Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith.
Someone has said, what goes around comes around. Not content to obey their parents, kids learn tough lessons the hard way. The second generation assumes inherited benefits are rights and that God can be defined in terms of their desires. Today, why the lessons ancient Israel learned are desperately needed now. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, as we learn more about we've been down this road before, help us understand why the lessons of Judges chapter two ring true for each of us today. Well, Dave, in a single sentence, I can put it this way that history does repeat itself. When you read the book of Judges, what you discover is that the people they cried on to the Lord and he delivered them. And then when you get to the next generation, those children, they again fell into idolatry and various sins and then in desperation, they cry to the Lord and he delivers them.
It's a cycle. And there's so much for us to learn as a result of what has happened historically in the book of Judges and other periods of history. We are excited because we are beginning what we call our matching gift challenge. Have you been blessed as a result of the ministry of Running to Win, a trust you have? The fact that you are listening now is because there are others that have contributed to this ministry. Would you consider helping us? Your gift will be doubled. Here's what you do.
Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. What an opportunity for every gift that you give to be doubled so that we can get the gospel around the world. Let's go to a second characteristic of the second generation syndrome. They redefine their understanding of God. It boils down to a theological issue. They redefine their understanding of God.
Now let's look at the very next verses, 11 to 13. Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served the Baals. They forsook the Lord their God of their fathers who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the people around them. They provoked the Lord to anger because they forsook him and served Baal and the Ashtoreths.
And what are we talking about here? Well, they forsook the Lord. Why did they change gods? Well, you have to understand Baal, it even says here plural, Baals. Baal was kind of a local deity and so one Baal may have responsibility for the weather, another for the responsibility in another area, in another place.
You say, well, Pastor Lutzer, why would someone choose Baal? Ashtoreth, the god of fertility, the god of sex, the god of violence, because these gods did not care whether you slept with your girlfriend before you married. As a matter of fact, these gods didn't care if you slept with all kinds of people. These gods said it's okay to go on spring break and to get drunk and to be immoral.
That's fine. And so what the people said is, you know, Jehovah certainly is against this. He doesn't want to put up with this, but Baal lets us do it in fact. In those days they had what was known as sympathetic worship. Sympathetic worship meant that the best way to worship your God is to act like your God acts. And Ashtoreth and Baal loved immorality.
So catch this. You could actually attend a worship service that was an orgy. You could get drunk, you could do whatever you're like, and the gods said it's okay. They said, we're okay.
You're okay. So the younger generation said to themselves, we are no longer going to follow the Lord God. You know, all these strict rules don't do this. That's ancient. What we want is a God who is more in line with our desires. Now here's something that you must take note of. It would have been one thing if they'd have said, okay, we're going to leave Jehovah and we're going for Baal and Ashtoreth.
It didn't quite work out that way. What they said is we're going to continue to worship the Lord God, but we are going to do that, bringing in all the worship of the pagan gods. And we'll still call it Jehovah's worship.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're still really worshiping Jehovah, but you see the way we're worshiping him is through our desires and through our new gods. It's all part of that. We're not turning our back on God.
No, we're just making him more relevant to where we are. And so they worshiped the Lord God. You say, well, Pastor Lutzer, isn't that nice that we don't worship Baal. The Bible says in the book of Ezekiel that the Lord is saying they have set up idols in their hearts and have worshiped them. Any conception of God that allows you to violate the teaching of the scripture is an idol. And so you can see today in America, we've got all these idols, all these gods redefined according to our own desires, aspirations, wishes and hopes and dreams. And so everybody's God is God. And so I've got my little God over there. My God would never allow this to happen over here. And my God is not that strict. My God is this.
My God is that. Because everybody's defining God and they're leaving the Lord God Jehovah, but they're still calling him God. They're still calling him Jehovah. But the definition has changed. Characteristics of the second generation.
They enjoy inherited benefits. They redefine their understanding of God. A third, they become enslaved to their desires. The desires that they follow now become a noose around their neck. Notice what the next verses say.
I'm picking it up at verse 14. In his anger against Israel, the Lord handed them over to raiders who plundered them. Now, I wonder if your theology can handle this.
I wonder if you're up to being able to accept this. God sold them to their enemies all around them whom they were no longer able to resist. Whenever Israel went out to fight, the hand of the Lord was against them to defeat them. Just as he had sworn to them, they were in great distress. God says, I am going to strengthen your enemies against you because you've turned your back on me.
So what is the consequences of their disobedience? They begin to serve these other gods. And remember God's means of discipline. God always says, if you want to sin, I'm going to let you sin. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to let you sin to your fill until it ensnares you, enslaves you, drives you, controls you until you get absolutely desperate, unable to function anymore.
