Faith Against Odds - Finding hope for your story from King Hezekiah

Do you ever find yourself grappling with your faith, especially when the world around you seems to be spiraling out of control? What if there was a blueprint, a compelling story of unwavering trust in God despite the odds that could guide you? This episode takes us through the life of King Hezekiah, a king who dared to trust God amidst adversity, even when it meant defying the great King of Assyria. Hezekiah symbolically tore down pagan shrines and smashed sacred pillars, signifying his allegiance to God alone. 

This narrative doesn't just end at Hezekiah's faithfulness, it also highlights the stark contrast with his father's unfaithfulness. A thought-provoking discourse around the struggle of breaking down idols and the resulting resistance it often instigates forms an integral part of our discussion. We delve into the perils of syncretism, which is the merging of our faith with cultural practices, and its potential harm. As we traverse through the Bible, we bring to light stories of trust in God, drawing parallels with the story of Cain. This episode is filled with spiritual insight and will challenge you to reexamine your faith and trust in God.

Chapters

• 0:07 Trusting God
• 9:18 Hezekiah's Trust and Faithfulness
• 23:11 Trust and Dangers of Idolatry

Transcript

Dan Schilling: 0:07

Hey, welcome to the Feed Sheep Podcast, where we help you hear God's voice, follow His lead and thrive as a disciple. I'm Dan Schilling and I'll be one of your guides. Now let's get into today's topic. Hey, welcome to the FeedSheep Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Today we are going to continue on a topic we have been addressing over the last couple of episodes and it's about the issue of trust, and I know this is something that we're going to continue to wrestle through all of our lives. But, Michael, I'm glad to be back and talking with you about this topic. You and I have been wrestling with this. I know you've been talking about it. You actually were helping me this past week get out of a ditch, because I'm falling apart sometimes on all this area of trust and trusting God to provide and trusting God to help me get this technology issues sometimes. So I'm grateful for you and our friendship.

Michael Blue: 0:59

Yeah, thanks, dan. It's good to be here and glad to get to talk about this, because it's one of those topics. I think that for me and we've talked about this too in our lives of you know it helps, having seen God be faithful in the past, trust Him for the future. But that doesn't mean it's effortless. So we continue to grow and sometimes, you know, the growth is that he gives us bigger things to trust Him for, but oftentimes it's our own human doubts and questions and all that that we have to deal with. So I think it's always a relevant topic and I'm excited to dive in.

Dan Schilling: 1:34

Yeah, well, you can't be not to dark. You hear about that because, you're right, it is an issue that we struggle with and I'd say we talked about this last time a little bit that my issue, most of my trust, is about. I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to deal with in the future. What about this, what about that? And when I think about the story where I'm talking about today with Hezekiah and how God one of the things he says about Hezekiah and we're going to look at that in just a minute it's he was believing God for what God was going to do and what was coming, and we're going to see how this issue of trust is really a lot of deals with that. So good, well, why don't you pray for us? Get us started?

Michael Blue: 2:22

Okay, moving father, thanks so much for these times that we get to look at faithful servants of you who trusted you, and I just pray that we would grow in faith, we would grow in trust, and that you would just continue to encourage us and draw us near to you as we have the opportunity to trust you. So I pray for all the listeners, I pray for Dan and I that you would just fill us with more trust today. And Jesus name Amen.

Dan Schilling: 2:48

Amen. Well, michael, I've spent some time looking today, actually just was intrigued by this story that we're going to look at is about King Hezekiah. For folks, if you'd like to spend some time looking at Hezekiah great stories around him you're going to see the primary topic around him in Isaiah, chapter 36 through 39. You're going to also see this in 2 Kings 18 to 20. We're going to look at 2 Kings 18 for our discussion here today, and then we're also you'll see 2nd Chronicles, 29 to 32. And so, if you'd like to look at those because we're going to look at Hezekiah the next episode or two here and talk about how he was a king who trusted God, but he was facing a lot of issues through his kingship One of the things that I saw today as I was studying Michael is in 2 Chronicles 28.

