2 Chro No.15 How to Please the Lord

I'd like you to turn in the Word of God to the second book of Chronicles, and let's read some verses as found in the thirtieth chapter and spill over to the thirty-first. Well here from the thirtieth chapter we come across a man by the name of Hezekiah, he's twenty-five years of age, he's got an incredibly difficult task, and so, verse one, Hezekiah sent word to all Israel and Judah and also wrote letters to Ephraim and Manasseh, inviting them to come to the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem and celebrate the Passover to the Lord, the God of Israel. The king and his officials and the whole assembly in Jerusalem decided to celebrate the Passover in the second month.

They had not been able to celebrate it at the regular time because not enough priests had consecrated themselves and the people had not assembled in Jerusalem. The plan seemed right both to the king and to the whole assembly. They decided to send a proclamation throughout Israel from Beersheba to Dan calling the people to come to Jerusalem and celebrate the Passover to the Lord, the God of Israel.

It had not been celebrated in large numbers according to what was written. At the king's command couriers went throughout Israel and Judah with letters from the king and from his officials which read, people of Israel, return to the Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, that is Jacob, that he may return to you who are left who have escaped from the hand of the kings of Assyria. Do not be like your fathers and brothers who were unfaithful to the Lord, the God of their fathers, so that he made them an object of horror as you see.

Do not be stiff-necked as your fathers were. Submit to the Lord. Come to the sanctuary which he has consecrated forever.

Serve the Lord your God so that his fierce anger will turn away from you. If you return to the Lord then your brothers and your children will be shown compassion by their captors and will come back to this land. For the Lord your God is gracious and compassionate.

He will not turn his face from you if you return to him. The couriers went from town to town in Ephraim and Manasseh as far as Zebulun, but the people scorned and ridiculed them. Nevertheless, some men of Assyria, Manasseh, and Zebulun humbled themselves and went to Jerusalem.

Also, in Judah the hand of God was on the people to give them unity of mind to carry out what the king and his officials had ordered following the word of the Lord. A very large crowd of people assembled in Jerusalem to celebrate the feast of unleavened bread. In the second month they removed the altars in Jerusalem and cleared away the incense altars and threw them into the Kidron Valley.

They slaughtered the Passover lamb on the fourteenth day of the second month. The priests and Levites were ashamed and consecrated themselves and brought burnt offerings to the temple of the Lord. Then they took up their regular positions as described in the law of Moses the man of God.

The priests sprinkled the blood handed to them by the Levites. Since many in the crowd had not consecrated themselves, the Levites had to kill the Passover lambs for all those who were not ceremonially clean could not consecrate their lambs to the Lord. Although most of the many people who came from Ephraim, Manasseh, Issachar, and Zebulun had not purified themselves, yet they ate the Passover contrary to what was written.

But Hezekiah prayed for them, saying, May the Lord, who is good, pardon everyone who sets his heart on seeking God, the Lord, the God of his fathers, even if he is not clean according to the rules of the sanctuary. And the Lord heard Hezekiah and healed the people. The Israelites who were present in Jerusalem celebrated the feast of unleavened bread for seven days with great rejoicing, while the Levites and priests sang to the Lord every day accompanied by the Lord's instruments of praise.

Hezekiah spoke encouragingly to all the Levites who showed good understanding of the service of the Lord. For the seven days they ate their assigned portion and offered fellowship offerings and praised the Lord, the God of their fathers. The whole assembly then agreed to celebrate the festival seven more days.

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 Lord, and God heard them, for their prayer reached heaven, His holy dwelling place. Verse 2, Hezekiah assigned the priests and Levites to divisions.

Verse 5, As soon as the order went out in terms of contributing to the well-being of the priests, the Israelites generously gave the firstfruits of their grain, new wine, oil and honey, and all that the fields produced. Verse 8, When Hezekiah and his officials came and saw the heaps, they praised the Lord and blessed His people Israel. Verse 20, This is what Hezekiah did throughout Judah, doing what was good and right and faithful before the Lord his God in everything that he undertook, in the service of God's temple and in obedience to the law and the commands.