And then suddenly you cry up to me and say, God, whatever it is that you ask, it matters not at last. You have my attention. You look at America today. This statement occurred to me, so I'm taking responsibility for it. It might be an exaggeration, but could it not not be said today that we are an addictive generation by and large. 10 million people addicted to alcohol, millions addicted to drugs of one kind or another. You have the proliferation of gambling people addicted to gambling.
People addicted to various kinds of sexual expression, no matter what label it is, driven by desires, controlled, unable to help themselves. And what does the text say? God sold them over to their enemies. God sold them to their enemies.
They discovered that sin took them further than they intended to go, held them longer than they intended to stay and cost them more than they intended to pay. But there's no other way for the second generation to learn the consequences of disobedience because every generation has to learn the same truths over and over and over again. You can pass some things onto your children.
God bless you. God has been good to us as a family. We passed on those values, those aspirations to seek the Lord. But at the end of the day, if you look at society generally, what you find is that no second generation simply inherits the lessons of their forefathers.
They must learn them for themselves. Third consequences, they became enslaved to their desires. Number four, they cried to God. Now the text doesn't say that right here. It just says that they were in distress and then the Lord sent up some judges.
Now because this cycle is repeated six times in the book and we haven't even gotten to the first cycle yet, this is an outline of what this book is about. It does not say expressly here that they cried to the Lord, but that's what it says. And all the six other instances that once the enemies overran them, once the consequences of their disobedience became intolerable, it is then that they cried to the Lord and said, God now help us.
And you know what? Graciously, wondrously, undeservedly, God helps them because God really does love them and God really does want to help us, but he will not help us as long as we are not desperate. And so what happens is God intervenes.
He sends them judges, he sends them rulers, and these judges begin to fight the battles. In fact, there's a text that says, God says, the reason I have to put you through this is because you folks have not learned to fight. You see your first generation fought and they understood the value of freedom. They understood that there are some things in life worth more than living, but you don't know that, do you?
And until you are brought to the end of yourself, you will not cry to me. You'll always think that there has to be some other way. And so each generation has to learn that sin is slavery and in desperation there is deliverance, but each generation has to learn that. Each generation has to learn that God's way is best. Each generation has to learn that compromise brings terrible consequences. Let me give you some bottom line lessons so that we can summarize this and help us to think more clearly about where we fit into this. Number one, compromise always leads to defeat, always. Now that is true nationally.
It's also true personally. A historian wrote, decadence is a moral and spiritual disease. It results from too long a period of wealth and power, producing cynicism, decline of religion, pessimism, and frivolity.
Frivolity. Isn't that what we are today as a nation? Everybody trying to do something silly, foolish, trying somehow to cover the deadness and to fill the emptiness somehow somewhere. The citizens of such a nation will no longer make an effort to save themselves because they are not convinced that anything in life is worth saving. An opinion poll showed that very few Americans, less than a majority, are really willing to die for anything because they don't think that there's really anything worth dying for. Previous generations knew that there was something worth dying for.
The second generation doesn't think so. Compromise leads to defeat. Now that's national.
That's also individual. Sin has this terrible quality that it always wants to take over. Every time you give it an inch of course at once a mile. Alexander Pope wrote, vice is a monster of so frightful mean as to be hated needs but to be seen. Yet seen too oft familiar with her face, we first endure, we pity, and then we embrace. And there are things in our lives that we would have never done 10 or 20 years ago that now are becoming acceptable because of the erosion of our conscience and our standards and we now think that it is okay. But compromise leads to defeat. Third, God uses slavery to sin to get our attention.
Slavery to sin to get our attention. You know that if you drive a car, most modern cars no longer have gauges that tell you whether or not the battery is being charged and so forth. They have a light that would say on the light, a check engine. I had a car like that one time. It was a car that had so much trouble, major, five or six major problems.
I won't give you the brand, although I could and save you a lot of trouble. But I remember you know you'd be going along and then always this red light would say check engine. To me that was one of the most foolish things that anyone could have invented. Check engine. Check engine.
Boy is that helpful. I mean what part of the engine? I mean I don't know. You know is it spark plugs? I don't know if I don't even know if cars still have spark plugs. You know is it carburetor? Yeah carburetor.
We could go down the line. Some of you remember some of the things that make up a motor. Those of us you know who don't know what end to pick up a screwdriver with, we're a little unclear regarding these things. Check engine.
Oh boy. Thanks a lot. I do want to tell you this, that if today you find yourself addicted to sin, you know what it is? It's a warning light. God is saying check your spiritual life.
