Revival and renewal in the Christian life are directly linked to a return to and obedience of the Word of God. Moses' instructions in Deuteronomy emphasize that blessing and prosperity come from tenaciously adhering to God's commandments, statutes, and judgments, which serve as divine instruction and guidance. The sermon illustrates this principle through the examples of Noah, Abraham, and Joshua, highlighting how their faith and obedience to God's word led to national success and spiritual flourishing. Conversely, deviation from God's word, as seen in the sin of Eden and the period of the Judges, results in barrenness, chaos, and judgment, underscoring that true success is measured by obedience, not worldly standards. Ultimately, revival is presented not primarily as a result of prayer, but as a consequence of actively obeying God's word, as demonstrated by figures like Samuel and the revivals under Hezekiah, Josiah, Ezra, and Nehemiah.
Restored with Diffio
Audio restored with Diffio. Diffio processed the original archive recording to reduce noise and produce a cleaner listening version; the original stays available.
Speech quality score (model-estimated, SCOREQ): before 2.77 → restored 4.41
The Lord helping, I would like during the sessions that are at my disposal to speak to you about the centrality, the authority, the importance of the Word of God in the Christian's life, and very particularly the importance of that Word in relation to any sort of revival, renewal, or whatever you want to call it. in our lives individually or collectively, because I am convinced from reading the Scriptures that all revival comes through a return to the Word of God.
However, as a starting off point, I'd like to read a verse or two from Deuteronomy chapter six and going over perhaps into chapter seven and eight, just in passing. Moses is here summing up all that he has to say to the people of God, they're on the borders of the land, and he is laying down the conditions for blessing in their lives as a people. Deuteronomy means the second law. Not that there was a second law, but this is a recapitulation. It is going back over it, a re-emphasizing, a reaffirmation of the very basis.
of their life as the people of God. And he says, Now these are the commandments, the statutes, the judgments, which the Lord your God commanded to teach you, that ye might do them in the land whether you go to possess it. That thou mightest fear the Lord thy God and keep all his statutes and his commandments which I command thee. Thou and thy son, thy son's son, all the days of thy life, that thy days may be prolonged. Hear, therefore, O Israel, and observe to do it. The word it is really in italics there you'll notice.
So it is, don't just hear, but act, perform. Hear, therefore, O Israel, and observe to do, to act. that it may be well with thee, and that ye may increase mightily, as the Lord God of thy fathers hath promised thee in the land that floweth with milk and honey. Now I would like you to go down through these chapters yourself and see how frequently Moses emphasizes the fact that if they obey God, if they cleave tenaciously to the truth that God has given them, then all will be well. He says again and again that it may be well with thee, that thou mayest increase.
And again he says, and states this to Joshua, that thou mightest prosper. If you want to go on, if you want to be a living witness for God, if you want to be what you ought to be, then there must be a clinging to this word. This may sound all very, very first grade stuff to many of you. And yet I think we need to be reminded of it as we shall see as we go on. Because Moses then goes off, and this is what I don't want to be taken up with at the moment. He goes on to state that if they should depart from this word, God would judge them. And one of the judgments he would send upon them would be barrenness, drought and famine and barrenness.
Not merely would they bring about this through their activities, but that God would actively judge them by sending these conditions. And the physical conditions would only be a reflection of the spiritual conditions that had brought them on. And so he says there is judgment for leaving my word. And the only way back from that condition of barrenness, that condition of drought and famine, will be to hear my word. and to get back to it. Not to pray, Mark you. And praying is a very, very marvelous thing. James is going to talk about it a great deal in his letter. And I can see that our messages are going to make contact here and there, that we haven't even discussed with each other what we're going to speak about.
Perhaps we should, but we didn't. And so the Spirit of God will lead in that, no doubt. So Moses says, here is the path to blessing, to progress, to increase, that you may increase mightily. You will go on well. You will flourish as a nation if you only fulfill this one great prescription. Total obedience to all the Word of God. He sums that word up as commandments in verse one, and statutes and judgments. These are words that are repeated again and again in that great Psalm, And as a matter of fact, we have them in other parts of the Scripture too, with others added, of course.