He sought his God and worked wholeheartedly, and so he prospered. If you have the NIV version of the Bible, speak that last verse out boldly. It's chapter 31, verse 21, I'm referring to.

After three. One, two, three. In everything that he undertook, in the service of God's temple and in obedience to the law and the commands, he sought his God and worked wholeheartedly, and so he prospered.

I want to speak to you this morning on how to please the Lord. The verse that you've just read out with me, those of you who've got the NIV versions, is actually, if I might say this without sounding terribly pious, my life's verse. I mean by that, when I was just a young lad of around sixteen, I went to see the headmaster of my grammar school.

Now, in those dim and distant days, a headmaster was rarely seen apart from at assembly and in his office. He sort of combined the function of high priest and administrator. He used to strike almost the fear of divinity in our hearts when he walked down the corridor.

But such was the esteem in which he was held. I had hardly spoken twenty words to him during the five years that I was at the school. And I was going, because I had an appointment with him, to tell him that I felt a call to be a minister of the gospel.

And my mom, who shared my thinking ever since childhood along with my dad, said that in her reading that morning, she'd come across this particular verse in Chronicles and she wondered if the Lord wasn't confirming what I was going to do in terms of this verse. So it's become for me a sort of life verse. I wish I could say hand over my heart that I've lived up to it, but it does contain to this day my goal, what I wish to aim for as a pastor, a preacher of the Word of God.

It seems that it has within it the answer to the question that I think is perhaps the most vital one that I can put before you and seek in some way to tease out from Scripture a resolve to the problem as to how it is that we should please God. If you were to read in the prophecy of Micah, you would discover in the sixth chapter and the sixth verse that he, speaking on behalf of the Israelites, says, how shall a man please the Lord? What is it that you want? One day a young man came to the Lord Jesus and he asked more or less the same question, good master, what must I do to inherit eternal life? If you unpackage that question, it's fundamentally the same request that I'm attending to. What must I do to please God in order to enter into life eternal? Now listen, because this morning what I want is one to one.

Forget everyone else, just me and you. I really mean that. If I had the possibility of five hundred conversations individually, this is what I would take and discuss this question through with you because it is so important.

If you really believe in Christianity, as presumably you must do because who else, with the exception of just a few people who are querying the Christian faith, would spend half an hour on a Sunday in days when preaching like this is utterly unfashionable and listen to men expound Scripture. If you really do believe in the Christian faith, then there is nothing more important in your life surely than this, to please God. Everything else, however influential you may be, however successful in your professional life you may be, all these can be honorable pursuits in themselves, but they fade into insignificance over against this one thing, how do I please God? Because you're only here for a while.

You may run for seventy years or eighty years in this world. No one will even guarantee you that, but that's a relatively short time span over against the whole of eternity. So I say to you, my dear brother and sister, with all the sincerity that I can muster, the most important question I put to you from the pulpit is this, the most important answer for you to get is one to the question, how do you please this God? I made reference to the NIV, not because I've got any particular love for the NIV, over against the AV.

In fact, in some senses I prefer the AV. And in the authorized, the old-fashioned version of the Bible, in Ephesians 6.6 and also quoted in Colossians 3 and verse 22, you come across a word that the NIV has blushed to use. It's the word men pleases.

And the idea of the Apostle Paul is that there are a lot of people who between the choice of pleasing God and pleasing men will opt for the latter rather than the former. And says the Apostle, not so bluntly as I'm putting it now, that is plain stupidity. It's more important, the esteem that you have in the eyes of God than in the eyes of men.

