression at the end of the thirty-first chapter, verse twenty-one, in everything that he undertook, in the service of God, temple and in obedience to the law and to the commands, he sought his God and worked wholeheartedly and so he prospered. He is a man, you see, who goes through a personal revival.

As you and I can, in the grace of God, know a personal revival. And when he comes to the throne, he engages in a strategy. The timing is awful, but his strategy is impeccable.

What would your first step be if you were Hezekiah, wanting to reform a Judaism, a religion of the Jews, which is corrupt? Well, perhaps you'd hit the temple first, because you know enough about the temple in Old Testament days to realize that the temple is the headquarter of the Jewish faith. There's no headquarters of the Christian faith today, because the Spirit of God circumnavigates the world. The temple is the church.

Wherever the church is, there the Spirit of God is or should be. But in those days, that wasn't the case. God located his presence particularly, not exclusively, to the temple.

Now, you will remember from these addresses given by Brother Tim and myself from 2 Chronicles, that it was Solomon who was responsible for the erection of the temple. You remember that great dedicatory service. And you remember the glory of God, the Shekinah that fell.

And all of Israel that were gathered in Jerusalem recognized that God had moved in to this temple in a most remarkable fashion. Well, if there's going to be reform, it's got to start at the temple, because that's where the rot has set in. And so you find that Hezekiah casts his eye around the temple.

He inspects the problem and he sees that it's grave. Verse 6 of the chapter, our fathers were unfaithful. They did evil in the eyes of the Lord our God and forsook him.

They turned their faces away from the Lord's dwelling place. It's a description of the temple, you see. And turned their backs on him.

They blotted out what the Hebrews would call the bath coal. That is the Hebrew term for the voice of God. Heard when Jesus was baptized, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.

Heard at the transfiguration, this is my beloved Son. Hear Him. They shut the doors of the portico, put out the lamps.

They did not burn incense or present any burnt offerings of the sanctuary to the God of Israel. That was the cause. Here is the consequence.

The anger of the Lord has fallen on Judah and Jerusalem. He has made them an object of dread and horror and scorn, as you can see with your own eyes. Judgment begins.

The house of God. You want to know why the world is as she is today? Hear me, my friends. Because the church is as she is.

The world will never be stronger than the church. So I come back to my original plea that the church must be the church because it is the church that cleanses, acts as salt that savors, as light that illuminates. Eradicate the church and the devil has a field day.

That's why reformation has to start with the church. That's why the people always, to quote John Calvin, should be semper reformata, reformation always reforming, always looking at yourself. This is what Hezekiah does.

He goes to the temple and what does he discover? He discovers that the temple is full of religious bric-a-bac, pagan, idolatry. It's remnants. It all needs to be chucked out, got rid of.

So he says the latter part of verse 5, remove all defilement from the sanctuary. It's blocking blessing. He starts at the heart of the problem.

But what's more, it seems to me that from this chapter, and there are many deductions that you can make, I can only share several because obviously our time is limited. He recalls the original aim of the temple. I say that by implication of verse 35, the service of the temple, last part of verse 35, the service of the temple of the Lord was reestablished.

You can only reestablish something that was established in the first instance. You can only undergo revival when you've got some sort of pointer to which you're going back to. Revival means that you lost the category in which you originally were intended to live.

That's why we need today to think back to the acts of the apostles and to examine ourselves in the light of our spirituality. Well, you cannot reestablish something that wasn't established in the first instance. So, the point of my logical conclusion, that he recalls the original aim of the temple.

What was the original aim? Well, I've hinted at it. It was the place where God was going to manifest himself. Come back to verse 6, our fathers were unfaithful, they did evil in the eyes of the Lord our God and forsook him.

Now, when you forsake God, the flip side is that God may well forsake you. You cannot play fast and loose with God. In his infinite mercy, sometimes his patience is extended and he comes again and again, but it is possible that you can so forsake him that he will forsake you.

And so, this headquarters of Judaism where the bath called the voice of God should be heard, it's not there anymore. And he recalls the earlier times, the times when Solomon in great joy had come before the Lord and the temple had been dedicated. Let's go back to that sixth chapter which speaks about it.

And in the 21st verse in Solomon's great dedicatory prayer, the latter part of the 20th verse rather, he says, May you hear the prayer your servant prays towards this place. Hear the supplication of your servant and of your people Israel when they pray towards this place. Hear from heaven your dwelling place and when you hear forgive.

Here is Solomon you see and he's got a right understanding of the temple. He's not fascinated by the building itself. He's already recognized that there is no building on earth that can house the power and the splendor of God.

But God has given the Israelites a visual aid in the temple. It will represent his presence, his dwelling place. And so the Israelites even if they couldn't be at the temple would turn towards the temple in their prayers.

Not in a sort of magical superstitious fashion but believing that God in a most remarkable way made his presence felt there. Now Solomon dreaded a few things did he not in that prayer? He dreaded the possibility of Israel being sidetracked. So in the 22nd verse, I'm still with chapter six, when a man wrongs his neighbor and is required to take an oath, Lord if he comes back and prays to you will you forgive him? I'm paraphrasing.

Verse 24, when your people have been defeated and so on and so forth, as you go through that chapter and as you flip across to the seventh chapter and into the 19th verse, you discover God responding to the intercession of Solomon. If you turn away and forsake the decrees and commands I have given you and go off to serve other gods and worship them, then I will uproot you, uproot Israel from my land. This is the great dilemma.

I will reject this temple which I have consecrated for my name. I will make it a byword and an object of ridicule among all people. And though this temple is now so imposing, all who pass by will be appalled and say, what has the Lord done? Why has he done such a thing? All that Solomon dreaded came to pass.

