Power is a dangerous thing. History is littered with men and women who started well, gifted, humble, and blessed by God. and somewhere along the way, began to believe their own press. Today, on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindahl returns to one of the Old Testament's most sobering biographies. It's part of his series called How Great Is Our God.
In this message, we'll see a king who had everything and lost it all in a single moment of breathtaking pride. His story is a mirror. and what it reflects may surprise you. Glorious worshipful admiration. Highest praise.
Splendor. Radiant beauty. Magnificence. Circle of light. How important it is that we remember.
That that marks our God. And no other. To him belongs the glory. To him goes all the credit. To him we give our applause.
To him we stand in awe before him. How easy to mix up. The special delight of being chosen by God. And then feeling a sort of a heightened sense of pride. Almost a smugness that I am among the elect.
And you're not. And therein lies so many of our struggles. Osgen hits at this in his wonderful book, The Call. I say it's wonderful because it is my favorite of Os Guinness's books. It's the only one I understand, so it's my favorite.
And in it, he writes this that is worth hearing. Listen closely. The reverse side of calling is the temptation of conceit. All truth in a fallen world is vulnerable to distortion. In fact, each truth has its own foreseeable distortions that are its shadow side.
I like the way he puts that. Each truth has a shadow side. He continues. The closeness between calling and conceit is easy to see. After all, to be called is to hear God whisper three things to you in a hundred different intimate ways.
You were chosen. You are gifted. You are special. Let those three things sink in for longer than the first precious moments. and you will inevitably hear another voice, honeyed and smooth.
Yes. You really are chosen. Mm. Gifted. Special All too soon, if you are anything like most of us, you will find yourself saying in response to the devil's echo.
of God To yourself, of course, never out loud. I'm chosen. I'm gifted. I really must be special. And before you know it, the wonder of calling.
has grown into the horror. of conceit. I know nothing more than to challenge all of us with a reminder that being chosen is an act of grace, not a cause for conceit. To be a part of a ministry that has grown like this is an act of grace. Envied by many.
and unfortunately sought By some. Easy to feel a little A little smug toward the rest of humanity. who aren't chosen. Who aren't gifted. who aren't special.
Let's never go there. Let's never let that happen. That's what I Was thinking about when God led me to the life of a king. whose biography appears in second Chronicles chapter twenty six. What a study in contrast.
He's not the only one, but he is among the most eloquent examples. Um a king everyone admired and then experienced a moment when everything changed. and ultimately became a man nobody respected. His name is Uzziah. I don't know about you, but I smiled when I returned to the story and found that.
Verse 3 of 2 Chronicles 26, he was 16 years old when he became king. Ha ha ha ha ha. Yeah. Remember when your son was 16? Aren't you glad he wasn't appointed king of anything?
Aren't you glad you weren't? Uzziah. and for fifty two years until he turned sixty eight. He is the king of the land and what a man he was. He was a fixed star.
upon which many people navigated their lives. I mean, look at his story. He did right in the sight of the Lord, verse 4. You can't beat that. He continued to seek God in the days of the great prophet Zechariah, as he should have done.
As long as he sought the Lord, God prospered him.
So wealth came his way, and prestige and prominence, fame surrounded the throne of Uzziah. Don't stop there. He went out and warred against the Philistines and he whipped them, the ancient enemies of the Jews. If that wasn't enough, verse 7: God helped him against the Philistines and against the Arabians who lived in Gerbal and the Meonites and the Ammonites. And his fame extended to the border of Egypt.
We're talking famous. His name is a household word among the people. of the land. And he became very strong. You love Uzziah because of his inventive, creative ability.
Even applied to battle and warfare. Look at verse 9. He built towers in Jerusalem at the corner gate and the valley gate. And he put corner buttresses there and fortified them. He built towers in the wilderness and hewed many cisterns for he had much livestock.
Both in the lowland and the plain, he had plowmen and vine dressers in the hill country. The fertile fields. He loved the soil. I like guys like that. He's just a farmer at heart.
He liked to get his hands dirty. Yeah. Just one of us. You'd see him at times with a livestock and looking over the fields. What a guy.
