WAKE UP!

Notes from a sermon heard on Sunday 28 April 2013

Zechariah 4 verses 1 – 14

Verse 6”not by might nor by power but by my spirit saith the Lord”

The background to this book is that God’s people, the Children of Israel had been brought into the land of blessing.  What it cost them when they came into this land in which they are living.  Go back to that night in Egypt when God’s people were in bondage in Egypt under Pharaoh.  He had them for slaves to do his work.  God heard his people crying under oppression.  God still hears today and answers the prayers of his people.  He heard their prayers and he sent down Moses to bring them out of Egypt.  God brought them through the wilderness, across the Red Sea and brought them into the land of blessing.  Imagine what it cost to bring me into God’s salvation today.  Think of it with the bread that was broken, the blood that was shed.  He had to do it all for us that we might be brought into the land of his blessing of salvation.  It cost the God of heaven so much.  The children of Israel were now in the land of blessing and had been there for a number of years but they forgot God.  They thought they had come into this situation by their own strength and power.  God had been left out of their thinking, he had been set aside.  Is that not the society in which we live in today?  God has been set aside and is only used when needed.  God had other plans.  He hadn’t forgotten them.  He had to chastise his people.  He allowed the King of Babylon to come down and defeat the children of Israel and carry them away to captivity because of their rebellion and rejection of God.  The temple of God was raised to the ground by Nebuchadnezzar.  Some 70 years later God moved again and brought them back out of Babylon into Canaan again.  The Babylonian army and nation had fallen by this stage.  God used the Medes and Persians to bring his own people back into the land of Israel.  That is where Zechariah was.  The people were happy to be back in the land and the first thing they did was build up the temple of the Lord.  They laid down the foundations of the house of God then the work stopped.  They settled down.  God brings his word to the prophet Zechariah.  Remember the prophet Ezra - when he got the people back to rebuilding the temple the opposition came from governors and people who didn’t like to see God’s work progress.  Many today don’t like to see the work of God going on.  God comes with great encouragement.  He gives his prophet this great scene.  He says to you “let not your heart be discouraged, don’t get yourself down, it is not by your might and power that you will see things done but by my own Spirit.”  If we are doing things the way God wants us to do he is in the midst of it all.

First of all – the slumber God deals with.  Verse 1 “And the angel that talked with me came again.”  God will use his prophet again another time.  Are we in that position that if God came to us would we recognise his voice?  “and waked me” he is described as a man who is comfortable on his bed.  God has to deal with his sleep before he can begin a work again in the land.  Maybe God has to deal with our slumber today before he can deal with the situation in our nation.  He has to lift you and I out of our slumber so that he will work through you and I.  Before he could show him this vision he had to open his eyes out of sleep.  “Where there is no vision the people perish.”(Proverbs 29 verse 18)  Men and women are losing their souls today.  There are those in our family who are going out into a lost and Christless eternity unless we reach them with God’s saving grace.  God had to awaken his servant from his sleep, awaken him to the dangers all around him, to lay aside the spirit of the age in which he lived in.  It was one of coldness and carelessness.  It is easy to get influenced in such a day but we need to keep ourselves in a place where God can use us.  The danger is we can be asleep in the society in which we are living in and we are oblivious to everything and everyone that is all around us in our world today.  Remember the man in Luke’s gospel – one beggar and the other a rich man.  Two men who lived side by side.  The beggar lived at the gate to the house of the rich man.  He begged for his food day and night.  The beggar died and the angels picked him up and carried him into the kingdom of heaven.  Then the story turns to the rich man living behind the gates.  “In hell the man lifted up his eyes being in torment” reminding us there is a heaven to be gained and a hell to be shunned.  There are those on their way to heaven and home today but there are others on their way to a lost and Christless eternity.  Both are as real as the other.  The rich man could do all sorts of things in hell – he could lift up his eyes, he could see, he could talk, he could plead but now he was awakened to his plight.  Zechariah was being influenced by the people all around him.  We need to be awake that we don’t get into a cold religion today.  One time people were very excited to get the temple built but now they had become complacent.  The condition of the prophet now – he had preached and prayed for so long prophet but fell into the same apathy of the nation.  God has to come and open up his eyes.  We live in a day when men and women are cold to the things of God.  Such an environment exists today.  The church is called to live in that environment today but sadly the church is asleep today.  God is still God and he can still come, touch us, revive us, arm us for the days in which we are living in.  Remember Jonah – when God came to Jonah and spoke to him “I have a word for Nineveh will you go and preach the word of God?”  What did Jonah do?  “He arose” and ran away “from the presence of God.” (Jonah 1 verse 3)  He felt he could either take or leave the word of God.  He got on a ship and fell asleep.  Such was the spirit that had entered into his life.  The old captain of the ship couldn’t believe that Jonah was fast asleep while the waves were raging overhead.  Jonah was out of the will of God and there was danger all around him.  When we get out of the will of God and are not doing what God would have us to do then there’s danger all around us.  Jonah should have been in that city of Nineveh.  Jonah had to be awakened and thrown into the sea.  Paul wrote to Timothy the character of the days before Christ’s return “know also that in the last days perilous times shall come for men, shall be lovers of their own selves” (2 Timothy 3 verses 1 and 2) These are the last days before Christ comes to make his appearance.  The word implies a cloak to be thrown over the top of something.  Paul said to the church at Ephesus “Awake thou that sleepest and arise from the dead and Christ shall give thee light.”(Ephesians 5 verse 14)  30 years later John was asked to write to them “you have left your first love.”  We are living in those days of Laodicea found in  Revelation 3 verses 15 and 16 20 “you are neither cold nor hot .. thou art lukewarm.  There is a slumber God was dealing with here in Zechariah’s day but there was also tremendous blessing ahead.

The scene that Zechariah was to see.  God was to open up the scene before him.  Not the activity of man but the activity of the Holy Spirit.  Will we allow God to work through us to see the sin before us and work through us as a result?