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Village SDA Church

Education Reformation

Ron Kelly

Education Reformation: Inexcusable Ignorance

Education Reformation: The Prophet and the Professor

Education Reformation: Cancer on Christian Education

We've been blessed already, and for that we are thankful.

And now I'm asking, Lord, that your Spirit would make our hearts ready, Make us willing.

Bless us now, I pray, in Jesus' name, amen.

This morning I am continuing in the second of a series of 5 sermons on education reformation.

Last Sabbath I talked about let the righteous women rise up.

We noted at least 5 individuals in the first chapters of the book of Exodus that put in place the delivery of hope through the deliverance of Moses.

This morning I don't want for a moment to minimize the power of the home.

And it doesn't cease to be a school just because people graduate.

The instructors, as long as they live, by God's grace, are blessings to those that they have put on the path of life.

So I'm appealing to you moms and dads, I'm appealing to you adult children, don't harden your heart and be stiff-necked.

Just because you reach the age of maturity doesn't mean You've achieved all things in relationship to the elements of our spiritual growth.

So may we be humble to each other and follow the admonition of the New Testament to have spirits that are submissive to each other.

This morning I'm going to go on the next leg of the journey.

And the next leg of the journey is a story that was prophesied 300 years before it came to be.

Take your Bibles this morning and open them up to the book of Kings, 1 Kings chapter 13.

I'm going to picture frame the story this way.

We've had the amazing journey of a king named Saul who was spiritually unfit over time because the pride of his place and his position overwhelmed his submission to the Lord.

He was a persecutor of the next king, but the next king was faithful in many respects and repentant when not.

And then finally, the son of David, Solomon, comes onto the throne, and Solomon is postured for the most amazing success, to fulfill the goals of the Israelite nation in the world.

And we see some of it with the Queen of Sheba coming and paying homage to the wisdom of Solomon's God.

This is a journey that was about to go wrong.

Solomon in his spiritual lostness becomes oppressive in the financial and tax structures of the nation.

And he multiplies horses and wives, as was prophesied in the Old Testament that would happen when they had a king.

And when his kingship is ended and his son is on the throne, Rehoboam by name, he gathers the sages, the ancient men, and he asks for their counsel, because the people are saying, relief, we need relief.

And Rehoboam hears the counsel and dismisses it, but then gathers his friends who speak to him the words of affirmation about the significance of his position and the power in his role.

And he tells the tribes that, my father's waist will look like my pinky.

There not only will be no relief, but since I'm in charge, it'll be my way.

There's a need for some kind of leader in the northern kingdom.

That man would be none other than Jeroboam.

Jeroboam had been exiled to Egypt, but he's come back and he is now the de facto leader of the 10 tribes, and he understands quite well that this is a spiritual people, given to spirituality.

And he sets up a place of worship in contradistinction to the temple in Jerusalem.

He understands these people have religious habits and the joy of Fellowshipping and if they continue going back to Jerusalem they will rejoin the kingdom of the south and so He establishes a place of worship in Bethel, and He enacts a decision that had been enacted by the will of the people before, and that is to have something to worship, something visible.

And in 1 Kings 13, we have a protest from God Himself.

Now this is 300 years before the subject matter of today's message, but it is the launching pad for education reformation.

1 Kings 13, verse 1, says, Now, behold, there came a man of God from Judah to Bethel.

By the word of the Lord, wild Jeroboam was standing at the altar to burn incense.

He cried against the altar by the word of the Lord, and he said, O altar, altar, Thus says the Lord, Behold, a son shall be born to the house of David, Josiah by name.

And on you he shall sacrifice the priest of the high places, who burn incense on you, and human bones shall be burned on you.

Then he gave a sign the same day, saying, This is the sign which the Lord has spoken.

Behold, the altar shall be split apart, and the ashes which are on it shall be poured out.

Now when the king heard the saying of the man of God, which he had cried against the altar in Bethel, Jeroboam stretched out his hand from the altar saying, Seize him!

But his hand, which he stretched out against him, dried up so that he could not draw it back to himself.

The altar also was split apart, and the ashes were poured out from the altar according to the sign which the man of God had given by the word of the Lord." God, in His great mercy, restores Jeroboam's hand.

And now I want to fast-forward 300 years.

I want to picture frame where we are in the story of Israelite history.

We've had good King Hezekiah, who made a mistake and showed Babylon the riches of the temple precincts.

We have his son Ammon, who comes to the throne and is only on the throne for a few years, and then we come to the experience of Josiah.

Josiah is the 1 who is 8 years old and who will become the 1 who institutes the final great effort at reform in the Israelite experience.

The 10 nations to the north are gone when Josiah is on the throne.

They've been disseminated by the Assyrians, never to be collected again, a warning to the final 2 tribes in the Saul.

