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Sermons and messages from Pastor Jason White and others at Colonial Hills Baptist Church in Tyler, TX
Aaron, well, good morning everyone. My name is Aaron Glover. For those of you who don't know me, I was formerly the pastor of missions and Outreach here at Colonial hills. I'm currently the head of school for kings Academy, Christian school, the school that utilizes colonial hills as its home for our school building for kindergarten through eighth grade. Our ninth through 12th grade is at Southside Baptist across the way. Whenever Jason asked me to preach for him, I was more than happy to do so, because first and foremost, I love our church. I love getting to see you guys. Love getting to spend time with you, and I love just telling people about Jesus. So that's an easy yes for me, but I want us all to remember, as Jason's taking time this week, being a pastor is not an easy job, and so this week, he's taking time out of his calendar to step back and to seek God's guidance for the next year, to prepare for sermons and initiatives and just asking God where we as a church should be going, where we're headed, how we're going to get there. And so just remember to pray for him that this week, that God would continue to speak to him, that he would continue to listen, and that we as a church, would faithfully follow where God is leading us as colonial hills. You know, part of living in a fallen world is from time to time we get bad news. Sometimes bad news is something silly and something funny. Even, you know, you may go to order something and they say, Oh, I'm so sorry. We don't have that flavor. We
don't have that in stock. And you're like, Darn it.
Or it might even be that whenever you pull out your phone to check your latest order from Amazon Prime, you see that it's going to be a day late, don't they know I need that yesterday just ruins everything. But it's kind of silly. You know, bad things happen sometimes, though, we get bad reports that are major, that are life altering, life shaking. It could be a report from a doctor who comes back in after some testing and tells you the very words that you did not want to hear about a diagnosis. It could be that a loved one you know has fallen ill or has died, or it could be something like a major shift in your family, like losing a job or a bad circumstance. I remember back in 2020, in the spring, right after COVID had hit. Right after spring break, everything kind of shut down. Everybody was in a panic. We didn't know what was going on with COVID. Some people were saying this. Some people were saying that everybody was just losing their minds. It seemed we were at work. We weren't going into the office. We were doing zoom meetings. And I hopped on a Zoom meeting one morning, and I hopped on with the vice president that I worked under, and someone from HR was there, and before they said anything, I knew what was happening, they did a massive round of layoffs at the company, and at the time, when our nation was the most scattered and confused in my entire life, I was suddenly jobless. I was trying to finish a doctoral program at Dallas Baptist University. I had a wife and three children at the time to provide for all looking to me, and suddenly it felt like everything in this world had turned against me. Whenever I found out that I had lost my job, it was a report that hit me so hard
it took me months and months to recover from
maybe you've had something like that happen to you. So I have a question for you this morning. Where do you turn when it feels like life has turned against you?
Where do you turn
when things in life feel like they have turned against you? I wish I could stand up here and say to you all, the moment I got that report, the moment I got that news, that bad news, I wish I could say, oh, you know, I that moment I just turned and I started praising God. God, you're so good. You're faithful. You're going to take care of me. But I didn't. Fear welled up inside of me, and then anxiety started to mix in with this. And then all the worry and the frustration and the anger and all of these things just became this ball that was spinning out of control. It felt like my life was over in many ways. I remember just trying to think through everything. Maybe I can make a plan, or I can figure this out, or if I could do this, or talk to so and so, talk to Emily, trying to figure everything out. I wish I could say that the first place I turned to was. Back to my Lord,
but that's not true.
But why not?