The word commandment doesn't mean something bellowed at you by Sergeant Major. But it has a thought behind it of instruction. It is the orders of God given to his people by way of instructing them as to what they should know and do. In the back of the root meaning of the word is given here, is the idea of instruction, teaching. The word statutes, sometimes called precepts and linked up with precepts, is more like finger posts, signposts. This is the way walkie in it. It is not just teaching in the facts, it is the application of that as to a path.
There is a path which is right. All deviation from that path must be wrong. And the word judgments, of course, does not mean acts of violence poured out by God because of disobedience. It has that sense in certain places, but not like this in the plural. It simply means God's judicial findings about things, like the Supreme Court hands down a judgment on something. This doesn't mean they go out and open fire. but it means that they give a judicial pronouncement as to what it's all about. And God has done that. His Word is full of this.
First of all, it is instruction. Then there are signposts indicating to us how we should walk, where we should go. And by the way, every time you're told, now be sure to keep to the left, you are thereby warned not to go to the right. In other words, Every positive has a negative, and must indeed have a negative. It's very much out of fashion I know these days to be negative. Apparently God hadn't discovered that, because in His commandments, eighty percent of them are negative. Thou shalt not. And if you don't believe in negatives, just as a test, when you go out to the parking lot, disconnect the negative terminal of your battery and see how far you get.
When I say yes to the path to the right, I am saying no to the other paths. And when a young woman says yes to the man who proposes to her, then he believes that she's going to say no to everybody else, and if she doesn't, he should forget it right there. So every positive has a negative. And here we have that idea. There are instructions, there are finger posts, And then there are God's judgments about things. In the book of the Revelation, for example, he says of the first church, You have this, that you hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans. Pardon me, that you hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans.
Which thing I also hate. And the devil has tricked us into, for almost two thousand years, worrying our heart side about who the Nicolaitans were. We don't know who the Nicolaitans were. So please don't ask me at the close of the meeting. Now I have my own idea about who they might have been. But to me this is utterly beside the point. And if Satan can get us preoccupied with who they may have been or may not have been, then he's winning something because he's got our eye off what God is saying, which is, I am glad that the things I object to, you object to them too. I praise you and credit you with this that the thing I hate is hateful to you.
It doesn't matter whether it's the Nicolaitans. Or in our day something else. There are lots of things God says he hates in the Word of God. We're told them again and again and again. The evil speaker, the lying tongue. And that will no doubt come up somewhere in James despite the fact that it's exclusively to preachers. And so God has delivered his judicial findings. And he states certain things that are right and proper and true and just. And that he loves. And he wants to see enough. and other things that are to him repulsive, repugnant, and that he does not want to see. Cleanse yourself from these. Put these things off. Rule them out of your lives.
Those are God's judgments about certain things. Now these judgments will not always be what the world judges them to be. In fact, they will usually be the exact opposite. And so the believer must never listen to what the world says about things in its moral judgments, because the world... is not in a condition to give moral judgments. It is morally blind, insensitive, and totally dead to God and to the values of his book, indeed denying and opposing those values at every turn. Young Christians, do not take your estimate of things from the society, the pagan society in which you live. James is going to tell us, and I hope I don't overdo this referring to James, but I like James too.
James is going to tell us that our conduct is judged by the word, not by the standards of our society, not by the other fellows or girls at school or college, not by our colleagues in business. Well, everybody in business does this. That is not likely to be a reason for you're doing it. That is very likely to be a reason why you should not do it if these men are not Christians. And so we are judged by the Word. That is God's final judgment on everything as to what its qualities are. Now with that background, turn over, if you will, to Joshua chapter one.
Joshua chapter one. We're looking at the positive side of the Word of God as commanded to his people for blessing. Verse two, for the sake of time. Moses, my servant, is dead. Now therefore arise. Go over this Jordan, thou and all this people, into the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel. Look at verse five. There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee. I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. Be strong and of a good courage, For unto this people shalt thou divide for an inheritance the land which I swear unto their fathers to give them.
He's harkened back to what he had said to Moses in Deuteronomy chapter six. Indeed, all of Deuteronomy. Verse seven. Only be thou strong and very courageous that thou mightest fight all the enemies in the land of... Oh, sorry. It doesn't say that, does it? Only be thou strong and very courageous that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law. Which Moses my servant commanded thee. Turn not from it to the right hand or to the left. That thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest.