He protected us as a nation. Enemies cowered before him, and armies moved with his thumbs up, and heads rolled with his thumbs down. This man is powerful. creative and inventive. continues to Lead the army of over three hundred seven thousand men, verse thirteen, and could wage war with great power.
And all of them helped the king. And verse 15 concludes: his fame spread afar. He was marvelously helped. Until he became strong. Every once in a while, it is appropriate that you pause.
and let the truth in. Mark that in your Bible. Until Something snapped. We're not told what it was. I've had more than one this morning in the services before this one.
Ask me what was it? We're not told. It's hard to track the cause of carnality. One of a dozen reasons.
Something inside his head. Little by little, the erosion took its toll. He turned more of a deaf ear to those who would tell him the truth. Little by little, he became his own. man consumed with his own clippings.
Uziah goes too far, however, in his carnality. We read of it in verse 16. When he became strong, his heart Was so proud he acted corruptly and he was unfaithful to the Lord his God. For he entered the temple of the Lord. Wait a minute, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Stop. Priests enter temples. not kings. Priests have the right, being sons of Aaron, but not kings. Except Uzziah.
I'll go where I want to go. I'll do what I wish to do. This is all about me. And so he went into this place of the altar in Azariah, verse 17. The priest who had the right to be in there entered after him.
And in case you wonder if he needed help, he brought with him 80 valiant men. They opposed Uziah. Look at that. Eighty-one priests. opposed one man.
You've heard of Road Rage? You're going to read Temple Rage right here. How dare you stand against me? May every strong-hearted pastor read these words again. and let the chill run up your back.
May every ill-motived potential leader take heart. Take notice. Take notice. Uzziah took the glory that belonged to God. and personified it.
They opposed Uzziah the king and said to him, It is not for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the Lord for the priests. The son of Aaron's, it's for us who have been consecrated to burn incense. Get out of the sanctuary. You realize the guts it took to tell Uzziah that? Get out!
This is a man who commands 307,000 in his army. This is a man who has wealth that is not even described. Get out! You've gone too far. You have been unfaithful and will have no honor.
From the Lord God. But Uzziah, look at this. Talk about stubborn. With a censer in his hand for burning incense was. Enraged.
means exactly what it says. How dare you stand in my way What Uziah didn't realize is that he wasn't calling his own shots, but the very breath in his lungs came from the Lord God of heaven. And his skin suddenly became splotched with leprosy. He didn't know it at the moment because it came on his forehead and they saw it. The leprosy broke out on his forehead before the priests in the house of the Lord beside the altar of incense.
Notice how the chronicler describes it: he is in the house of the Lord, he is beside the altar of incense, where he had no business being. Azariah the chief priest and all the priests looked at him, and behold, he was lepros. The dread disease among Jews, the leveris. And they hurried him out of there, and he himself hastened to get out because the Lord had smitten him. Course.
Remember Isaiah's words: I am the Lord. To another I will not give my glory. May every pastor ultimately hearing this message remember this. May every elder and ultimately elders of the future remember this. May every leader of this congregation now and later remember this: we will be smitten.
when it turns and becomes a story about us. When any one of us seeks the glory, the credit, That which belongs only to our awesome God. Expect consequences. They are coming. And that's exactly what happens to Uzziah.
And of all things his epitaph reads sadly, he was.
Okay. Leper. And he was a leper to the day of his death. I'm so grateful the Lord preserved the story. There are other stories.
Layton Ford, in his book written in 1991, titled Transforming Leadership. describes an experience he had that's worth mentioning. And I Quote. Several years ago, Ford writes, I had lunch with Richard Dortch. Who had just been chosen to become the executive vice president of the PTL Club?
A multi-million dollar religious televangelism network Dorch had headed his denomination's work in Illinois. And had an outstanding track record. I was, frankly, very impressed. with what he had to say and with his seeming sincerity and competence. He planned to recruit a strong finance director and several MBAs.
to establish some fiscal sanity. It's going to be like turning the Queen Mary around with a teaspoon, he said. It won't be easy, but I plan to do it. I wished him well. and watched him from a distance.