Dan Schilling: 3:58

We're not going to look at this verse necessarily, but his dad was Ahaz, king Ahaz, and what was interesting to me is that this is in 2 Chronicles 28, 19 to 24. And it says that Ahaz was utterly unfaithful. He closed the temple, he set up the shrines and the shirapoles, and I mean there's nothing to be more, I guess, than history. You'd say, to have something written about you that you were utterly unfaithful. Like you, were the epitome of no unfaithfulness.

Michael Blue: 4:35

So not something you want to go to and remember for.

Dan Schilling: 4:43

So a lot of times you say, well, what's the point of that in the story? Well, a lot of times we can look back at our own story, our own journey, our own history, and we can say, well, you know, my dad or my parents have this issue and this issue, and that caused me to not be trusting or caused me not to be a certain way. And so I just was thinking about gosh, regardless of what our past is and our present, we still always have this future in front of us. And Hezekiah was in a place when he took over and he immediately said hey, wait a minute, what are we doing here? And so we're going to look at that, and so let's just go ahead and jump into that for just a second and we'll kind of bounce back over some of these other passages if we have time, but let's start this.

Dan Schilling: 5:37

Second Kings. I'm going to go back up to verse one and we're just going to get a little bit of the history here of Hezekiah. Again, this is second Kings 18, starting in verse one, and this is the new living translation. So you want to read one through four there, sure.

Michael Blue: 5:55

Hezekiah, son of Ahaz, began to rule over Judah in the third year of King Hoshaiah's reign in Israel. He was 25 years old when he became king and he reigned in Jerusalem 29 years. His mother was Abijah, the daughter of Zechariah. He did what was pleasing in the Lord's sight, just as his ancestor David had done. He removed the pagan shrines, smashed the sacred pillars and cut down the ashore bowls. He broke up the bronze serpent that Moses had made because the people of Israel had been offering sacrifices to it. The bronze serpent was called Nehish-Dun.

Dan Schilling: 6:30

Yeah, I don't hold your pronunciation on that, I don't know. You did a good job. So there's a lot here in this first text, right, this first paragraph. And so let's just talk through this a little bit. So you say he's 25, a young guy, he takes over, he's going to reign for 29 years, gives a little bit of his heritage.

Dan Schilling: 6:57

It tells us in verse that he did what was pleasing, like his ancestor, david. And this is where what starts to get interesting is that this was, as I was looking at it, it's about five or six hundred years after David was king. So it wasn't like it was really close, like he didn't know a great grandpa David. It's like this is generations. There has been a generational disobedience going on throughout the kings. There's a split, obviously, of the kingdoms. You know Judah and Jerusalem. So that's why he's king of Judah. His father again had a share of poles, pagan shrines, all this stuff. So he comes in early in his reign and says, kind of enough of the nonsense here.

Dan Schilling: 7:45

And then we also see that, that bronze serpent, which was really a symbol. We even still have that symbol today in our medical community, right, I mean that bronze serpent. But that bronze serpent has been passed on and the people are worshiping it and you and I talked about like the golden calf I was. A friend of mine was telling me. He said he's listening to one of our episodes a while back about the golden calf of retirement and how sometimes we just start worshiping something like what are we doing here? And it wasn't even a bad thing. This is, you know. It was a good thing, this is what redeemed them right.

Dan Schilling: 8:21

Look upon this steak and you'll be and so, and it actually had a name and so, yeah, give me some of your thoughts and insight.

Michael Blue: 8:35

Yeah, you know, I've you, and I did a kind of a co-teaching one time, a couple years back, if you remember.

Dan Schilling: 8:42

Yeah.

Michael Blue: 8:42

And I kind of came in with the hammer and I talked about the kings of Judah.

Dan Schilling: 8:49

Yes.

Michael Blue: 8:50

And you know it's interesting, as I think back on that, that you know Israel basically had no good kings, so this King Hosea was likely an evil king. Ahaz was an evil king who came before in Judah, but Hezekiah is one of four that were, you know, viewed as good kings.

Michael Blue: 9:08

There's about four others that were viewed as kind of had some good, either a good start and a bad finish, or bad start and good finish, or something like that.

