-Transcript-
00:35 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the program.
00:41 Welcome to KJV Cafe. Here we are in the end of a series on zeal, having zeal for the Lord. Oh, you know, what, what exactly does zeal mean? It means great energy or enthusiasm in pursuit of a cause or an objective.
01:02 Do you have zeal for something in your life? Maybe you’re zealous over your family or you have zeal for a pizza night or you have zeal for a certain sports team or you have zeal for a brand of clothes or zeal for the type of job that you do or your employer. You know, having zeal as a is not a bad thing. Amen.
01:29 I mean, if you have zeal, you’re passionate and you’re devoted, you’re living it out. Amen. You’re living, you’re kind of, you’re practicing what you’re preaching.
01:36 You’re doing the talk and the walk. Amen. But when it comes to the things of God, do you have zeal? Do you love what he loves and do you hate what he hates? Do you separate yourself from things that would be an abomination to Him, offensive to Him? And do you run and cling to the things that are great, that are godly, that are what would please Him? You know, godly zeal can do a lot for us.
02:03 And as I’ve mentioned in the previous episodes, godly zeal isn’t just created by us. We don’t wake up one day and say, well, I guess I’ll have godly zeal today. Godly zeal comes from getting close to the Lord.
02:15 It’s a by-product of getting close to God. And as we seek God and we get close to him, we desire to know Him. We grow in knowledge and faith of Him.
02:25 Zeal will come and it’ll come big time. Our text verse, second Kings 10, 16. And he said, come with me and see my zeal for the Lord.
02:36 So they made him ride in his chariot. Who is he? That’s Jehu, who was a commander of the northern Israel army and later on becomes king. And Jehu the king was not perfect.
02:49 Amen. In fact, right after this passage of scripture, he gets in trouble himself. But in this passage of scripture, he is God’s tool to wipe out Baal worship in the land.
03:01 And he does a very effective job of that. In fact, he gets rid of Jezebel. Remember, she was involved with those false prophets of Baal.
03:10 She was putting them up and she wanted anyone that would harm them to be killed as Elijah slayed those 450 false prophets of Baal after they had not been able to call fire down from heaven. Remember, Jezebel was against Elijah and wanted him dead. Well, guess who finally gets Jezebel? That’s Jehu.
03:28 And Jehu doesn’t just get Jezebel, he wipes out the rest of the house of Ahab, which we know is a very evil king. And Jehu also wipes out all of Baal worship, the temple, the idols, and all those that worshiped Baal. And so Jehu did a great thing for God.
03:46 And he brought someone with him, Jehonadab the Rechabite. And this is a father figure there of the Rechabites, which was a really unique people group, a nomadic people group that didn’t build houses, they lived in tents. They didn’t plant vineyards, they didn’t sow seeds.
04:00 And you may say, well, what’s the big deal if you have a garden or not? Back then, sowing seeds would be like using a computer or a cell phone today. It was the culture, it was the way that people traded, it was the way that people lived. And so these people were living by great faith, they weren’t planting seeds, they weren’t having vineyards, they weren’t drinking wine, they were abstaining.
04:24 And they were abstaining not just to abstain, but because they were keeping themselves pure for the Lord. And they are mentioned 200 years later in the Bible, in the book of Jeremiah, that they were tested. God said, go ahead and test them, offer them wine, and they wouldn’t drink it.
04:47 And so the Rechabites, that’s who I’m speaking of as this group, their father figure there was Jehonadab. And Jehonadab is the one that rides with Jehu in the chariot to witness Jehu’s zeal for the Lord. And so we see this great destruction of all the Baal worship.
04:57 And we see an example of zeal in action. We see an example of the legacy of zeal. And we see what God is calling us to do in being zealous for him.
05:07 He put it in his word so that we could understand that maybe there’s things in our life, right? There’s things in our life that we need to get rid of. Maybe there’s false gods. There’s idols in our life.