Now, there is a possibility, I think, when we've been looking at Chronicles, that there's a bit of a sameness about some of the studies that we've brought. And it's not a bad thing to repeat, but here is something practical for everyone to plug into because, you see, this particular challenge that we have this morning, it affects not only those who are preachers, those who are somewhat public in the church. It affects everybody, everybody in my congregation.

You must answer this question, and you must correct your lifestyle. Are you hearing me? Let me repeat that if I have to repeat it ten times. You must correct your lifestyle in terms of the answers that you find to my question, how do I please God? Whatever you had to give up, whatever priorities you have to re-assort, you have to re-select and put into a different order.

It's important for you to do that in order to please God. Our Lord Jesus is the man who paramountly stands out as He who pleased the Lord. This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.

Now, says John, we are the sons of God. Therefore, our same aim must be that of our Lord Jesus'. Hezekiah is a man who stands out paramountly in the Old Testament Scriptures as a man who pleased the Lord.

The Chronicler poises on saying, and doesn't quite make it though the writer of the Kings seems to in a parallel passage, that he was the greatest king in everything he undertook in the service of God's temple and in obedience to the law and the commands. He sought his God and worked wholeheartedly and so he prospered. So Hezekiah, what is it about you that pleases this God? Because I for one want to know.

And I crack open the text and I bring to you five things from it and from its immediate context and I'll try to go through quickly. It seems to me that he had a mindset that impressed the Lord. The word is wholeheartedly, it stands out, doesn't it? In everything he did.

In everything he undertook in the service of the temple. He sought his God and worked wholeheartedly. Have you not noticed in the theology of Chronicles, surely you have those of you who follow us week by week, how important that word theologically is for the Chronicler, wholeheartedness.

I've got references on my overhead which I've not timed now having spent so long in my introduction to get into. But Amaziah gives you an instance of a king who is only half-hearted. Jehoshaphat is an instance of a king who is wholehearted.

And whenever the Chronicler is assessing the leaders of Israel and Judah, he does on the yardstick of what their dedication to the Lord was like, wholehearted or half-hearted. And we're told in the Chronicles in a general statement in the sixteenth chapter and through to the ninth verse, the words of one of the old prophets of whom you probably know very little, a man called Hanani, chapter 16 and verse 9, the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to Him. That's what makes Hezekiah stand out paramountly as an illustrious king of Israel.

He has a mindset that pleases the Lord because he's wholehearted. We were looking at the subject of revival last week and Hezekiah was our starting point and we noticed that in revival, which did break out in some degree, one of the things that was in the mind of Hezekiah was the anticipation that God could do an awful amount, not just for the southern kingdom, Judah, but also for Israel. So in the opening verse of the thirtieth chapter, you discover that Hezekiah sends word throughout the whole of the kingdom and he implores men and women to get right with the Lord.

This is his concern as he sends his emissaries around the united, in his perspective, kingdom. Did some of you listen to Lionel Blue, the Jewish rabbi on television the other day as he was doing a little tour of the religious centers of England and bringing out some significance on the characters that lived. He went up to Hull and he told us a little bit about William Wilberforce, this great man who was used by God to eliminate slavery, at least from the United Kingdom.

What changed Wilberforce was this. Somebody gave him a copy of the New Testament. He read it and he came to the conclusion, if this is right, I have to live differently.

And it was the Jew, Lionel Blue, who said this, that there is such a thing as pop religion and real religion. In his concluding remarks, real religion is when a man is gripped by the purposes of God and he is prepared to do everything to achieve in his life what he can for the service of the Lord, and this pleases God. Did you hear me? To have a mindset, wholehearted, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul.

That is what Jesus said, were qualifications for the accolade of the man that pleases God. Our Lord had a holy zeal, didn't He? The zeal of your house has consumed me, He says, as illustrating a greater than Hezekiah. He came to the temple in His day and He saw that it was rotten to the core, and so He reformed or endeavored to do so as He threw the money changers out of the temple.