Do not deviate from my words and all will be well. This is it, not part of the law, all of the law. Not in some things, but in all things. Not just in your religious life, but at every level of your life. This is the path of blessing, adherence, total and absolute, to the truth of God. And he said you may, there's a possibility of deviation to the right or left. Now, I don't imagine that he was thinking about liberal and conservative, our present day uses of them, the left and the right.
But it could be applied that way or any other way you want. This straight line of duty and obedience to the truth of God. We are never excused or pardoned for the slightest deviation from it, one side or the other. and not even middle of the road, but it is the line of the Word of God. This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth. This is what you are to talk about. Thou shalt meditate therein day and night. That is what you are to think about. Thou mayest observe to do, according to all that is written therein. It's to be on your mouth because it's in your mind, and if it's in your mind and your mouth, then it will be in your hands and feet.
All your actions will be according to it. For then shalt I make thy way prosperous. This is the true sign of a prosperous man. Then shalt I have good success. I met a friend in a doctor's office. He happens to be a preacher as well. And we got chatting, and I don't know how the conversation came up, but he told me that His young daughter, young teenage daughter, had brought a friend of hers home. They were going out somewhere. And while his daughter got ready, this friend, who was apparently a very precocious sort of modern young lady, and she asked him what he did, and he told her, and she said, would you say that your life has really been prosperous, that you have got there?
I don't know really, maybe she was going to write an essay on this at school or not, but she was doing some research work anyway. Would you say that you had succeeded, that you had been a success in your life? That took him rather aback, but he said, yes, in the main, I'm very happy with what I have had to do and with where I have gone in it, in spite of much weakness and failure. She looked around at the rather ordinary sort of home that he lived in, and she said, well, It doesn't look very like it. Anybody who had succeeded in her eyes would have lived in a more luxurious sort of place.
And he said, well, that's a matter of point of view, isn't it? Let me read you a verse or two. And he read these verses from Joshua chapter one. Then shalt thou have good success. And he said, young lady, I consider the man to be successful as the man who lives and walks and works according to the Word of God. And that may not appear in the furnishings of the home because we're not at the end of the road yet. I thought the answer was a rather good one. Progress, success, success.
in all that we do is to be measured not in the amount of money that we have amassed, not in the kind of home we live in, not in our position in the business totem pole, but in the extent to which we have been obedient to all the Word of God. Thus shalt thou have good success. Now, I don't want to go any further with that either. I would just like to remind you that the sin of the Garden of Eden was really a departure from the Word of God.
Of course, all sorts of very... ...cons of its creatures into a lake of boiling tar or something just because some silly woman ate an apple. And they think this is very comical, very witty. Of course, the Bible says nothing about that at all, does it? Proves that they haven't even read the Bible, or if they have, that they haven't read it very carefully. Genesis chapter three is the record of a man and a woman who were given God's word and who, instead of keeping that word, turned their back on that word and took a wrong path.
which was listening to another word that appeared very right and very good and very proper to them. The achievement of all that they thought was important. It's good for food, it satisfies the body. It appeals to the eyes that is associated with that nation. It's part of us that might think our life is this body. The truth is that it appeals to all we have. nature. And they weighed the thing up, and it made sense. And all the time there was God's word. Thou shalt not eat of it. And the sin of Genesis three had nothing to do with eating apples.
Apples are not mentioned. It had to do with a deliberate departure from obedience to the word of God. And whenever we turn, we find that that very, very small little remnant of people of God in the Old Testament have been the very opposite. Noah, by faith, he heard the Word of God by faith, moved the fear. He built it an ark. He believed the Word of God. He acted on the Word of God. And you know the rest of the story. Abraham believed God. And he went out. He turned his back not on a very low-level, nomadic sort of society.
The archaeologist Spade has shown us that he lived in an extremely sophisticated society. But he became a pilgrim because God said, this whole society in which you live, I am going to destroy. I am going to destroy it. The whole land of the Tigris and the Euphrates. And look at that once prosperous, green, gorgeous land today. And you have your answer. The very cities in which these men lived are feet, scores of feet, in some place hundreds of feet, beneath the sands of a suffocating desert. And there's nothing to show for it, but ignorance and squalor.