Michael Blue: 9:14

But we're kind of more lukewarm and the rest of them were bad. Yes, and so you look at at someone like Hezekiah, who's coming into the midst of, you know, just generations of really bad kings and bad leadership and all that, and you know, somehow his mom, right, which I got to think that she was a big part of his faithfulness because she would Zachariah's daughter, right, so clearly his dad wasn't the guy who was influencing him, and so it doesn't spell it out, but we can kind of make some assumptions by who she is and what she. The fact that she was his mom and that she's mentioned here is, I think, significant. Yeah, it's good and that as well. So there was somebody in his life, namely his mom, who was dealing with a husband who couldn't have been more opposite of what her father was. Yes, and here she is raising a son who then ends up being a godly son and a godly leader, despite kind of all of the back you know, the baggage that he came with.

Michael Blue: 10:19

Yes, so that's kind of a couple things that jump out at me as we look at this. Yeah so good? Yeah, I was just going to say. The other thing is, is the violence with which he destroyed the things that were anathema to God right? He removed the pagan tribes and smashed the pillars and then cut down the ashropoles. This wasn't like, well, let's cover them up. You know it's repurposed some maybe we'll make that ashropole into you know it's that game where you hit the pole around the pole.

Dan Schilling: 10:47

Yeah, tether ball.

Michael Blue: 10:49

Tether ball right. The first tether ball happened was with a rock in the string. No, it's pretty dangerous, but no, they ripped him down.

Dan Schilling: 10:58

Yeah, yes, well, I was going to say is you have a great point of you know, even the faithfulness of moms sometimes too. You know probably a lot of these kings throughout. You know, having multiple children with multiple wives. You know where the mom really probably was a very influential figure in their lives for many of them. And so you have a faithful mom who probably was discipling and training this young man. So there is a lot of good that you see. Thank you for mom and all you good moms out there who were looking out for us and we were younger.

Dan Schilling: 11:43

And I think we have a thing you said about Hezekiah too. We're going to talk about this. We won't get to it today, but you know, hezekiah in some ways doesn't finish well either, right, I mean, he, he, he prospers. You know, we're going to see what, how God views him here in just a second. But then he prospers and and through all that prospering, he's like, yeah, this is great. And then, you know, invites the Babylonians, you know, and to come see all of this stuff, and Isaiah is like, hey, what are you doing, man? And you know, and then it's kind of his at the end, as I was studying this again today he's like, well, you know, at least I'll have peace in my lifetime. You know, like, come on, really, dude, you know. And then you see his son, manasseh, you know, is a trainwreck who essentially reinstitutes all of the polls, all of this. You know pagan shrines, all the ashira poll, you know all the stuff. So like, oh, my goodness, what are we doing?

Michael Blue: 12:36

So yeah, and he was. He was the one who who offered his son right.

Dan Schilling: 12:42

Yes, yeah, yeah, man, it's like what are you doing, you know? So, yeah, okay, I said it did. He was like he was one of the way the sorcery, the divination, the stuff that he brought in was unparalleled, and it says how it angered the Lord. And so you just reminded again of our you know, there, I heard a guy say this years ago there is no spiritual grandchildren. You know, like, where each one of us are called to disciple the next generation, those who follow us, and so you know, that's probably another big failure on Hezekiah's part. And yeah, I don't. I don't know how many kids these guys had. You know, I have seven. It's hard enough just to keep track of them. I mean, some of these guys probably had who knows how many, because he says they're going to take away his sons. That's what Isaiah prophesied Some of your sons are going to go and they're going to be Unix, and so Right, yeah, not always a good scenario.

Michael Blue: 13:38

It is a good. Yeah, I mean we could go down probably a little bit of a rabbit trail on on parenting, but yeah, that's a, that's a huge encouragement to remember that that it does. You know, god does redeem generations. But it's also not this promise of. I mean we have to be vigilant in in training up our, our kids.

Dan Schilling: 14:02

Yeah, yeah, it's good. Well, let's, let's go on, since we're talking about trust and we're going to see here, really, I think, where this lines up with the theme of what we want to accomplish each time when we're here for the podcast is help people to hear God's voice, follow his lead and thrive as disciples, and I believe what we're going to see here is a key aspect as disciples to thrive. So let's look here, starting in again second Kings 18, and pick up there in verse five and read down through eight through eight.

