The Heart of Revival and Revitalization, Part 4: Opposition Doesn't Have to Be a Bad Thing Ezra 4:1-5 A few months ago, I was privileged to be able to buy a new sectional couch for my wife. We had been through a series of free and cheap couches off Craigslist and various other places and nothing seemed to fit right or last very long. So finally I was able to take her to American Furniture Warehouse and out of the gazillion couch sets they have there, we were able to pick what we really wanted. We got it home and started bringing in the pieces and everything seemed to be going great...until we got to the last piece...which just happened to be the biggest piece. I'm sure you can see where this is going. We tried it one way, then another and another. Every time we would get wedged between the ceiling, floor and a wall somewhere. Doors came off hinges, closet doors and light fixtures were removed. We turned and twisted and pushed to no avail. That piece was NOT going in. We were ready to give up. I am a stubborn person by nature, so it takes a lot to get me to give up. But I simply could not see a way to have victory in this situation. I was on the verge of admitting defeat. Then Angie asked if it would fit through the deck door, which of course it would if we could get it up on the deck. Now her idea was to ask for help and to get several people to help me lift it up onto the deck. That would have been the smart thing to do. But this isn't a sermon about being smart. This is a sermon about not giving up. So my solution looked more like this (show picture).
Have you ever been tempted to give up? I know you have. But have you ever been tempted to give up when you knew you were pursuing God's will for your life? Doesn't it seem sometimes like when we begin to truly pursue God's will for our lives, everything begins to go wrong? We are tempted to think, "God, I'm doing what you asked. Why isn't this easier? Don't you want to bless me for my obedience?" But, you see, Jesus never promised that following Him would be easy, did He? In fact, He promised just the opposite. He said things like: "In the world you will have tribulation," (John 16:33) and, " Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account," (Matthew 5:11 ESV) and, "Don't be surprised if the world hates you." I don't know about you, but it seems I face all kinds of resistance and obstacles and difficulties when I am praying for revival in my heart and pursuing a closer relationship with God. I commit to spending more time in prayer and it suddenly seems I have fifty more things to do every day. And when I try to sit down to read my Bible, there is always something else that needs my attention. When you face opposition in pursuing God's will for your life, you have a couple of choices: fight or flight. We have to keep in mind that opposition is not always a sign that we are doing things wrong. It is often a sign that you are headed in the right direction. That's why Bucky always says when bad things start happening, "Well, we must be doing something right." Here's what I want to encourage you to do: *When opposition tries to keep you from pursuing God's will, This is the lesson we learn from the Israelites as they continued their efforts at rebuilding the temple in Ezra 4. Unfortunately, we learn it from their negative example. They were pushing towards revival. They were attempting to Reach UP to God in worship through rebuilding the temple. They faced all kinds of resistance and opposition. And they gave up. At least temporarily. Take a look at the beginning of Ezra 4. "Now when the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard that the returned exiles were building a temple to the LORD, the God of Israel, they approached Zerubbabel and the heads of fathers' houses and said to them, Let us build with you, for we worship your God as you do, and we have been sacrificing to him ever since the days of Esarhaddon king of Assyria who brought us here. (Ezra 4:1-2 ESV)
You may be thinking, "That doesn't sound like opposition to me. Sounds like they wanted to help." That is true and yet the author calls them "adversaries." Just who were these people? They were the neighbors to the north. Remember that before they fell, Israel had broken into two nations, a northern kingdom (Israel) and a southern kingdom (Judah). The northern kingdom was defeated by the Assyrian Empire in 722BC, 136 years earlier than the southern kingdom's fall to Babylon. Evidently the strategy at that time to keep defeated kingdoms from resurging and revolting was to take the people out of their homeland and scatter them in exile. However, they didn't want the land to lie unused and the cities to fall apart, so they would bring in people from other conquered areas to repopulate. This is described for us in 2 Kings 17. It tells of the Assyrian king, who we find out here in Ezra 4 was named Esarhaddon, bringing people from all these other defeated countries and placing them in the cities of Samaria. Evidently