And God said, Out of it, Abraham, it's marked for doom. And Abraham believed God. And with nothing but the word of God for it, he turned his back on the whole society, and he walked out. And from there we have the same thing all the way through. God said when he was about to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah and send those cities underneath the waters of the dead sea in a boiling cauldron of judgment because of the evil that was in them. He said, I can't hide this from Abraham, my friend. And we often stop there. Why would God not hide what he was going to do from his servant Abraham? He tells us quite distinctly, but we don't often read that part of the verse.
God said, Because I know him that he will not only keep my word, but that he will teach his children and his children's children after him to obey my word. God reveals his most intimate secrets to those who are prepared to obey his word. And that's what he's looking for today in our audience. Among you young men and you young women, oh, how glad we are to see you here. And when we refer to you as younger people, don't make the mistake of thinking we're harping on this young people thing. We're not. But those of us who are older realize that most of the major choices and decisions of our lives are already made and can it well, for the most part, be unmade or remade.
But you have your lives before you. And I plead of you. Listen to God speaking through his word. No departure from any part of this word. That is the path of true success, of prosperity, of going forth mightily, of being fruitful, of occupying the land that God has given us. Obedience to his word. Noah, Abraham, Joshua. We read in the book of Judges, the beginning of the book of Judges, that all the years that Joshua lived, and that the men who succeeded Joshua, whom he had taught and trained, during those years all went well with Israel.
So we're told that people obeyed God, and the nation went forward, and they prospered, and they kept on occupying the land. Oh, there was failure. They didn't do it as well as God intended them to do it. But during the lifetime of this godly man, who along with Caleb, by the way, had spent forty long years in the desolations of the Sinai Peninsula, through no fault of his own, he wanted to go on into the land forty years earlier. And God said, No, this people will turn back. I've often tried to think of how are these two men Caleb and Joshua must have felt as at Cailish Barnea, they turned their back on the land of promise, and they went into the desert again with a disobedient, disloyal, rebellious people.
And they spent forty years in that desert because of other men's stubborn disobedience to the word of God. And I also wondered why God called these men to do that, why it was necessary for them to do it, until it dawned on me, that I knew all that generation were going to die. that is from the years of responsibility and upward. They were going to die. And somebody was needed to teach the new rising generation the word of God. And that somebody was Joshua and Caleb. And they gave their lives to teach the word of God. And all the years that they lived, the nation of Israel prospered.
And the men and women of that generation whom they had taught, Israel still prospered for the same reason. But immediately following that, this awesome third generation collapse took place. And we read in the Book of Judges things that I wouldn't care to read in a public mixed gathering such as this. This people of God from the lofty heights that they had reached under Moses and Joshua, coming in over the land, seeing the walls of Jericho fall down, seeing the other nations running in front of them when they didn't even have tools of war, weapons of war to fight them, but God fought the battles from all the richness of the tabernacle ritual, all the beauties and glory of God living in the midst of them.
In the book of Judges, it is one of the most tawdry, disgusting books in the whole of the Bible. So far as morals were concerned, animals wouldn't have behaved the way they behaved in the book of Judges. So far as administration was concerned, it was total chaos. God sent them leaders who brought them out of captivity to the nations that they should have had under them. But instead of that, time after time after time, they departed from God and they only were brought back through men like Gideon and Jephthah and others who brought them back to the Scriptures. What is the title, the cue to the failure of the book of Judges rather?
after Joshua was gone and the men that he had taught were gone. It says there was no king, no leader in Israel in those days. Every man did what was right in his own eyes. I think this is a good idea. Why don't we try it? It doesn't seem that there's anything wrong with it and God hasn't specifically prohibited it. And after all, if it gets people, why shouldn't we give it a whirl? Are we out to get people? Or are we out to please God? Now, by getting people, I'm not talking about seeing people saved or led on in the things of God, but the largeness of the audience doesn't really indicate necessarily the blessing of God.