Why isn't God the first person we turn to when we get these kind of things in our life? Today, we're going to look at an example in the Bible. I love the Bible because it shows us raw and real examples of people who experience many of the same things that we go through. The Bible shows us examples of exactly what you should do, and sometimes it shows us what you shouldn't do. It's so honest. And today, what we're going to look at is this great king and how he responded, and what he does, how he moves in faith is something that applies to all of us. It applies to ourself, to our families, organizations, to our jobs, our workplaces, our church, our schools. What we will see today is something that we can and should implement every single time we get bad news in life. So if you have your Bibles, go ahead and turn to Second Chronicles, chapter 20. And before we start reading, I'm going to kind of set the scene up for us so we understand some context of what's happening. You can look on the screens and and see Israel during this time was a literally divided nation. Not just like America divided. Half the people voted this way. Half the people voted that way. They were a literally divided nation. You had the kingdom of Israel in the north and you had the kingdom of Judah in the South. You can see the northern kingdom in pink and the southern kingdom Judah in blue. Now the northern kingdom was had a king named aziah, and he was the son of Ahab and Jezebel. So if that tells you a little bit about his family tree. It was not a good family tree, obviously Ahab and Jezebel, and he was a wicked idolater, just like his father, Ahab, you know, the Bible says in First Kings 16, that Ahab provoked God like no other king before him, and then his son, Ahaziah, comes, and he follows along in his father's footsteps, provoking God with idolatry. He was a wayward leader that kept destroying Israel from within, even though economically, they were doing just fine, but in the southern kingdom, we have this king named King Jehoshaphat, and King Jehoshaphat was likened to a young David ahazi in the north, was just like evil king Ahab. But King Jehoshaphat in the South was just like his great, great, great, great whatever grandfather, King David, it's a high compliment for a king to receive. You see, he rejected idolatry. He wanted to. He sent priests throughout all the land of Judah to teach the people the law and what God said and how they should turn away from these idols, they should worship God. And he tried to reform the nation of Judah. He was a faithful leader.
He tried to lead the people as best he could.
These are hard times for Israel. Like I said, their nation was divided. Idolatry polluted them from within. They had enemy threats from other kingdoms outside of them, and they had some very sketchy political alignments that kept them wealthy. All in all, it was a very bad situation. It kind of reminds me of America sometimes, which with veterans. Day in honor of Veterans, day, I do want to say thank you to our veterans. You know, just this last week, you participated in the greatest political freedom, right and privilege in all of human political history, and that is the vote, the ability to vote in a constitutional republic throughout all most of human history, it's been kings and monarchies that sometimes led to tyranny. We have the blessing, the privilege, the freedom to have a say in who our leaders are, to have a vote in the direction of our nation.
And I think we could all agree that
we've got our work cut out for us.
These are trying times that we lived in with a divided nation and a terrible economy, our morals, our values, everything we hold dear as believers, seems to be under attack nowadays, and what we do as Christians, it matters how we vote matters. But let's get back to the sermon on side note there. Okay, so we're going to begin reading in Second Chronicles, chapter 20, and we're going to focus on King Jehoshaphat down here. Here in the kingdom of Judah. We're going to center around Jerusalem today. So Second Chronicles, chapter 20 begin. Verse one, it says, After this, the Moabites and Ammonites, and with them, some of the mayonites came against Jehoshaphat for
battle.
Verse two says, and some men came and told Jehoshaphat, a great multitude is coming against you, from Edom, from beyond the sea, so from the east. These three enemy nations have gathered to come against Judah. And they're not coming just to see how it is. They're not coming for a better tomorrow. They are coming to destroy Judah and everyone in the entire nation. They are here to lay waste to Jerusalem and wipe them off the face of the planet.
Now, if you're king Jehoshaphat,
and you receive this news, what's your first response?
How do you feel? I'm
not going to lie. The first thing I would be afraid. I would be shaking in my sandals. Three nations are coming against my nation and my nation's divided. We're at half power as it is. These men are these warriors are coming to kill every man, woman and child that I love and know and hold dear. Here's what verse three says. Then Jehoshaphat was afraid and rightfully so. Let's just pause there. Rightfully so he was afraid. How many of you have ever received bad news or a bad report and you were afraid? I'm see a way out of this. This is literally the worst thing you could tell me,
that's how the king felt.
Oh, but I love his response. Look at this response. He was afraid, and he set his face to seek the Lord. He felt the same fear that we would fear. He felt the same anxieties that we would feel. He felt the same dread and terror. And the Bible says he turned to seek the Lord. And not only that, he turns to seek the Lord, but he proclaims a fast throughout all of Judah. He
says, hey, guess what?