So Solomon, so Hezekiah, so our Lord Jesus, consumed with a holy zeal, a mindset that pleases Yahweh. But not only that, it seems to me, is one of the things you can identify about Hezekiah. You can also add this conclusion that he's a man who's got an anchor point.

What do I mean? Well, back to my text. In everything he undertook in the service of God's temple and in obedience to the law and the commands. This is what I mean by the anchor point.

You see, there's zeal and zeal, isn't there? Not all zeal is really admissible in terms of the advance of the purposes of God. Go to Romans chapter 10 and verse 12 and you'll understand what I mean. Here is the apostle and he's talking about the sort of quality that you and I ought to have.

Actually, I think I've listed the wrong verse there. Let's read Romans 10, 12, just see if I can alight on it. The Scripture says, I've missed the verse.

It doesn't matter. You can find it yourself. It's around that area.

The apostle Paul talks about a zeal with knowledge, a zeal with knowledge. Not every form of zeal is acceptable to the Lord. It's a zeal with knowledge.

That's why when I brought you back to Hezekiah, I pointed out that Hezekiah's reform is in accordance with the law and the commands. What is a zeal without knowledge? I'll illustrate it. The last miracle that Jesus ever did on the earth was as a result of the zeal of a disciple which was utterly misplaced.

Peter chopped off the ear of Malchus, the high priest, you remember? And Jesus has to perform a surgical operation as he tells Peter to put up his sword. Those who use the sword shall perish by the sword. There was nothing of matter with zeal in itself, but a zeal misplaced can be a very embarrassing thing.

Now here is Hezekiah, and it's not a misplaced zeal that he engages in, is it? It's a zeal that is completely conditioned by the law and the Word of God as he has it to that point. And so in the fifth verse of the thirtieth chapter, you read Hezekiah making reference to what he has already learned in the Word of the Lord. They decided to send a proclamation throughout Israel from Beersheba to Dan calling the people to come to Jerusalem and celebrate to the Lord the God of Israel.

It had not been celebrated in large numbers according to what was written. You get a similar comment in the twelfth verse where again reference is made at the end of the verse following the Word of the Lord. And so go through these chapters and you'll see here is a man who is concerned to ensure that his life runs alongside what the Word of God reveals.

So I must ask you, have you got this anchor point in your life? Do you keep referring to Scripture? One of the things that resulted in Hezekiah studying the law of Moses was that he realized it was incompatible for all the bric-a-brac of idolatry to be in the temple. And so he gets rid of those things which should never have been there. They clear away the rubbish.

Look at verse 14. They removed the temples in Jerusalem and cleared away the incense altars. This is chapter 30.

And threw them into the Kidron Valley. If you're going to live your life by the anchorage of God's Word, there will be stuff that you have to get rid of before you can actually renew and reform. Now, you may say, well, we've got no pagan idols in our home.

Well, that may be so if you're just looking at the subject matter literalistically. There are other things that become idols for us today. Everything that displaces the priority of God in your life is an idol.

You say, well, television is not really my idol. OK, I'm not suggesting it is, but let's try a little test, shall we? What's the proportion of your time with television over against the proportion of your time in what could be considered the immediate service of God? Prayer, Bible study, fellowship, and so on and so forth. Well, I'm not wanting to nail you or make you feel guilty.

I'm just giving you, if you like, a litmus test. Now, it may be that you come out perfectly OK. Well, that's fine.

Then just bask in the fact that the preacher didn't find you out badly. He found you out correctly, and thank the Lord for that. But some of us will have a little blush occurring at least on the inside of our faces, if not on the external.

There are things that we need to get out of the way, or at least get into proportion so that God can bless us and use us, and even more particularly, we can be people who please God, because that was the quest that we're about, at least as far as our study this morning is concerned. He clears away the rubbish. He gives place to the enduring.

He brings back the Passover, the sacrifice that has not been offered for a long time, reflective on God's great deliverance from the land of Egypt, and the opening of the Red Sea, and all the securities that God gave to the children of Israel. You're never to forget this day, says Moses. When your children ask you about it, you tell them the reason why you keep the Passover.