You could have this place packed, I suppose, if you had a pair of performing seals here or crickets or almost anything. That will bring people. But that wasn't the point. That wasn't the point at all. They had departed from almost every single aspect of the Word of God. They had got to the stage where there were neither priests nor prophets nor anybody else among them, where they took one of those vestments or not, took one of the vestments, a copy of a priest's effort, and they hung it up on the wall and they made an idol out of it. and make sacrifices to it. And then they employed a full-time worker, a priest to come and be their little pastor there.
And he actually became a priest of that effort. Can you imagine? The insanity of it all. And they ended up by slaughtering each other, by living in incest and filth and dirt. Every man doing what he considered to be alright. And the whole national course is downwards. Good success comes from tying this book between your eyes and on your hands, which doesn't mean as the Jews take it to mean today. You see them around Jerusalem at the wall and all over the place with what they call their phylactries. They have a little piece of, a little box, like a pillbox with a strap on it, a little piece of the scripture on it, and they put it around their head, and they think they're fulfilling what God said to Joshua, tie it between your eyes.
And they tie it on their wrists, and they make a big thing of this. And on the doors, even of the hotels, you'll find a little script thing pin beside the door and there's a few words of the Hebrew scripture in it and that's supposed to be putting it on your doorposts but of course as has been brought before us as such the Pharisees did all of this and at heart they were black-hearted liars cheese hypocrites and fools into the bargain shoddy imitations of the real thing carrying out all the outward movements of the things And he said, Inside you are like graves, quite washed on the outside, but inside full of rotting bones, decomposing human flesh.
That's what you're like. And that's how Israel ended at the end of the Book of Judges. Turn with me quickly to First Samuel. And here we have the first revival. The First Revival. First Samuel, Chapter Three. In the midst of this dreadful failure toward the end of the book, at the end rather, of the book of Judges, there is a woman, and that woman has a burden on her heart. I used to read this as though it were just purely and simply a matter of jealousy, feminine jealousy, Within the home, the other wife, Penina, had children.
She had none, so she got mad about it. That may have been true at the beginning. It certainly was not how the story developed. This woman went to God, and she asked God for a male child. Not a baby, but a male child. I believe this woman in her heart wanted a profit from God. She saw the wreckage round about. As she went up year by year to the hearts of God, the tabernacle which was at Shiloh, she saw the sons of the high priest Eli committing fornication with the women, probably a modified form of rape of the women who brought sacrifices.
Can you imagine the priests of God? And the father too blind to see all that was going on. And when he did get reports, he said, My sons, it's not a very good thing that you're doing. And people said, He broke down as a father. I'm not too sure about that. He was a very old man, and they had children and possibly grandchildren of their own. And they were out of his jurisdiction as a father. But they were not out of his jurisdiction as the high priest. They should have been expelled from their jobs immediately. That's where Eli fails. The home life was long since past. Maybe he failed there too.
But the scripture doesn't say anything about that. It just says they were evil men. And he allowed them and permitted them to stay on in the priesthood. And so this woman, as she went up, would see this kind of carry on. And these gluttonous men sending their servants to stick their pronged fork. into the very best of the sacrifices and hack off all the best joints, the best parts of the meat that should have been burned to God. And they were taking it and eating it, taking what was due to God. He said, Oh God, give me a man child to be brought up for you. Give me a son, a male child.
And if you do, I will give him back to you and he will come here and learn about you. Now I read in chapter three, first Samuel. The child Samuel ministered unto the Lord before Eli. The word of the Lord was precious in those days, meaning scarce. That's what the word means in the Bible. Diamonds are precious because there aren't so many of them. If there were as many diamonds as there are gravel, the price would be approximately the same. But the word of God was precious because it was scarce. There was no open vision. Now this was true all the way around. There was no vision. There was no word. There was no prophet. There was no glory. The very ark at the end of this little story in a chapter or so is torn out of the tabernacle and taken away and the Philistines get hold of it.
There is no anything. No word from God and no open vision. It came to pass at that time when Eli was laid down. Now go down to verse nineteen. Samuel grew The Lord was with him and had let none of his words fall to the ground. And all Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, knew that Samuel was established to be a prophet, a mouthpiece of the Lord Jehovah. And the Lord Jehovah appeared again in Shiloh, for the Lord revealed himself to Samuel in Shiloh by the word of the Lord.