Dan Schilling: 14:35

All right.

Michael Blue: 14:36

So Hezekiah trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel. There was no one like him among all the Kings of Judah, either before or after his time. He remained faithful to the Lord and everything, and he carefully obeyed all the commands the Lord had given Moses. So the Lord was with him and Hezekiah was successful in everything he did. He revolted against the King of Assyria and refused to pay him tribute. He also conquered the Philistines as far distant as Gaza and his territory, from their smallest outposts to their largest walled city.

Dan Schilling: 15:06

Okay, so there's several things here. Again, I think the key to me is that Hezekiah trusted the Lord, the God of Israel. I don't know why it says it doesn't say the God of Israel and Judah, but the God of Israel. Here, yeah.

Michael Blue: 15:22

There was what's that. Yeah, no, why is that? Well, I would imagine. I mean Israel is the whole nation. Still, yes right, even though the split you'd have Israel and Judah, but I think that you'd have probably better said the northern tribes of Israel and Judah.

Dan Schilling: 15:41

Yes, yes, so God season is one still right. That's a good point. And there's to me this was key again that there's no one like him among the kings of Judah, either before him or after him. So he was designated by his trust and that he remained faithful to the Lord and everything, carefully obeying everything. And because of that, because of that trust, because of that faithfulness and because of that careful obedience, then to me the result was so the Lord was with him and he was successful in all that. He did everything.

Dan Schilling: 16:19

And I think, as we've talked through Michael on this again, the goal for us is to hear God's voice, to follow or to obey and to thrive. And so I see that here there was no one like him before. He remained faithful, meaning he would hear God's voice. And this to me, when I think about a faithful child, you know, if I was giving one of my sons a designation of faithfulness, it's like I've asked them to do something and they followed through with it. Right, they were faithful.

Dan Schilling: 16:49

Take out the trash. When I come in, the trash is gone. It's not like just sitting outside of the can. It's not sitting out in a garage all over the place. It's not, you know, it actually got completed all the way through. Every step they were faithful, they did what was asked of them to do, and so, as a guy hears, he follows, he carefully obeys, and because of that, the result of that is that God's with him, that that fellowship, that intimacy that is available still to you and I, and that that goal that God's always had from the beginning is always being in fellowship and unity and communication and building that relationship with us back to Adam and Eve in the garden, back to gain and able that desire. Cain, I want you to be in fellowship with me, you know, but your sin or your desire to do things, your way, is going to separate us from that relationship. And so here we can see the same thing that gets always looking for that relationship, and then what it results in is successful.

Michael Blue: 17:53

I think, I think the important point I mean even tying this into you know some of the New Testament teaching where Jesus, you know, is saying well done, good and faithful servant. You know the emphasis oftentimes and that's parable of talents and parable of the minors, and we've talked about this a bit but the emphasis often kind of comes to the production of the servant. But the emphasis, I think, is on God first of all and second of all the faithfulness of the servant, and so, again, the return, the impact, whatever words we want to use, is ultimately in God's hands, whether you know, how far, to what extent, he takes it, but the faithfulness is kind of the part that we play.

Michael Blue: 18:39

We have an opportunity to listen, we have an opportunity to hear and follow, obey, and the result is thriving. And what that looks like, though, you know, will be entirely up to God, but it will be more intimacy with God I know that to be true which, ultimately, is the ultimate definition of thriving.

Dan Schilling: 18:59

Yes.

Michael Blue: 19:01

And so, then, that enables us, whatever situation we're in, because some people are literally live in situations and lives where you know, like the early Christians were thriving wasn't going to look like what Hezekiah is thriving or success. Look like yes, yes. And so they went to prison and died by the mouths of lions. Yes, but you could say they were successful in their walk and in their faithfulness, yes.

Dan Schilling: 19:26

So that's.

Michael Blue: 19:26

I think that's where we just want to make sure we pull the needle back of faithfulness. Is the call, not your return, not your whatever it is, god's going to take care of that stuff, and it may be, you know, it may be one way we picture success, but it also may be martyrdom or some other way that we may not long for in terms of success.