But they weren't keeping the Passover. But the Word of God said they should. So, get rid of those things that were unnecessary and bring back those things which are vital.

So, what premium do you put on the Lord's table? I've known people looking after sick cats, and I'm not exactly the least fun-loving person as far as cats are concerned. Then be around the Lord's table. Where is the proportion? Jesus said, do this in remembrance of me.

How regularly? That's up to you. It's not for me to legislate, though the early church seemed to home in on once per week as a minimum. You see why I wanted this one-to-one chat? Because I really don't want you to pass what I'm saying on to someone else.

I apply it to myself. This Word was bringing me almost to the dust of the ground. Last evening as I was thinking it through down on the seafront.

Lord, is that really what you want me to say? Because, Lord, your Word finds out my life. This is my life's verse I'm preaching on. But I look into the life of a man of whom it was directly written, and I find myself wanting to be there but not there.

But, Lord, I do want to get closer to you. I do want to be pleasing to you. Now, as a consequence of what these reforms, or rather outflowing from these reforms, is something very wonderful.

Look at verse 20, will you? The Lord heard, this is still chapter 30, the Lord heard Hezekiah and healed the people. The consequence of this man pleasing the Lord was that his reform so touched Israel that the land was healed. And you remember Solomon said, if my people who are called by my name shall humble themselves and repent, I will heal their land.

And this is what Hezekiah needed. He needed the land to be healed. And when Malachi is predicting the coming of the Messiah into the world, he says that the Son of Righteousness shall rise with healing in His wings.

And Revelation, speaking retrospectively of the activity of the Lord, His death and His resurrection, talks about the leaves of the trees were for the healing of the nations. Jesus came to bring salvation in terms of healing to our world. And you and I, if you like, are supposed to be modern Hezekiahs who see the importance of the gospel, who see the importance of the death and the resurrection of our Lord, and our lives directly or indirectly should be lived to bring glory to the Lord and the pushing out of the gospel message so our land might be healed.

You see why Hezekiah is pleasing God? He's got a zeal, a zeal according to knowledge. He's got an anchor point. He's got a mindset.

And all these things combine to bring the Lord pleasure. What's more, His perspective is a wide one, isn't it? In everything that He did. Underline that word everything, if not literally as I've got it underlined here in my Bible.

Underline it in your mind, in everything. You see, He's concerned with greater Israel, not just with Judah. He's concerned with the whole of the church.

What a visionary. He believed in the vision. Reading a story about a man who went into an optician's shop and had a very complicated prescription made up, but he wasn't too sure of the expertise of the optician when he popped back for his prescription for his new glasses.

And the optician was trying to reassure him and he put his arm on his shoulder and he says, man, my man, we stand behind our glasses. He said, so do I. So do I. Here is a king who stood behind his vision. He had a wide perspective as to what the purposes of God were for himself and for his nation.

In everything he did in the service of God. Now, do bear in mind that this man is not per se a priest. In one sense, we're glad about that because it allows me to make this correction.

There are some people who feel that a religious vocation is something that a woman engages in when she goes to a convent or a man does when he goes to a monastery. It's wearing a clerical collar. It's being called father or reverend or what have you.

I'm not denouncing that, incidentally. Some people are called to a life of prayer, whether they go off to a monastery or a convent, it's completely up to them. But what I am trying to say is this, that when you read into the church from the perspective of the New Testament, you discover, according to 1 Peter 2.9, that we are a royal priesthood.

You see why I said this is a one-to-one thing? I'm not asking you to please God by using a gift you don't have. Not everyone comes into a pulpit. Incidentally, I don't think that pulpiteering is the most important gift to have.

We've got too many preachers. We have too few practitioners. Too many preachers who've blown it in the 20th century.