I'd like you to underline that in your minds if you have any objection to underlining your Bibles. He revealed himself to Samuel by the word of the Lord. Not just the word of God. The word of Jehovah, the authoritative covenant keeping, eternal one. The one whose name is often given to us, as we've already heard in the New Testament, by that tremendous word, the Lord, the owner, the possessor, the disposer, the total one. the one above all others. And so, Samuel is a man who has God's word revealed to him in the midst of the darkness, and the story of his life is the story of revival.
He was the man who stood before the King of Israel and said, Listen, you offered sacrifices. To obey is better than sacrifices. God is not interested in your sacrifices because they are based on disobedience. He told you to destroy it and you didn't do it. Now God is going to tear the kingdom from you because you didn't understand that obedience to the word of God is the very basis of every success in the life of his people. Samuel had said this when he went, he had said it in actions when he went to anoint one of Jeffy's sons. God had said, go and anoint a new king.
So away he went. And he looked at seven of these sons, great brawny generals or what have you, in the army of Israel, courtiers, in Saul's camp. And he looked over them all, and he says, the Lord hasn't told me to anoint any of these. Well, those are the men. Now, I imagine that if They had run these men's qualifications through a computer and run David's through a computer. They probably would have chosen some of these fellows. They had presence. They had charisma. They had personality. They were men who were high in favor at court. There were men who had education in kingly behavior.
They were men of experience. They had made it because we read that they were leaders in the army of Israel. What was David doing? He was looking after the sheep. The job that's given to the kid brother throughout Africa. The kid goes and looks after the domestic animals. Even the people who would be looked on by others as being perhaps mentally deficient. They're given the job. The cripples. Those who are not very smart. The village idiots. Anybody can look after a few goats or sheep or cattle. So these are the people who get the job throughout this type of society. There's only one more left. Well, he said, Samuel, we're not going to have supper till we see him.
And then he came and the Lord said, that's the man. Samuel was a man who did not judge according to the standards of the society around about him. He's going to bring the people of God back. I believe this is national revival number one. Samuel then starts a circuit of Bible teaching in the nation. And he goes around four of the prominent cities of Israel every year. and he listens to what the people are saying, and he teaches them the ways of God. Now, prayer is involved, too, because he said, God forbid that I should sin against God in ceasing to pray for you.
He was a man of prayer. But I would like you to notice that in all the revivals to which I am going to refer you now and throughout the other sessions that fall to my responsibility, that revival came not. directly as a result of prayer. Now, if you feel very angry about that, let's not get angry with each other. You can feel whatever you want to about the Scriptures. But again and again we have failure among the people of God, and when we have this failure, the answer is, get back to my word. Obey me. Even in the case of Joshua, we have one very tiny little illustration of this, and yet a very, very solemn one.
They went up against Jericho. He was prospering. The trumpets blew, and Joshua marched around with the people, and the ark was there in all its glory, and the pillar cloud was on top of the ark. And as they marched around, they blew the trumpets, and the walls of Jericho fell, and every man went in right opposite him, and they slew the whole city. They were victors, triumphant, marvelous. And then they got into a slump. And they went up against a little... county town, a little market town, a little place of no importance called AI or whatever way you want to pronounce it. And as they went up against this, they were driven like a bunch of rabbits. And Joshua said, we better pray about this thing.
So he got into the presence of God and he prayed and prayed and prayed. What has happened, Lord? Are you going to help us or aren't you? And he's very much taken up in prayer. Now, please, Do not misunderstand me as ridiculing prayer. I am not. For I believe that prayer is one of the most important components of the Christian life. But there are times when the answer is not prayer but obedience. Pray for me because I've met this fellow and he's a very nice fellow and I need guidance. Is he a Christian? No, he isn't, but I... You see, there there's no good praying.
God's not going to change his word. God says that a believer is not to be married to an unbeliever, and all the praying that you could ever do will never change one single word of God's holy scriptures. There is no good praying about guidance in something on which God has delivered his judicial finding, his judgment. It is wrong from every viewpoint. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Now Joshua is making a real good job of praying, and God said to him, Joshua, why are you here on your face before me? This is not a time for praying. Get up and judge the sin that's there. I told you not to do something, and it has been done.