Eventually, Jim Baker, the head of PTL, resigned in disgrace over a sexual liaison and its cover-up, Both he and Dorch were convicted for the misuse of funds. How? I wondered. Could a man with such seemingly good intentions go so wrong?
So I read with interest a later interview in which he described how the managers of PTL came to define success. Please don't miss a word that follows. I quote. In the interview, they said, it is all tied to how many stations we have on our network or how big our building is. It is so easy to lose control, to compromise without recognizing it.
At PTL There was not time taken for prayer or family. Because the show had to go on. We were so caught up in God's work that we. Forgot about God. He also talked about the impact of television on preachers, and I quote again.
A television camera can change a preacher quicker than anything else. Those who sit on the sidelines can notice the changes in people once they get in front of a camera. It turns a good man into a potentate. It is so easy to get swept away by popularity. Everybody loves you.
Cars are waiting. for you and you go to the head of the line. That is the devastation of the camera. It has made us less than what God has wanted us to become. In PTL's case, the TV camera, the show, even the ministry itself had become ends in themselves.
They were powers which could have been creative. but which in the end actually became destructive. For those of us not in the public eye, it is easy to point the finger at the Jim Joneses. And Jim Baker's, but power can be just as seductive to the teacher in a classroom. The physician in an examining room.
The boss in a union meeting. or the leader of an average church. Call me extreme if you wish, but that's part of the reason there will not be a television broadcast. of our worship. We are not here.
For others. In our worship, we are here for our God. And as the body to grow and learn together. And then through the week, we get the message out. We're not putting on a show.
We're expressing our praise. and worship to God. Yeah. Now. There are effective ministries.
I understand that.
So please don't write me. I know there are, but they are the exception. tragically, rather than the rule. I don't need the temptation of fawning before a camera. With a face like this, are you kidding?
As many have told me, I have a face for radio, and indeed I do.
So So it seemed appropriate before we're through. That as your shepherd and friend and and fellow sheep. I offer these five warnings to all of us. Things to beware. Please take out a pen.
Please look at the outline. Please write them down. Please put them in your Bible. And please never forget them. They all come from the life of Uzziah.
And because the truths are transcendent, They apply to today just as they did in his era. How do we know when things are going in the wrong direction? When do we beware? First of five, beware. When greater battles are fought within than without.
You're heading for trouble. Battles behind the scenes. Battles for power. Battles based on pride. Defensiveness.
polishing an image. promoting an individual. fighting for authority. Grabbing for the money. or a bigger section of the budget.
When greater battles are fought within Than without A ministry is headed for trouble. Second. When more attention falls on one Who is building his or her own kingdom? Instead of the Lord's, you're heading for trouble. When more attention falls on anyone who is interested in building his or her own kingdom.
You're in for trouble. As in the case of Uzziah, it soon became all about him. Third. When the Lord's help is no longer considered essential. Beware.
When you can do worship services in a sort of perfunctory manner. Yeah, we've done these before for 10, 12, 15 years. Yeah, we can crank another one out. When you can do what you do without prayer, without dependence, Without a deep sense of reliance. Understanding that the very breath in your lungs comes from One who has created you.
You're in trouble. When you forget that. When the Lord's help is no longer considered essential. Remember, Uzziah was great until his heart became proud. By the way, when you stop praying.
and worship becomes a perfunctory exercise. or a display of someone's gifts. God delivers. Fourth, when reproofs and warnings are resisted. Instead of respected.
Let me pause here and clarify that. Not every criticism is an appropriate reproof or warning. Those in leadership must always discern where that reproof or warning is coming from. Is it from a spirit-filled individual? Is it from a person who's himself or herself has a heart that's right before God?
Is that individual mature? Discerning. Fair. balanced A large ministry easily draws people. who are looking for a place to shine.
Please Please Don't apply. When reproofs and warnings are resisted instead of respected. You're in trouble. Finally. Beware when the consequences of sin no longer bring fear.
Although obviously out of bounds in the temple, Even though the priest named Azariah confronted Uzziah appropriately and firmly, Uzziah. Wasn't afraid. And he should have fallen to his knees and said, I. I'm the man. Just as David did when Nathan confronted him.
Standing where we stand today, ladies and gentlemen, we need this reminder. We have been. greatly Blessed. We have grown. We have become known.