For God's sake, pray for me that I may never lose credibility as a preacher. But preaching is only the tip of an iceberg, and I'm not even too sure it's the tip. You see, there is, as a kid's song says, a work for Jesus, none that you can do.

Whoever you are, 60, 70 years of age, man or woman, the fact that you are born a woman does not mean that in the service of God somehow your ministry is inadequate. There is no submission in that sense. We're all, male and female, one before the Lord.

There are things that you can do in everything that God has engifted you to do. Do it for His honor and His glory. As Jesus said of one woman who came and anointed His feet, she has done what she could.

That's how you please the Lord. You do what you can. You don't go on a guilt trip because you can't do what other people are doing.

That was not your gifting. Before God, you're a unique person. You have your own potentialities.

I can't work them out for 500 people. Maybe I could help you on an individual basis. I'm not even sure of that.

But this, I do know that between you and God, you can work out the parameters of your ministry. And what my text is saying is that when you work them to the full, then you become a hezekiah. You please the Lord.

Are you hearing me? What pleases God is the man, the woman who has a mindset and is wholehearted, who fixes life and is directed by anchor points of Scripture, who has a wide perspective, recognizing that what is often referred to wrongly as the secular is sacred. A plague on those people who make a distinction between a mother who's nursing her child at her breast and a man who's conducting communion service. There is no distinction.

To be a mother, to be a father, to be a green grocer in Worthing, to be a teacher, whatever is sacred before the Lord as you do your work day by day as unto the Lord. And some of you have a complete misunderstanding as what the Sabbath day is. A Sabbath day for the Christian runs throughout the whole of his life.

Every day is a Sabbath to be lived as unto the Lord. This is the day the Lord has made. We don't just get religious on a Sunday wholeheartedly.

Serving the Lord, something else I almost blush to bring this up because in one sense, I wish I was not salaried by this church. I wish I had the abilities of Spurgeon and could live off the royalties of books. And then no one could think that when the preacher touches on finance, he has his own well-being in mind.

You see, when a man pleases the Lord, he does so. When a woman pleases the Lord, they do so by showing a generous spirit. Why was the priesthood so deficient in the day of Hezekiah? Well, because there was not enough finance to service the priests.

It's a disgrace in the twentieth century that there is a shortage of finance in terms of servicing our great missionary endeavor. I spent hours within the last two or three weeks, various parts of Europe, coming to grips with men and women grappling with the enormous problems of just financing Christian mission. I'm not laboring this to you good folk.

Many of you are an exception to this rule, but there are resources within the church that should be realized in order to please this God for whom you're living your life and to whom one day you will give an account. And here is Hezekiah, you see, and there's a bundle of generosity wrapped up with this man. I mean, this is the thing that endears you to Hezekiah.

He speaks, verse 22 of chapter 30, encouragingly to all the priests. And you will discover that his own generosity is rank in front of everyone else's. As in the third verse, you are shown that the priests do not have sufficient to be able to maintain the ministries.

And you find that the first person who comes to redress the balance is none other than the king himself who gives of his own finances to the work of the Lord. Verse 2 of chapter 31, Hezekiah assigned the priests and Levites to the visions. The king, verse 3, contributed from his own possessions for the morning and evening burnt offerings.

Verse 5, as soon as the order went out that others should be generous, the Israelites generously gave the first fruits of their grain—new wine, oil, and honey, and so on and so forth. There was a day for some of you, listen, when you had very little of this world's goods. You stood in front, some of you, of a church like this, and you gripped the hand of your bride, and there were no guarantees materially.

You had already said, almost with a blush, with all my will, the wealth I thee endow, and knew that that was a twenty thousand pound or a fifty thousand pound mortgage. Those days have now gone. God has blessed you, and you've lived at the parameters of your wealth, and that wasn't what God intended for you to do.