05:25 Maybe we’ve created an idol. Maybe work has become an idol for us. You know, if all we do is talk about work as adults, and all we focus on is work, and I’m talking about the ministry as much as I’m talking about a day job, amen.
05:32 I got a day job. My wife’s got a day job. We talk about our day jobs a lot.
05:36 And we have to be careful, even ourselves, that that doesn’t become an idol in our lives, that God is greater than that job. And maybe you’re in school, and it’s grades, or it’s classes, or maybe it’s friends and social acceptance. Or maybe it’s a love interest.
05:53 Maybe it’s, again, a sports team. Maybe it’s fishing. I’m not a fisherman, as in I try, but I hardly ever catch anything.
06:01 But I love fishing. And my wife and I would love to go crabbing at the beach and stuff and catch those crabs with old chicken bone or something. Yet, we have to realize, and I guess what I’m saying is I could see how for some fishing would be like their life, it’d be the biggest thing.
06:17 But we have to realize whatever it is, as harmless as it may seem, as godly as it may seem, it should never take the place of God in our hearts. We should be desiring God and seeking God and zealous for God and wiping out those things that take us away from God. In previous episodes, I’ll just recap here.
06:35 We’ve talked about God’s command to be zealous and repent. Revelation 3:19, as many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. Be zealous, therefore, and repent.
06:46 Revelation 3.19 tells us we need to get right with God. And you know what? Our zeal should start with a zeal and a humility to repent before God. We should be excited about repenting.
06:58 And you say, well, why would anyone be excited about admitting they’ve done something wrong and that they’ve transgressed God? Well, number one, you should be really excited about that because God’s forgiving. The Bible tells us that he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So I would be really excited if someone told me I’m ready to go to God and repent.
07:14 The problem is most people have so much pride in their life, either number one, they don’t think they’ve done anything wrong, and number two, if they think or they know that they’ve done anything wrong, they don’t want to go to God about it. Oh, but when we repent, a closeness is with God, that love is just better with God and more pure, that walk with God. Amen.
07:35 We are just living as he wants us to live. He calls us to repent. He knows our condition.
07:42 He knows our form. He knows we need it. He also calls us to be zealous of good works.
07:45 Titus 2:14, who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works. Well, what’s this talking about? It’s talking about Jesus Christ and that what Jesus Christ did on the cross. He paid the ultimate price for our sin debt.
08:04 He redeemed us. He reconciled us to God when we believe on him and his precious blood that saves us from the cost and the debt of sin. And we know the wages of sin, what we get paid for our sin is death.
08:18 And we know that without Christ, we could not be saved beheaded for a devil’s hell. And so Christ paid that amazing cost for us on Calvary so that his righteousness would be imputed to us. That’s the Bible word.
08:32 Amen. And our sin was imputed to him. That’s why he had to die for it on the cross.
08:41 And he was buried three days and risen again. That’s God’s sign of the resurrection, that he is of God, that he is God. Amen.
08:46 And what do we have from that? We have a command in Titus 2:14 that we should be a peculiar people. And we should be zealous. We should be excited.
08:51 We should be looking for good works. Most people, you think about the definition of good works, that’s not something trendy. That’s something you’re doing without getting any reward to do it.
09:03 And most people don’t want anything to do with that. Ask someone to do something really hard and tell them you cannot post on social media. You get no acclaim.
09:13 You get no pay. You get nothing. You are just doing this to benefit someone else.
09:18 And most people will want nothing to do with that. Even if they privately say that, but publicly don’t want to admit that. Most people don’t want to do something where there’s nothing in it for them.
09:28 They always want something in it for them. That’s human nature. And yet, because of what Christ did for us, we should be zealous, excited about doing good works, works that we don’t gain anything out of as Christ did for us.
09:40 And we’re also called in the Bible to edify the church. 1 Corinthians 14:12, even so ye, for as much as you are zealous of spiritual gifts, seek that ye may excel of the edifying of the church. Edify means to instruct or improve someone morally or intellectually.