Without any attempt to promote, we do not even advertise. But the word is out. And our best days are ahead of us by His grace. But as Alexander White writes in one of his fine books on Bible characters, We hang very heavy weights on very thin wires. May we never forget the source.
of our strength. And the reason for our growth. And the one who alone deserves The glory. Let's pray. May we never forget this today, our Father.
May it be a stinging and stunning reminder that this is all about you. This is all about your work. This is all about your songs. This is all about your word. This is all about your plan.
This is all about your mission. This growth is all about your favor. Your pleasure. This new place is all about your name. And may we forever and ever lift up that name that is above every name.
that at the name of Jesus, every knee will ultimately Bow. In the name of our Savior and Master, we pray. Everyone said Amen. Everyone said? Amen.
Everyone said, Amen. All right. Uh God will not share his glory, not with the king, not with the ministry, not with any one of us. and the moment we forget that is the moment we reach for credit that belongs only to him. Stay with us because Chuck Swindahl has some important closing comments for us coming up in just a moment.
First, did you know that Insight for Living has assembled a variety of Bible study tools for this series on the attributes of God? In fact, there's a special bundle that includes the Searching the Scriptures Bible Study Workbook and the complete collection of sermons on CD and MP3. The series is called How Great Is Our God. To purchase these resources right now, go to insight.org/slash offer. Have you ever thought of yourself as a steward of the mysteries of God?
Probably not. but it's a title that Paul assumed in the first century. Here's Chuck. I want you to sit with a phrase for just a moment. Six words from the Apostle Paul writing to that ragged, carnal, deeply confused church in Corinth.
stewards of the mysteries of God. That's what Paul called himself. That's what he called the Corinthian leaders. And if you've trusted Christ, that's part of your calling too. to help steward the mysteries of God.
Think about what that meant in Corinth. That city was a mess.
sophisticated, worldly, impressed with itself. running every direction but the right one. And right in the middle of it, God planted a church and said, You are the caretakers of my story. The gospel was brand new to the Gentiles. They were outsiders their whole lives.
strangers to the promises, aliens to the covenant, and suddenly the mystery was revealed. Jew and Gentile alike. Whosoever will the cross swings open for every one, and from that moment on the stewardship passed to us. Can you imagine anything more humbling? God didn't entrust this story to governments or institutions or people who had it all together.
He entrusted it to us. Ordinary people. That stewardship is not a burden. It's the greatest privilege I have ever known, and it's precisely why Insight for Living exists. Every broadcast is an act of stewardship.
every Bible study, every post, Every program that goes out over the airwaves and across the Internet. That's us together. faithfully tending the mystery we've been entrusted to proclaim. June thirtieth is almost here. As we close this phase.
Fiscal year, I want to ask you. Fellow steward. To invest in this sacred responsibility we share. Your gift keeps the story going. For our generation.
For the next one. boldly. Together. It's the cross. that we proclaim.
As Christians, we are caretakers of God's story. And today we're inviting you to join Chuck Swindahl and the entire team here at Insight for Living on this sacred responsibility to proclaim the cross. Here's how to get in touch. Call us at 800-772-8888 or go online to insight.org/slash donate. To express our gratitude for your partnership, we'd like to send you a brand new booklet that Chuck's written called The Cross We Proclaim.
In it, Chuck returns to the ancient words of the Apostle Paul and asks a searching question. Have you truly come to grips with the message of the cross? not as a doctrine to affirm, but as a transforming reality to live by. The booklet is yours when you make a gift to support the ministry of Insight for Living. To send a contribution in the mail, just address your envelope to InsightForLiving.
Post Office Box 5000. Frisco, Texas, 75034. That's Post Office Box 5000. Frisco, Texas, 75034. You can also call us at 800-772-8888 or give online at insight.org/slash donate.
I'm Bill Meyer. Join us when Chuck Swindahl talks about the holiness of God. Friday on Insight for Living. The preceding message, The Glory of God, was copyrighted in 2008, 2009, 2016, 2019, and 2026. And the sound recording was copyrighted in 2026 by Charles R.
Swindahl, Incorporated. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.