Dan Schilling: 19:46

Yeah, don't. I was studying when I was looking through this today, just that context of Isaiah when he, you know it says you know, here I am, lord, send me. I think it's Isaiah six.

Dan Schilling: 19:58

Well what he calls him then to do is go deliver the bad news, like, oh, wait a minute, I thought it was gonna be all warm and fuzzy. You and I were laughing about this. Maybe we'll have a future episode on Isaiah 20. I sent Michael a little theme I studied today for my Isaiah 20. And it's actually where I say how far are we willing to go in our obedience? Are we willing to God? I trust you, I trust your word to me that you're calling me. You got a purpose and a plan. And then Isaiah 20, god tells Isaiah essentially to strip down, take off your sack that you're wearing here and your sandals and walk around naked. And then it goes on to say he walks around naked for three years and, speaking to a prophetic, what God's gonna do. So I was like, hey, how far are we willing to go in this journey of obedience? And I was like, well, you know.

Dan Schilling: 20:56

I guess a little uncomfortable.

Michael Blue: 20:58

Grateful that calling seems to have been fairly unique.

Dan Schilling: 21:01

Yeah, yeah.

Michael Blue: 21:05

For you and everybody else around you, right? Yeah, I bet it'd be real sure about that one.

Dan Schilling: 21:10

Yeah, I was telling somebody here in the office about this and I said, man, that'd have been good. You know, that'd have been weird If you had to do that today. I was like I'm pretty sure it was weird back then too.

Dan Schilling: 21:20

So you know these things that got asked of his people. Sometimes you're talking about the prophets and the things and it's easy to say that we're gonna hear, follow and thrive. But sometimes thriving or doing what God asks us to do isn't easy. And, yes, hopefully none of us ever get that call Walk around. You're probably gonna go to jail for that.

Michael Blue: 21:43

Yeah, maybe God put it there to say, well, it could always be worse, I could call you to that?

Dan Schilling: 21:49

Yeah, this could get really bad if you, okay, I'll just. I'll go humble myself to my neighbor and say I'm sorry for taking the thing that I did.

Dan Schilling: 21:59

So I don't have to walk around my neighbor naked. So anyway, as we look back through the scriptures and see that thriving being in God's presence, doing what he asks us to do, sometimes calls us to lay down something that we hold true to and what we're gonna see in the next couple of episodes. With Hezekiah, the people weren't like, oh great, let's tear down the asherpahs, let's do all that. Stepping into a situation and saying, hey, this is what's right and this is what we need to do, is not always accepted, not always rejoiced over, Not always like oh great idea. I mean, you look at what Jesus did when he came and what's the Pharisees and Sadducees and things he was saying, and the disciples like, oh man, don't you know that these guys are offended? It's like, leave them. They're blind guides. Guys, we're not here to please. We're here to do what God's asked us to do and that's what being my disciple is gonna be. If you obey all these things, it's gonna go well with you, and that's been God's heart all the way through.

Michael Blue: 23:09

Right, yeah, it's a great point. I mean, I think sometimes I have the tendency to read these stories and think that their conditions even talking about Isaiah, that there somehow surroundings in their culture would have made these things easier to do or these things less weird to do. But it's just not true. I mean, there were some pretty smart people then and just as there are now there are also and so to see things that were that out of the ordinary and tearing down all these things when you tear down places that other people are worshiping at, they don't say thank you.

Dan Schilling: 23:50

No, they tend to fight you for it. Get them all riled up real quick, right.

Michael Blue: 23:54

And so unless there's a spirit of repentance, that comes, but that's not what it speaks to here. Certainly, maybe with Josiah or some of the other ones, we see more of that come through, but here it's just like, look, what my dad did was wrong and so I'm gonna tear it down. Yeah, and you also. Then I say, think with his son, as you mentioned the reaction with Manasseh, where people almost they push back even farther when you come at them like this, they got worse.

Michael Blue: 24:21

They got worse. I mean, not only did he sacrifice his son, they took an asherpul. Instead of putting it on high places, they put it in the temple. Yeah, that's right, right. And so it's like oh, you're gonna take that for me. I'm gonna go so far, over the top with this, that. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's really important to realize that this was difficult, even for a king.