I'm King. I'm saying we're all seeking God right now, everybody, I'm seeking God. You are all seeking God with me. What an incredible response. He proclaims this fast. And then he calls an assembly together, calls the entire nation together. Come everybody. We're all of Judah. We are going to seek the Lord together. So they gather together, and the king goes out to speak to the nation of Judah. Men, women and children have all gathered
to seek the Lord with the king. I
and here's what he does. And
just imagine number one. I mean, speaking in public is hard enough, right? How many of you have a fear of public speaking? Yeah, imagine you were the king, and you had to go out and tell everybody, hey, guess what? Three enemy armies are coming here pretty soon, and they're going to kill us. That's not the kind of news you want to deliver. I would be terrified to say such a thing, but the Bible says that he goes in front of the people and instead of telling them some great battle plan, some some great strategy, instead of doing the things that we think he would do. He prays,
he prays,
and he prays an incredible prayer that we're not going to read. Every verse we don't have time. I would suggest all of you go read Second Chronicles, 20 in its entirety later, it's an incredible chapter of the Bible. But he begins to pray, and I broke his prayer down into several different aspects. And the first thing he does is he recognizes God's authority. He proclaims that God you are king, you are Lord over all the kingdoms of the world. No one can stand against you. You are the true ruler. First thing he does is recognizes who God is in verse six, and then in verses seven through nine, he recalls God's faithfulness, as God has delivered Israel through the promised land and delivered their enemies into their hand the promises that he made to his friend, Abraham. He says, You are a faithful God who. Delivers us and makes us victorious. And then he submits the circumstance. He tells that these these enemies, have come in verse 10 and verse 11,
and then in front of the entire nation, in
front of the entire nation,
what he says, next just baffles me. Could you imagine what I'm about to read if one of our presidential candidates would have said something like this? He acknowledges his own weakness, and he says we are powerless against this great horde that is coming against us.
God, we have no chance of winning.
We have no chance against this enemy. We couldn't stop them if we tried. We're toast. And so he says this at the end. This is underline, this, highlight this excellent exclamation point, this. This is the whole point of the message today. He ends his prayer with this powerful sentence. After he says, We're powerless against this great and vast horde that is coming against us, he says, We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you?
Wow, I'm going to be honest if I'm a man in that crowd who's a faithful Jew, and I brought my family and my children like I'm expecting to hear some kind of battle plan. We gotta go out and fight. We gotta. And you just said we can't win. We don't even know what to do. We're just gonna look to God. Are you kidding me? You see the flesh. The people want a plan, but instead, God gives them a prayer, and that prayer was more powerful than any plan or scheme that Jehoshaphat and all the advisors in the world could have come up with. That prayer had more power than anything a man could have planned. We don't know what to do, but our eyes are on you so often we want to fix everything in our lives. Soon as the bad news hits, we're dreaming. We're scheming. We're coming up with ideas. We got the plan. We know who to call. I'm going to text so and so they're going to fix this and get all we start going to work. And it's like, God, I don't need you. I've got this. I'll call you when I get into big trouble.
Prayer had more power than any plan Jehoshaphat ever could have come up with, and I love how, how God answers this prayer. God doesn't always deliver us from every circumstance. He gives us ultimate victory through Christ, Jesus, one day when we're all in heaven and eternity, every wrong will be made right, everything will be healed. There will be no crying or mourning, nor nor shame, none of that will exist in eternity, God does give us victory here on earth. He doesn't always give us victory on Earth, though we need to understand that he does give us victory, and eventually everything will come to subjugation under King Jesus in eternity. But I love how God answers this. There's a prophet named yahaziel. And I love his name because his name means God sees. The king says, Lord, we're looking to you. And God speaks through a Prophet whose name means God sees. And here's what the Prophet says. Yahaziel said, Listen all of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem and King Jehoshaphat, Thus says the Lord to you, do not be afraid and do not be dismayed at this great Horde, for the battle is not yours but
God's.
I want to proclaim to you today whatever you're facing in your life, the battle is not yours, but God's. If you are to have victory over anything, it will be because King Jesus makes you victorious over that. The battle is not yours, it is God's. And the Prophet continues in verses 16 and 17. I'm going to summarize and shorten this. He says, tomorrow you will go down against them.
You will not need to fight.
Stand firm, hold your position and see the salvation of the Lord on. Your behalf, do not be afraid. The Lord will be with you.
The people want protection, and God gives them a promise.
God makes a promise.