Well, Lord, why don't you do it? Why don't you just strike a whole lot of them down? Now, Joshua didn't say that. But I'm supposing, pretending that he did. Do you think God was going to do that? No, he wasn't. He wasn't. And sometimes even elders indulge in this little trick. and it never works. We'll pray that God would take care of this dirty, ugly situation. And God is saying to you elders, no. If I start judging, I will also judge you. For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged. But if we do not judge ourselves, then God will step in and He will judge all, including those who did not make the proper judgment in the first place.
God is saying to Joshua, Prayer is not what is needed right now. You have failed. There is backsliding. There is defeat. There is a loss of joy. Instead of the triumphant cheers of Jericho, they are wailing because they have been driven like a bunch of fools from the walls of a little ten-cent time. And God said, this is not the time. Don't pray to me. The responsibility lies with you. Go and put right what is wrong. And I will bless. Now that is the path, I believe, the true path to revival and restoration. By all means, let us pray. But if we pray, we might also pray, Lord, show us what is wrong, that we might put it right.
They had to go and find out. And so, throughout all of these areas in which we have read now and in which we are going to read, revival has always come as a result of a return to implicit obedience to the Word of God. Now we're going to read on other occasions, just so you can be thinking about it, we're going to read about the first three kings of Israel. Saul, David, and Solomon. Saul was a man who never once obeyed God voluntarily and fully. Never once he was a rebel from the start.
And he ended in disaster and destruction. David, the second king, by the way, each of them was given forty years. The number which speaks of testing, approbation, putting to the proof. Forty years in the wilderness. Forty days in the mount in the presence of God. Forty days in the wilderness tested the Lord Jesus Christ. It's the period of testing and approval. And each one of these kings had forty years. David, sorry, Saul never once obeyed God voluntarily and fully and happily.
David, David was a man after God's own heart. He slipped and he fell grievously and terrifyingly. But he never was happy in it. Oh how I love thy law. Oh how I love thy law. He said, Your word is more to me than my dinner, than my food day by day. I have an aching hunger after this word. My heart pants like a stag being hunted, and it pants for the rivers of water. And that's the way my very heart pants after you and after your word. This is the man who always obeyed God. He slipped, he fell, but his desire was always after God.
Solomon, the third king, was one who gave partial obedience, sometimes on, sometimes off, who started off well, but who ended up very, very badly. Under political pressure, he married a lot of wives to consolidate treaties and form all sorts of leagues with the kings round about it. But there was also a great deal of lust about it, and we're told that from the Word of God. He loved many foreign wives. These three men tell us exactly what the picture is going to be. Forty years under a man who never obeyed, a king who never obeyed from the heart, forty years under one who always wanted to obey from the heart, no matter what it cost him, and forty years under a man who, like a lot of us here today, myself included, in and out, off and on, and he sowed the seeds of the destruction of the nation.
For it was because of his behavior that his son Rehoboam was thrown off the, not thrown, but torn. The nation was torn in two. And that finally that idolatrous northern section of it went into captivity under the Assyrians, and the southern intercaptivity under the Babylonians. And it all started with the introduction of idolatry under Solomon. Partial obedience. beginning well, but not going on very well. And it's all based on to obey or not to obey the Word of God. And we're going to look at three other great revivals in the Old Testament, if God will, in the other occasions.
And one was under Hezekiah, one under Josiah, and one under Ezra and Nehemiah. I wondered last night when the scriptures were read in Nehemiah chapter eight, whether my whole subject was going to be taken away from me then. But it wasn't. It was just reinforced. We're going to read about these revivals and how they came about. And my own solemn conviction, and I have a burden before God about this, my own solemn conviction is that revival always and only comes through our returning to obedience to the Word of God. Prove me now and see if I will not send you such a blessing as you shall not be able to receive.
prove you how. Bring the tithes into the store. Keep the feast. Keep my word. Obey my voice. That's how it will come about. That's how it always comes about. May God prepare our hearts to accept this truth. Trust and obey. There's no other way to be happy than to trust and obey. May God bless His word to us.