And as we come to the storyline of our scripture reading this morning, the nation of Israel is on the edge of divine retribution.

Josiah will enact many and mighty reforms.

When he dies in 609 B.C., there will only be 3 years before King Nebuchadnezzar shows up and begins orienting the nation of Israel to its new future.

Over a period of almost 20 years, Nebuchadnezzar will give Judah a chance to play by the rules, to be a cooperative vassal state.

So I want to explain right from the beginning of this message that Josiah is a last best chance for reformation, and Josiah is God's instrument for a message of repentance.

Now take your Bibles and go to 2 Kings 22.

And let us look at the story, the story of a boy who grows into a man and becomes a great reformer.

He was 8 years old, verse 1 says, when he became king.

Verse 2, he did what was right in the sight of the Lord and walked in all the way of his father David, nor did he turn aside to the right or to the left.

Now, this phraseology, 1 commentary said, was common amongst the Israelites in regards to the rectitude of a leader, but where does it come from?

Take your Bibles and go back to the book of Joshua.

Joshua chapter 1, I want you to see where it comes from.

Because it is a promise that is important for us in the moment in which we live.

Joshua chapter 1, beginning with verse 5.

It says, no man will be able to stand before you all the days of your life Just as I have been with Moses.

I will not fail you or forsake you be strong and courageous for the Lord shall give this people possession of the land which I swore to their fathers to give them only be strong and courageous Be careful to do according to all the law which Moses my servant commanded Do not turn to from it to the right Or to the left So that you may have success Wherever you go verse 8 This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it, for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success.

Have I not commanded you, be strong and courageous, do not tremble or be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go." This morning, I want to assure you that the promises made to Joshua were as true and waiting to come to fruition for Josiah as they are for you and for me.

God does not intend that His church come to the end and stumble in exhaustion across the spiritual finish line.

God intends that His people receive blessings that can be attributable only to divine partnership and divine intervention for your life individually and for the corporate work of the church.

There is indeed this continued covenantal blessing that God wants to place upon His people, and that relates specifically to fidelity to the law of God.

And this expression found in the book of Kings is an expression about Josiah moving according to a knowledge of right and wrong out of the law, out of the inspired word.

We have come to an interesting place in society where we have found, and more importantly in the sub-society of Adventist faith and the 3 Angels' Messages, where we have found ourselves taking our cues from the latest scientific study, the latest sociological data.

And this morning I'm here to announce, as we continue in this journey of education reformation, that it is time for us to come back to a partnership with God and the instruction of inspiration for the success that the world needs and deserves so that it can be warned through an army rightly trained, even an army of youth.

This morning as we look at a young person, a young person whom I believe was saved from the sullying licentiousness of his age.

His father only reigned for 2 years before he was killed by his own servants.

And what this does is it places a young boy who has not yet been caught up in the meat grinder of the licentious cult that was operating in the temple precincts.

He's a boy still in his intimacy with a tendency to spiritual sensitivity and God will go around the generation preceding him and he will do a work which is built upon an amazing discovery.

Verse 3, 2 Kings 22, Now in the eighteenth year of the king of Josiah, the king sent Shaphan, the son of Azaliah, the son of Meshalam, the scribe, to the house of the LORD, saying, go up to Hilkiah the priest that he may count the money brought into the house of the Lord, which the doorkeepers have gathered from the people.

Let them deliver it to the hand of the workmen who have the oversight of the house of the Lord, and let them give it to the workmen who are in the house of the Lord to repair the damages to the house.

So the carpenters and the builders and the masons, and for buying timber and hewn stone to repair the house, only no accounting shall be made with them for the money delivered into their hands, for they deal faithfully." Quite an amazing statement of trust in a generationally compromised royal situation.

Verse 8, Then Hilkiah the priest said to Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord.

And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan who read it.

Shaphan the scribe came to the king and brought back word to the king and said, Your servants have emptied out the money that was found in the house and have delivered it into the hand of the workmen who have the oversight of the house of the Lord.

And moreover, Shaphan the scribe told the king, saying, Hilkiah the priest has given me a book.

And Shaphan read it in the presence of the king.

When the king heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his clothes.

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Series

Education Reformation

Education Reformation: Inexcusable Ignorance

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Plenary

Learning to Be Human Again

1h 14m

Plenary Sessions

A Faithful Priest

52m

Plenary

Will We Believe?

43m

Adventist Education: Respectable and Conventional

58m

The Peril of Adventist Education

49m

Abomination of Desolation

Abomination of Desolation in Daniel’s Day, Part 1

54m

Beyond Belief: Noah and the Flood

41m

What’s that You’re Eating?

49m

Why is the First Commandment First?

41m

More Media and the Brain

Un-doctrinated: Wordly Schooling & Media

1h 18m

A Sacred Trust: Character

58m

Holy, Don’t Touch

50m

Sound Doctrine