God raised up lions who began killing these people off because they did not fear Him, so the king sent back one of the exiled priests to teach them the ways of the Lord. So these men were not lying when they told Zerubbabel that they worshipped and sacrificed to the Lord. However what they did not mention, and what Zerubbabel and Jeshua must have known, was what we read in 2 Kings 17:33, "So they feared the LORD but also served their own gods, after the manner of the nations from among whom they had been carried away." Zerubbabel and Jeshua saw these men and their offer to help rebuild the temple as adversaries and opposition because they knew their allegiance to their false gods would eventually infiltrate the Israelites and keep them from truly worshipping and serving the One True God. So one of the things we can learn here is that opposition can come from anywhere. Sometimes the worst opposition in pursuing revival can come from those who seem like friends. Once Zerubbabel and Jeshua refused their offer to "help," we see these people's true colors coming out as they began their full scale opposition to the rebuilding of the temple. "Then the people of the land discouraged the people of Judah and made them afraid to build and bribed counselors against them to frustrate their purpose, all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, even until the reign of Darius king of Persia." (Ezra 4:4-5 ESV) Now we aren't talking about just a little bit of opposition here. If they began rebuilding around 537BC and Cyrus continued to reign until 530, followed by his son Cambyses and then Darius didn't come along until 522, that's over 15 years of opposition. And if we jump down to verse 24, we see the response of the Israelites to this opposition: "Then the work on the house of God that is in Jerusalem stopped, and it ceased until the second year of the reign of Darius king of Persia." (Ezra 4:24 ESV) They quit. Gave up. At least temporarily.
And the opposition didn't stop there. Ezra jumps ahead in history to describe other persecution and opposition that Israel faced in their attempts to be revived as a people and revitalized as a nation. In verse 6, he tells about an accusing letter written to King Ahasuerus (also known as Xerxes) who was the king we read about in the book of Esther and ruled 50 years later. Then he describes a similar letter written to the next king, Artaxerxes, which stopped the rebuilding of Jerusalem. And we read in Nehemiah 4 how the opposition continued even after he returned there to continue the rebuilding. You add it all up and it amounts to around 100 years of opposition to God's people pursuing His will for their lives. Why didn't God make it easier for them? After all, they were His people right? And they were doing what He wanted them to do, right? So why all the opposition, resistance, persecution? Why was it such a struggle? We believe that our God is sovereign and that nothing happens without His permission. So that must mean that it was within His will to allow these struggles to happen. We probably have some of the same questions about our own struggles too, don't we. Let's think about this for a minute. What would it be like if we had no struggles when we try to follow God's will in our lives? Would we give praise and glory to God for those victories? I think we know ourselves better than that, don't we. We would end up saying, "Hey, look what I did! Isn't that awesome. God asked me to do something and I did it. Yay me!!" We need those struggles to remind us how pathetic we are and how desperately we need Him. Also, if we were cruising along with no opposition, no struggle everything easy what would happen when we came to a hard time. We'd fall flat on our faces, wouldn't we? When an athlete is trying to get stronger, what does he do? He lifts weights, works out, runs harder and farther. Pushing against the resistance tears his muscles down so they are build back stronger. In the same way, the small struggles, the resistance, the opposition we face in life help to shape us and strengthen us for bigger challenges that we will face down the road. So *When opposition tries to keep you from pursuing God's will, We have an adversary, don't we. His name is Satan and he will do anything within his power to keep you from pursuing God's will in your life. Paul said, "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places." (Ephesians 6:12 ESV) And Peter warned us, "Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour." (1 Peter 5:8) So we shouldn't be surprised, should we, when we start praying for revival and suddenly things start going wrong. When we feel distant from God. When it is challenging to pray. When temptation seems stronger than ever.
When that happens, don't panic. Don't think that the sky has fallen and all is lost. Remember, this is normal. Remember that God is still in control. Use opposition to your advantage. *When opposition tries to keep you from pursuing God's will,