Check, check, check, check. It is God's megaphone. The Bible says that God sold them into the hands of their enemies. What is God trying to say?
He's trying to say you are not yet desperate to cry to me and say whatever the cost I want to be free. When you get to that point my deliverance will be there. God uses slavery. God uses the devil.
Luther was right. Even the devil is God's devil. Finally, the issue is always, it always comes down to this. Which God shall we serve?
That's really the fundamental issue. Which God shall we serve? Are we going to serve the God of our desires who allows us to do whatever we like? The new tolerant God. Someone has said we have cows for milk, we have sheep for wool, and we have God to come along and to affirm our deepest cravings. Now is that the God that we're going to serve? Or are we going to serve the Lord God at great personal cost?
That's really the issue. We look at our nation today and there's so much to discourage us, but there's also things to encourage us. God's word is still going forth. We are still seeing growth in churches, including this one. And who knows what God may have in mind?
All that I know is that we desperately, absolutely desperately need his intervention. When England was so far down the moral and spiritual trail that Parliament had to be let out at noon because many of the members were too drunk to continue. And when you had alcoholism rampant and when you had child slavery and the misuse of children in factories, God sent Charles and John Wesley and God mightily worked in England back in those 1700s to really turn multitudes in that nation toward him. Now we know in England there's a generation that grows up that knows not the God of Wesley.
We think of America. We think of the time when church attendance was on the decline, when you had moral and spiritual decay. God sent the great evangelist, George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards who preached the gospel there in Northampton, Massachusetts. And so many people were converted over a three year period that one historian said that one could have left a bag of gold in the street in the evening and it still would have been there in the morning because people were into righteousness.
Doesn't sound like Chicago to me personally. And God did something. I have no idea what's in God's mind.
He does not owe us a revival. But if we did turn to him in desperation, if we did begin to cry to him in sheer honesty and helplessness, who knows? But that God might do something and turn the tide.
Who knows? But that he might do that. Seneca said, oh, that a hand would come down from heaven and deliver me from my besetting sin. I want you to know today that in Jesus Christ that hand has come down because the scripture says he came to save us, save his people from their sins.
There is deliverance, but it's only reserved for the desperate. Let's pray. Our Father today, our needs are so overwhelming and so great. To where shall we turn when we live in a nation that has become so addicted to any number of pleasures? Where do we go, Lord? Where do we turn, Father God, when our hearts are not turned towards you to pray and to seek your face? Where do we turn when believers perhaps do not touch their Bibles week in and week out?
Where do we turn? We fall on our faces before you and say, God, help us because we're desperate. Come to us, Lord. Come to individuals in this congregation who've never trusted Christ as Savior. May they reach out to you today, the hand that came to deliver them from their sins. But Father, create within us an overwhelming sense of your presence and a desire for your intervention in our great need. Do that, Lord, we pray. Now, what is it that you need to say to God today?
I'm going to give you a few moments to say it. You speak to him because he's listening. Father, hear the prayers of your people. Hear us Lord and birth within us that which we do not naturally have. And that is a hunger and thirst for righteousness and a hunger and thirst for you. Create it within us, Lord God, because if you do not, we shall not have it. And bring those who've never trusted you a Savior to saving faith. In Jesus name, Amen. I don't know about you, but that prayer also applies to me. I pray that God will birth within me a passion, a love, a desire to get the gospel of Jesus Christ to even more people.
I want to thank the many of you who support the ministry of Running to Win, and I have some very exciting news. Some generous donors have said that they will double whatever contribution is made during this period. Imagine that. You give $50, it becomes 100, 100 becomes 200. Well, you can do the math.
You know, sometimes when you're involved in financial planning, the expression that is used is ROI, that is the return on your investment. Imagine this, your gift is doubled. But even better than that, your gift is used to grow this ministry and get the gospel of Jesus Christ around the world. I'm holding in my hands a letter from someone who says, I can't put into words how much I've learned, how much I've grown and encouraged by listening to the ministry of Running to Win. I listen every morning.
Well, those kinds of testimonies can be multiplied. Right now, ask the Lord how he might use you so that the ministry of the gospel can be expanded. Well, here's what you do. Go to rtwoffer.com.
That's rtwoffer.com or pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9337. Remember ROI, the return on your investment. Your gift is doubled. And better than that, it helps us get the gospel around the world. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60614. Running to Win is all about helping you find God's roadmap for your race of life. Pastor Erwin Lutzer, concluding The Second Generation Syndrome, the first of 12 messages on the topic we've been down this road before, taken from the book of Judges. Next time, join us for a message on Wanted Leaders. Thanks for listening. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.
