Nothing To Offer

Total desolation. That's what was left in the wake of a great locust plague that swept across the land in Joel's day. This vast army of insects literally stripped the land of all its fruitfulness. Joel describes it this way... "The seeds die in the parched ground and the grain crops fail. The barns stand empty, and granaries are abandoned! How the animals moan with hunger!" (Joel 1:17-18). The fields were bare. No grain. No grapes. No olive oil. The rug had just been pulled out from under the feet of the nation. Think of it. These were desperate times!

Amid Joel's lament, we read this unusual statement. "Dress yourselves in burlap and weep, you priests! Wail, you who serve before the altar! Come; spend the night in burlap, you ministers of God. For there is no grain or wine to offer at the Temple of your God" (1:13).

Grain and wine were more than just food and drink. Grain and wine were essential elements in Old Testament temple worship (Genesis 35:14; Exodus 29:38-46; Leviticus 2:1-16; 6:14-18; 7:9-10; 10:12-13; 23:13, 18, 37; Numbers 28:3-8; 6:1-21). The grain offering and the drink offering were acts of worship to the Lord. No grain or wine in the land meant no grain offerings or drink offerings. God was not receiving the worship He deserved. The means of their worship had literally been eaten up! Joel was calling the people to brokenness.

We are no different than those of Joel's day. Worship is not offered because there is nothing to offer! We gather every Sunday to "worship" together, but often times our very motivation to worship has been "eaten up" by everything else. The meaningless things of the world have choked out our love and adoration of our Savior. God is worthy of our deepest heartfelt worship that transcends a church service and bleeds over into our lives. I think we can all agree, in our lives or in our churches, God does not receive the worship He deserves. Does that break our hearts? It should. As ministers of God, we should weep over the absence of the glory of God in our churches. Where is the desperation for God in our worship?

There is hope for the barren field of your heart. God says, "Turn to Me now, while there is time. Give me your hearts. Come with fasting, weeping, and mourning... Perhaps you will be able to offer grain and wine to the Lord as before" (2:12, 14). God promises to restore what the locusts have eaten if we will turn to Him. He loves us so much! He wants our hearts. How could we not be desperate for our great God?

The King and I

There is a central theme that seems to permeate my life right now. It has invaded my prayer life, my study of Scripture, and consumes my thoughts. It is desperation. While reading the other day, I came across this passage in Isaiah 38. 

King Hezekiah got some bad news. God's prophet had just told him that he was going to die. "Get your affairs in order. Things aren't looking good, Hezekiah." This was the word of the Lord. It seemed it was a done deal. But Hezekiah didn't lie down and die. He got desperate. He prayed out of utter desperation for God to have mercy. The Bible says that God replied, "I have heard your prayer. I have seen your tears."

I believe that we don't see answers to prayer because we're not desperate. Furthermore, I believe we don't pray because we're not desperate. Someone has said, "Prayer that touches the heart of God is born out of desperation."

Just recently, I knelt at an altar with others crying out to God for healing for a very sick woman in our church. As I listened to the brokenness in the voices of those praying, the sniffles, and outright weeping, I thought of the prayer of Hezekiah. The Scripture says that he "wept bitterly." As I prayed I also was convicted. I was broken that God's house is only a house of prayer when our circumstances become desperate enough. The truth is, if we could really see our spiritual condition, we would be desperate more often than we are. Desperation doesn't depend on our physical circumstances as much as how we view our circumstances. I think we are often blind to how needy we really are.

It is so easy to "do" church, go about our lives and not see our desperate need for Jesus. Michael Catt, the pastor of Sherwood Baptist (the church that produced Facing the Giants and Fireproof) says, "I believe we won't seek God until we are desperate. If you aren't desperate, it's because you've got your head in the sand."

We talk about how our nation is in such moral decline, but are we really broken about it? We boast in our fellowship among the body of Christ, but are we broken over the lost all around us? We're not desperate. The fact that we're not desperate ought to make us desperate! Oh God, make me more desperate!

If we cry out to God, He will hear us. He will see our tears and He will answer us. God is so eager to answer the prayers of His desperate children. In his book, Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire, Jim Cymbala says, “God is attracted to weakness. He can’t resist those who humbly and honestly admit how desperately they need Him.”

Let's get desperate for revival. God wants it more than we do.

The Responsibility of the Gospel

God came down to us, lived a perfect life, died for us, rose from the dead, ascended to Heaven, and is coming again. That's the gospel. That's the good news, right? 

As followers of Jesus we have been commanded to share the good news with everyone, across the street and around the world. Everybody who takes Jesus' words in Matthew 28:18-20 to heart would agree that this is our mission as the Church. But what is the good news really? In our modern evangelistic methods, I think we've neglected a crucial element to the gospel. We've left out the bad news. Bad news is what makes the good news so good! Let me explain.

A few years ago, at the age of 24, I sat in a doctor's office with my wife and listened as the diagnosis was pronounced. "You have cancer." (I don't remember his exact words, but he got the point across anyway!) He then began to explain to us that it was treatable and explained to us the steps we would be taking toward healing.

But what if it had happened differently...

Let's just imagine my wife and I waiting for the doctor to come into the examination room. He enters holding a manila folder and greets us with a smile and a handshake. He sits down, opens the folder, and proceeds to give us an exhaustive overview of medical history. He then elaborates on the great advances in cancer research that have been made in recent years. He speaks very highly of several cancer specialists in the area and states that he would recommend them to any of his patients. The doctor then stands up, says, "Have a great day" and exits the room. My wife and I have a puzzled look on our face. "What was that all about?" we ask ourselves.

The doctor had left out one important fact. He neglected to inform the patient of the cancerous growth rapidly growing inside their body! Nothing the doctor said really mattered if the patient didn't know how sick he really was. Thank goodness the doctor told me the truth!

That may sound foolish, but isn't that what we've done with the gospel in America? In an effort to be seeker-friendly and sensitive we have neutered the good news to nothing more than a self-improvement program.

The truth is that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). That means that because of our very nature and willful rebellion against God and His law, we are alienated... separated from God without any hope of being reconciled with Him in and of ourselves. Because of our love of sin and hatred of God we deserve hell. There is nothing in us that would seek to change that. Our hearts are hard. We have an irreversible disease that has clouded our judgment and threatens to destroy us. That's very bad news.

The good news is that a Savior, Jesus, sought us out to save us. He loves us. He didn't just tell us how He feels about us. He demonstrated it. He died for us even before we would think to give Him the time of day (Romans 5:8). He took the punishment that we deserved so that we could be found guiltless before the throne of God. He defeated sin - the sin that makes us a slave to it. He defeated death - the death that seeks to swallow us up. He rescued us.

Nobody like to be the bearer of bad news, but it is essential to a right understanding of the gospel. We carry that responsibility.