09:55 We should be excited and zealous, not of the spiritual gifts that God gave us, though that’s great that he gave it to us, but that we could use them to edify and build up others in the church, to bless the church. God gave you a gift for technology. Don’t just use it for profit.
10:10 Use it for the church. God gave you a gift to sing. Don’t just sing for acclaim or money or fame or whatever, but sing for the church.
10:18 Bless the church. Help people get closer to God. Use your gifts.
10:24 God gave you a gift to teach. Well, then teach at the church. Help the church.
10:31 You get the idea. We should be zealous, excited for that. And now here, let’s look at some examples of zeal in the Bible.
10:35 Jehu, we’ve mentioned already, seen that he was zealous to wipe out what God wanted wiped out, and idolatry and wicked leadership was wiped out. Baal worship was wiped out. Jehu is an example.
10:48 How about Phoenus? Israelites at this time of Phoenus had started committing whoredom with the daughters of Moab, which again led to Baal worship and a mixed people group, and God had ordered that not to happen. It got so bad that a couple, an Israelite man and a Moabite woman, went by strutting by Moses himself after God and said, you will not do this. And Phoenus sees it and kills them.
11:13 He stabs them with a javelin and kills them. Numbers 25:11, Phoenus, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, hath turned my wrath away from the children of Israel, while he was zealous for my sake among them that I consume not the children of Israel in my jealousy. And so we see an example of great zeal, and that zeal was rewarded by God.
11:34 He turned his wrath away. Who knows what God could have done? He could have wiped them all out, thousands of them or all of the people together, if Phoenus had not had that zeal for the Lord to say, enough, you’re not going to go strut by Moses and make this a public thing when we’ve called for you to stop. God rewarded Jehu, 2 Kings10:30, and the Lord said unto Jehu, because thou hast done well in executing that which is right in my eyes, and hast done unto the house of Ahab according to all that was in mine heart, thy children of the fourth generation shall sit on the throne of Israel.
12:05 So we see God’s reward for Jehu, that Jehu will have four generations of people sit on the throne of Israel because he did what God wanted him to do. He got Baal worship out of Israel. And we know as you read on in 2 Kings that Jehu falls into sin, and yet God was faithful to allow four generations to rule as a reward for what he had done here on earth.
12:27 And then the Rechabites, I mentioned Jehonadab and the Rechabites, Jeremiah 35:19, therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, Jehonadab, the son of Rechab, shall not want a man to stand before me forever. And so Jehu gets four generations. The Rechabites have a perpetual, eternal servant there before God.
12:50 That’s their reward. Amen. They are so blessed because of their abstaining and because of their purity and because of them loving what God loves and hating what God hates.
12:58 They have been blessed because they took up their cross in this world and they live sacrificially. And they lived as God called them to live, no matter what the culture told them to do, they were blessed. And so the point I’m getting at here is that when we have zeal for the Lord, God will reward us for that zeal.
13:16 And as I mentioned in the beginning, zeal comes from drawing close to him, Amen, repenting, getting right with him, drawing close to him, living as he calls us to live, not getting yoked up in the things or the ways of the world, not trying to please man, but trying to please God. And as we live to please God, and as we live and walk close with God, we can expect and understand that God will bless us and there’ll be a reward. The rewards that I mentioned were both earthly, that was a earthly kingdom for four generations, and heavenly, right? An eternal presence before the Lord.
13:46 And so we see that our rewards would be both earthly and heavenly. We’ll be blessed here on earth as we have zeal for God with peace and following the path that he’s made for us. And we’ll be blessed in heaven with heavenly rewards for our faithfulness.
14:01 So trust God today and have zeal for him, understand what it is and apply it to your life, have zeal for our great God. He is worthy. He is so worthy.
14:11 Christ died for you. The least you can do is live for him. Thank you for listening.
14:17 Take care. God bless. Amen.