You see, He entrusts us with a largesse, more than we require, and He gives us, not legalistically, He gives us voluntarily the right to use the extra for the advance of His work. The Israelites forgot the principle, but it's embodied in the ministry of our Lord Jesus, who, when He gives, always gives to excess. And the man who pleases God is a man who has an understanding of the attribute of God, who is per se a generous God.

I conclude, how to please the Lord, a mindset that's wholehearted, an anchor point in Scripture, a wide perspective, seeing everything as so-called secular in terms of the sacred, an open purse, disciplined devotions. Look, he sought after his God. That's what it says.

I love the Church of England. I really do. I love its prayer book.

I will often, if I'm at Chichester or somewhere else, get into even song. But one thing I cannot tolerate is when somebody gets up and says, and now a prayer. It's just the way that sometimes it's said, a prayer.

You don't just offer a prayer. Now, that's not just the Church of England that I'm criticizing. It's also ourselves here in Worthingtown.

It doesn't say that Hezekiah offered a prayer. It says that he sought. He sought.

It's the mind, the emotion. It's will. It's everything engaged in this holy exercise of seeking first the kingdom of God.

He sought the Lord. He did this throughout his life. And as a result of that, there is a holy intimacy that develops between him and God, even though he's a king and not a priest, an intimacy that I think is well illustrated by the fact that he knows, as he writes around the Israel community, that God has entrusted a particular task to him in terms of renewing the Passover meal.

The plan, verse 4, the plan seemed right to the king and to the whole assembly. When he sends his letter throughout greater Israel, so to speak, he tells them when he's invited them to return to the God of Abraham and Isaac and Israel. He says that if you come back, the Lord your God is gracious and compassionate.

He will not turn His face from you if you return to Him. He has the audacity, although he's living by the Word of God, to call the Passover meal and to allow people to partake of the Passover, even though they themselves are not ceremonially as clean as they ought to be. But here is the intimacy.

Hear me, friend, and particularly those of you who love Bible study, drop down to the 18th verse. May the good Lord, or the Lord who is good, pardon everyone who sets his heart on seeking God, the Lord, the God of his fathers, even if he is not clean according to the rules of the sanctuary. And the Lord heard, has he cared and healed.

He's not a punctilious sort of man. He's not just bothered about secondary and third issues of doctrine and so forth. They may have their place for debate and what have you.

These people, well, there's a relative uncleanness about them. But nonetheless, they want to get right with the Lord. So bring them into the temple.

Give them the Passover. Let's before the Lord prostrate ourselves, and I as king will lead the prayer of confession. And God heals the land.

You see, the person who knows God, he has this boldness. It's not a brashness. It's not an impudence.

It is a recognition of who God is. And because he feels at home with the Lord, he can come with this bold and intimate language before the Lord, and great joy breaks out in his heart and amongst the people, as you can see. Well, you work the rest of this out for yourself.

The fact of the matter is that he prospered. He prospered. God blesses the man who pleases him.

Look, I don't want a memorial in this church. I've told you that many, many an occasion. But what I do want is one day God be gracious to Tony Sargent that in that critical hour, and I'm not looking forward to the process of death, but I am looking forward to being with Jesus.

In that critical hour, when you pass from this life to the next, I might get what I want more than anything else. Well done, you good and faithful servant. You see, the bottom line, that's all that matters, isn't it? You run your BMW, you have your bigger home and so on and so forth.

I'm not preaching against that. You work these things out yourself. But you can't take them into heaven with you.

There is only one thing that will last throughout eternity, and that is the way that you lived your life as a God pleaser. And this is the challenge for everyone to respond to. Try and please the Lord.

The Apostle Paul says, I've done my task. He's an old man. He's about to flake out.

I fought a good fight. I kept the faith. Henceforth, there remains for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord will give me on that day.

You see, he's done a hezekiah. He knows what's in front. He knows what's in store.

That's the thing he's worked for. Now, did you hear me 30 minutes ago? Make any correction in your life in order to secure that goal, and God bless you.