Dan Schilling: 24:43

Yeah, Well, michael, you and I have talked about this and what I referred to earlier as a friend was telling me. He said hey, you guys talked about retirement being the golden calf in that episode. He said I'm really convicted by that and I said, well, these are some idols, right? Yeah, in our day. And maybe you and I. I said I sometimes think maybe you and I might be stoned to death sometime in our own culture.

Dan Schilling: 25:07

You know, by some of these things that we feel like that's calling us to say to our culture right, these are shiripoles, these things that have become acceptable places of worship in our society today, in our thing, and we don't even see it wrong.

Dan Schilling: 25:23

We don't say, hey, this is okay. I mean, you know, I'm doing it in, I'm doing it in Jesus' name. And yet we what we looked at a couple of weeks ago in Matthew 7, when he was saying you know, not everyone who calls on me, lord, lord, in verse 721, not everyone who calls, he says Lord, lord, it's going to enter the kingdom of heaven. There's going to be people that are going to say Lord, didn't we prophesy cast out demons and do miracles in your name? He says I will say to them away from me, you evil doers, and you say wait a minute, you know, I thought they were doing good things like no, they, they, they're. There was an idolatry that was in place and thinking that we can just use the name of God to get our. You know, thinking so even back in those days, these people thought that they were the chosen people of God and they can act that way, do whatever and still violate the principles of God and not be a consequence.

Michael Blue: 26:19

Yeah, what's, what's great is, to that point, right before we get to 18 and at the end of 17, where it's talking about a has it actually says in verse 32 to 33, says they also feared the Lord and appointed from among themselves all sorts of people as priests of the high places. They fear the right, they fear the Lord and they appointed priests of the high places. I think that's a mixture, yeah, and who sacrificed for them in the shrines of the high places? And then it says so they feared the Lord, capital LORD, so, yahweh, they feared Yahweh, but also served their own gods after the manner of the nations from among whom they had been carried away.

Michael Blue: 27:02

And so you have this, this idea I think we see all throughout history and our lives is like, well, I'm still doing these things, you know, I still have priests, I still am sacrificing and I'm still fearing God, but you know, like the idol, like they've just been thrown in the culture that surrounded them's idols and they've mixed. You know, it's called syncretism and that's something that we have to watch out for. It's really hard to see, because when you live in the middle of a culture, you're like, well, everyone else does this. I don't. I don't understand why it's, why it's idolatry.

Dan Schilling: 27:36

Wrong.

Michael Blue: 27:37

Yes, right, you know, that was maybe a little easier because they actually were worshiping at a high place, at a different shrine or something like that, but same thing with our idols today. So we got to really really watch and say am I fearing the Lord and adopting the practices of the people around me, yes, or spying the same idols that they are, or also serving our own gods as you? As they say, little G, yes, yes, so that's that's kind of where Hezekiah came from, where it's like, okay, guys, cut these two apart. Right, here's a Lord and faithfully serve Him, not Him plus, yes, yes.

Dan Schilling: 28:20

Well, and what we're going to see in the next episode or two beyond this because I think we've still got some digging to do here in this area of trust is one to see how big of it, how big of a deal this is to God. And it's not just contained in the, in this story about Hezekiah, this is throughout. I do think you could go back and argue that this really is part of the issue with Cain. You know we trust me, we do things my way. Cain, you know, bring your best and like no, I'm not going to do it. Adam and Eve, will you trust me? Don't, you can have everything, just don't touch that, that tree right there. Just leave that one alone. You know we trust me.

Dan Schilling: 28:59

And so this issue of trust, we're going to see how important it is to God, why it's important to us today and why it's not just like well, you know and I've said this before it's easy to say we trust God until we're putting a place where we have to trust Him and I don't think that's just talking about the material things, right, I think it can be sometimes like gosh, I, I'm going to, I feel like God's called me to do something, but I don't know how that's going to work. Like I need to go trust Him for the provision of how to talk with my son on this issue, you know, because we got. I don't want to trust Him. He's not giving me wisdom. I trust Him. He's not giving me the patience and the kindness and all the other things that I'm going to need in this situation.