He says, just show up tomorrow. You won't even need to fight, but you'll see victory now again. Let's make this real for us. If you're standing in that crowd and you hear, hey, tomorrow, we're going out to battle, but you're not going to fight. Our plan is that you get dressed, you show up on the battlefield, but you don't lift a finger. The reason I say that the prayer and the promise is so much greater than any plan we could have come up with is because that's not how fights are won. Guys in a battle, usually you have to fight the enemy, not just show up,
but God doesn't do things the way we do them.
God works in ways that we will never understand, and it's so much better than how we would do it. And so the next day, here's what happens. I'm going to summarize it. They get dressed, they go out, and as they're going, King Jehoshaphat reminds them. He says, Believe in the Lord, trust in His prophets, and you will prevail.
Trust in God,
and you will be saved.
And then the king goes a step further, after taking some counsel with some people, the king decides, you know what, not only are we getting dressed to go to battle, to not fight in but win,
we're going to put some worshipers out front. Now, this
totally blows my mind, because this doesn't make any sense, and I think about this, it would be like putting Emily and Heather and and them out front, in front of our army. We take our worship leaders, we're going to put them out in front of the Army, on the front lines as we go out to battle that let me remind you we're not planning on fighting in and as they go, they start praising God. And the wildest thing happens. All of a sudden, these three enemy nations that have gathered against Judah start turning on one another and fighting and fighting and fighting until they slaughter every single one of themselves and nobody is left. And to help you understand how big this enemy army of these three different peoples was the Bible says that it took the Jews three days to gather all the spoils of war, so to take all the stuff off the bodies, all the anything they had that was useful, it took them three days to gather this stuff up. The Bible says they gathered all this and they took it back into Jerusalem, singing joyfully, victorious. They didn't lift a finger in the fight. But God brings them after this. The Bible says that Jehoshaphat reign, there was peace for the rest of his in the rest of his reign. Oh, it's incredible. You know, we can't read a passage of Scripture, though, in the Old Testament without seeing how it points us to King Jesus. Yes, this was a real situation that really happened, but if we miss the part about how this leads us to Jesus, then we've missed the whole point of the message. You see, just like Judah was powerless against their enemy, we were powerless against an enemy called sin and death, no matter how hard we would try to fight, no matter what scheme we would come up with, we could never overcome sin and death on our own. So God stepped in to fight on our behalf.
You didn't go to the cross.
You didn't have your hands and feet pierced. God went in your place. Jesus became our sacrifice. He interceded for us. The battle is the Lord's
and he took that for us,
and all we do is trust him, just like King Jehoshaphat said when they were going out to battle, Believe in the Lord, trust in the words of His prophet, and you shall see salvation. And that's the same thing God offers to every single one of us. All we do is trust and believe. We show up and we get to live in Christ's victory. And after we gather all the blessings and the spoils, everything that we have been blessed with in Christ, Jesus, we are led back into the holy city, new Jerusalem, to be with our. God forever and ever,
hallelujah. Thank
God.
What I want us to remember is that looking to God should not be our last resort. It should be our first response every time something comes to you every time something bad, every time something good, every time something turning to God, seeing what he wants, how he wants you to move, how he wants you to respond, how he wants you to be seeking God should be our very first response, not our last resort. And so here's my invitation to you all today, the next time you get a bad report, you face a challenge or a problem has come into your life, I want you to decide I'm not going to wait to seek God. The first person I'm turning to is Jesus Christ. But you can't wait until that happens. If you wait until the bad news comes, it's probably too late, guys, just like what the judge Joshua said to Israel, he said, choose this day whom you will serve, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. I say to you today, choose this day who you will turn to every time something bad happens in life, as for me and my house, we're turning to the Lord. We're seeking Him in every circumstance, good, bad, trivial, Major. Make that decision now
so that when it happens,
your default setting is to turn to God,
not a backup plan.
That's your default plan.
But that's for my brothers and sisters in Christ who are already believers. But for anyone who's not yet believed in Jesus, you've not yet put your faith and your trust in him. It's never too late to turn to him. I invite you to turn today and seek Him as your Lord and Savior, and He will deliver you from sin. He will offer you forgiveness. He will offer you eternal life. He will make you a brand new creation, united with His Holy Spirit and given every spiritual blessing in him. You will live in his victory, and you will be with him in eternity, all through simple faith and belief, you trust in Him and He will give you his victory over sin and death and.