But you remember that God in his grace, before he responds in this fashion to Solomon, also claws out a little exception. If the worst happens, Solomon, if verse 13 of chapter 7, when I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land. Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place." Now don't you see? That's what kept Hezekiah going.

He picked up from what he knew of the past. The origins, the aims of the temple. And so he comes to the men who should be serving the temple in those days.

He enlists their aid. If you like, he addresses the church. So drop back to chapter 29 of 2 Chronicles.

Listen to me, Levites. Here's a command. There's an exclamation in the NIV at the end of that imperative.

Listen to me. He's so concerned now to institute this reformation in the temple. And so his passion overwhelms him.

But he's a good pastor is this king. He doesn't just tick the priest off. He endears himself to them.

Verse 11. Drop your eyes down. My sons do not be negligent now.

Here is the great possibility. We've spiraled downwards. We've hit the quagmire of sin and rebellion.

We're paying the price economically and militarily. But if we move into our position of destiny, if we stand before Him and serve Him to minister before Him and to burn incense, who knows what might happen. Do I need to spend time to update that? The leaders of the church, deacons, elders, so-called ordinary members of the church, here's a moment of destiny.

If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves, here is the way of reformation and the possibility of revival. So the king instructs the church. And then you will discover, I have no time to enlarge on that, you will discover that he restores sacrifice as did Solomon years before.

He gets the priest as Hezekiah to clean up the temple and when the temple has been cleaned up, verse 18, they bring the report. We have purified the entire temple of the Lord, the altar of burnt offering with all its utensils, and the table for setting out the consecrated bread with all its articles. We have prepared and consecrated all.

So what? So now we can pay attention to that which caused Solomon and David and going back, Abraham having skipped over Moses to appreciate that the Jews are in a covenant relationship with you. It's the time for sacrifice. It's the time for the underpinning of the truths of atonement in the minds of the Israelites.

And when revival comes in the Christian era, there is always emphasis placed on the death of our Lord Jesus and His mighty resurrection. Spiritual decline is correlated with men and women failing to pay attention to the cross of Christ, the purity of Christ and the power of the Father in raising the Son to an everlasting life. And so these Israelites are ready under the tutorship of the King, this godly Reformer, to reinstitute the sacrificial system.

And there is an enthusiasm which I think you can detect within the chapter as you read it, because it looks as though although Hezekiah is giving some instructions, there is also a spontaneity amongst the people as they begin to realize what is happening under the leadership of this good King. Verse 27, Hezekiah gave the order to sacrifice the burnt offering on the altar. As the offering began, singing to the Lord began.

I love that. The offering began and singing began. Not just the paltry singing of unenthusiastic people disciplined into doing something that they don't want to, but here is a people who realizes the recovery of all that was precious that has gone by.

It's possible for them to return to what originally they were intended to be, the people of God, worshipping God in the temple of the Lord. And so they start to sing accompanied by trumpets and instruments of David, etc. And in case you missed the point, the chronicler rubs it home as you drop down to the 30th verse.

King Hezekiah and his officials ordered the Levites to praise the Lord with the words of David and of Esau, the seer. So they sang praise with gladness and bowed their heads and worshipped. You see a religious revival has broken out.

It is revival. I argue that because if you drop back to the 30th or on to the 30th chapter and down to the last two verses, you'll read in verse 26. There was great joy in Jerusalem for since the days of Solomon son of David king of Israel there had been nothing like this in Jerusalem.

The priests and the Levites stood to bless the people and God heard them for their prayer reached heaven, his dwelling place. It wasn't just noise. God heard them.

He'd heard Solomon centuries before, decades before. He now hears this people as revival breaks out and there is a re-emphasis on things which were important in the days when the temple was dedicated. The power of God, the presence of God.

Solomon prays and God answers. So I come full stop. What the church needs is an earthquake and the Los Angeles people are right.

An earthquake is an earth correction. It's the settling down of the substrata to the point at which it should rest. We need a spiritual correction in my life, in your life.

We cannot guarantee revival. Revival is within the providence of God. But what we can do is to do a Hezekiah internally in our own hearts and externally through our church infrastructure.

To ensure that as we are led from the word of God through the preaching of his word we fall into line and we do what Hezekiah instructed the people to do. I'll tell you a story. I find it funny but the point of telling it will become very serious as you'll gather at the end and with this I close.

A fellow who could never do anything right. Have you ever met that sort of guy? Ham-fisted. He went visiting.

His mate was in the intensive care hospital, department of a hospital having suffered a car smash. He's under an oxygen tent and this ham-fisted fellow who's kindly gone to see him can't communicate because the patient cannot speak to him from under the oxygen tent. And as he's sitting there he sees that his friend under the tent is getting more and more agitated trying to say something but unable to express himself.

Eventually the patient gets a piece of paper. He's got a pen and he starts to write something. And having completed writing it he flakes out and dies.

And the man visiting him thinks well it's rather sad but how wonderful the last thing he did was to write to me. So he put his hand under the oxygen tent and took the piece of paper and opened it and it read please take your foot off my oxygen tube. You cannot sustain life with your foot on the oxygen tube if you're a patient in that condition.

The church cannot sustain its life, are you hearing me? If some of us in a ham-fisted fashion have got our foot on the equivalent of the oxygen tube there is only one way for you to ensure your spiritual personal viability. It's through the reading of God's holy word. It's through praying to the Lord.

It's through coming around the communion table. It's staying as close to him despite the problems outside. Despite the spiritual malaise outside.

The only way to stay healthy is by doing what Hezekiah did. Engaging in a personal reformation and finding personal blessing and in the grace of God as far as he was concerned that blessing was permeated through the rest of Israel as God could take you and me and use us in revival blessing in this church, in this town, in our world. Let's stand for a moment of quiet prayer.

After a brief moment we'll have the note on the organ and we'll sing together the Lord's Prayer. Amen.