Dan Schilling: 29:43

So I think what we're going to continue to address here in this issue of trust is why God values it so much and why really, what he's looking for is goes all the way back to what we've been talking about is he desires the intimacy in relationship. He desires us to hear His voice, to follow Him and thrive, no matter what's going on in the world around us, the culture, what our background is. Even if King Ahaz was our dad, he was a knucklehead. You know that he wants to reveal Himself as trustworthy and he has already done that, but he wants it just for us to experience it personally and to why to walk it out.

Michael Blue: 30:25

Yeah, that's good. One of my favorite quotes I hang on to from a pastor is we all want to be in a position to experience a miracle, which I'm sorry. We all want to experience a miracle, but we don't want to be in a position to need one.

Dan Schilling: 30:38

Yeah, yeah, yeah, please not make me have to get to that place, yeah.

Michael Blue: 30:44

I don't know that I want to need a miracle, but I'd love to experience one.

Dan Schilling: 30:47

Yes, Well, because again we're going to talk about these issues and what helps us build these trust muscles. We talked about this a little bit last episode when we were going through Deuteronomy 8, great episode. I encourage you to go back and catch that part one and two of that in it. What God's heart has always been and I've been thinking about this, michael too from why the manna? You know that when he says again, man does not live by bread alone, but every word that proceeds from the mouth of the father he wants us to learn complete dependency upon him and that hasn't changed.

Dan Schilling: 31:21

The dangers are the things around us, and we start looking to them to be the things that we put our hope and trust in yeah. He doesn't want that. For us, it never works out. He's got the bread, yes, and then.

Dan Schilling: 31:38

Well uh, we're gonna wrap up today and we're gonna continue again this conversation in the next episode. Uh, we're gonna look some more at Hezekiah, but for today, one of the things I just want to May leave you with is one of the first keys that we're gonna see out of Hezekiah In building these trust muscles. I believe it's faithfulness. That faithfulness is key and again, the faithfulness is hearing and obeying, and if we trust him, when we hear, we'll obey, we'll follow, and that, like Hezekiah, the outcome, when it says he was successful and everything that he did, that I believe that's what God's desire for us is. Now, that's not my definition or your definition, michael, of what success looks like. It actually is how God defines it, and so not always easy.

Michael Blue: 32:23

But yeah, and it, and all begins with knowing the father. Yes, uh, and if? We don't know him to be a good father. His commands will seem, you know, oppressive, rigid, whatever, like you pick, pick the adjective. But if I, if I know him and I understand that he actually loves me and so he's giving me Instructions that are for my good, even if they're not for my, comfort.

Michael Blue: 32:49

Yes, then I will say you know, if I know him that way, then I, then I am more likely to trust him and say, okay, I don't, don't see it, I don't understand it. It's like the Abraham, isaac, jacob, joseph, right, they were all praised in Hebrews 11 for their faith, for what they were looking to on their deathbed. Basically, all of them Isaac, jacob and Joseph Because they had come to know the father and so they knew that the promise that they had been made to them, that they had yet to see, was going to be fulfilled in the future. Yes, so it starts with our knowledge of him, amen.

Dan Schilling: 33:24

Well, watch, pray for us.

Michael Blue: 33:25

We'll close out, go ahead good, I was just saying, when I say knowledge, I don't just mean like I know about him, I mean I know him.

Dan Schilling: 33:32

Yes, and I say a relationship. Right, that's what I mean. Yeah, good, why don't you pray for? Us, we'll close up for today, and then we'll Continue on next time.

Michael Blue: 33:41

Good Thanks. I got thanks for a chance to just look at your faithfulness To us and response even to times when we are faithful, and so I just pray that you would, I, give us the Just courage to draw near to you and then the courage to hear, follow and and then experience the nearness of the view and the thriving that that will Now. Thanks for this time. Thank you for your grace. Jesus name amen, amen.

Dan Schilling: 34:07

Thanks for tuning in the FeedSheep podcast. We'll see you again next time. Good Bless you.