It does no good to fix a problem if you do not even know you have the problem. Nobody wants a cure for a disease they do not think exists. That is how it was for Samuel in 1 Samuel as he related to Israel. They did not even see the sickness of their sin until God brought them to a place of brokenness, and only then were they ready for the revival that happens in chapter 7. Hi, church. Welcome back to our series through 1 Samuel. We have been going pretty much verse by verse, chapter by chapter, and this is a series of videos where we try to bring the Bible home, not just on Sundays but throughout the week too, so you can continue with the content here on YouTube. If you are new here, I am Pastor Ryan Rench, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California. As we walk through this story, today we have gotten to chapter 7. You can go back to previous videos to see the rest of the story up to this point, but here in chapter 7, God finally turns Israel’s ruin into revival.
A Road Map
That is where we are going. Here is a road map for today, with checkpoints along the journey. Number one, ruin: seeing the destruction for what it is. Then the return of Israel to God. And finally, the revival, the life that follows repentance; that is when revival finally comes. By the end of the video, I hope you will honestly ask yourself, “What checkpoint am I at? Am I in the ruin phase, or should I return and repent and experience the revival God wants me to have?” You see the text here on the screen. 1 Samuel 7:1 says, “And the men of Kirjath-jearim came, and fetched up the ark of the LORD, and brought it into the house of Abinadab in the hill, and sanctified Eleazar his son to keep the ark of the LORD. And it came to pass, while the ark abode in Kirjath-jearim, that the time was long; for it was twenty years: and all the house of Israel lamented after the LORD.” So we see in verse 2 that they had been hearing the preaching of Samuel, it seems, for twenty years, and they were finally coming to a place of brokenness, finally starting to see the need for the cure Samuel was bringing. You do not need a cast if your bone is not broken. You do not need an insulin pump if you do not have diabetes. But once you realize you have the problem, you start looking for the solution, and that is where Israel had finally arrived. As I read through this passage, I am reading about revival, and I am thinking, “Man, this is a text about revival. We need revival. Our church needs revival.” And then I am thinking, well, why do we need revival just because Israel had revival? Before you bring something back to life, you first have to admit it was dead, and that is where Israel was coming from. It is a story about revival, but they did not start fixing the problem until they knew there was a problem. So sometimes, before the revival comes, before you put a cast on a leg, God has to break the leg. You know what I mean? Sometimes you have to be shown the problem before the cure comes.
Checkpoint One: Ruin
Israel’s problem up to this point had been idolatry. They loved their Baalim and Ashtaroth, the gods of comfort of the Canaanite cultures around them. The gods of prosperity and pleasure of the surrounding Canaanites were the ones their hearts were chasing, and they were trusting the false gods instead of the true God. The other religions said, “Well, do not say no to your flesh.” Baal and Ashtaroth said, “Say yes to your flesh, and while you are at it, go ahead and call it worship.” That is the kind of so-called religion Samuel was preaching against. For twenty years he was up against a religion that said, “Please your flesh,” sexual idolatry, going to a prostitute in the name of religion. If you are going against people like that, then, boy, you have your work cut out for you. It is no wonder God had to crush it at its core. He had to get to the heart of their real issue, and He had to preach to them about their hearts. God shows them here that they had no heart for God. Sin, especially the sins they were into, always promises some kind of life, some kind of happiness, some kind of pleasure, but we know from Scripture it only lasts for a season. It leaves you so sick and empty. I heard somebody say that only once you get so sick and tired of being sick and tired, only once you hit that point, can you wake up to what is truly good. So the first checkpoint in the text is the sin that brings ruin, the ruin that comes into people’s lives because of their sin. You cannot get around sin, and you cannot get around the ruin. Maybe ruin for you looks like some unsettledness in your soul. Maybe ruin has gone so far for you that it has caused a miserable home or an emptiness inside you. James teaches us that sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. Ultimately there is eternal death in hell; that is what Jesus came to save you from. That is the ultimate ruin Jesus came to save you from.
So if you have never trusted in Him, true revival begins at salvation. You cannot revive something that was never alive in the first place. Revival is just Christians returning to normal Christianity, going back to the life they first received when they accepted the gospel by faith. So revival begins at salvation. This passage is about revival for Israel, a sort of spiritual revival that happened there. But you first have to start by believing that Jesus died for your sin, placing your trust and your faith in Jesus, repenting, and turning to Jesus Christ. That is what salvation is. That is the gospel in a nutshell, and that is where the true, abundant life starts. If you are a believer, a passage about revival applies to you in a different way. It means going back to the time when you remember placing your faith in Jesus Christ, back to a time when you were right with the Lord. If sin has been creeping into your heart, if there is a sin tolerated in your heart, it is removing God from His rightful place, and that is where the ruin comes from. That is where the emptiness and the faithless life come from. So it starts with recognizing the ruin, and only once you recognize the ruin sin brings can you return.
Checkpoint Two: Return
At the end of verse 2 we read that all the house of Israel lamented after the LORD. For twenty years, it seems, Samuel was preaching, plowing the ground, plowing the hard soil, preaching the truth, waiting for hearts to finally soften and turn to God. We realize, man, this revival was not instant. It was years of this. Revival is not a cake mix where you throw the ingredients together and out pops a cake. No, it is years of plowing and praying before hearts finally turn to the Lord. Samuel says in verse 3, “And Samuel spake unto all the house of Israel, saying, If ye do return unto the LORD with all your hearts, then put away the strange gods and Ashtaroth from among you, and prepare your hearts unto the LORD, and serve him only: and he will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines.” It is the grace of God that allows people to return to Him. It is the grace of God that He does not just say, “I am done with you. You did not live for Me. I am done with you.” No, the grace of God says, “Come home. Return.” He is waiting, just as the father waited for his prodigal son. Some of you have been that prodigal. You have been far away from the Lord, and God’s message to you is the same: “Return. Return. Put away the strange gods and Ashtaroth from among you, and prepare your hearts unto the LORD, and serve Him only.” That is God’s message: return. This is not about crocodile tears. You can be sorry without changing, but real repentance means surrendering and returning to the Lord. It is not even necessarily first turning from sin. It is first turning to God with all your heart; that is where he starts here: “If ye do return unto the LORD with all your hearts.” So first it is a heart for God. It starts with a desire to understand and know God, being sick and tired of being sick and tired, seeing the ruin in your life, and just wanting God again. So checkpoint one was ruin. Checkpoint two is return: we hear the call of God, and we return to Him. Only after those two checkpoints can the revival of checkpoint three come. Revival is the result of God’s people returning to Him.
So Samuel tells them what to do: “Put away the strange gods and Ashtaroth from among you, and prepare your hearts unto the LORD, and serve him only.” Put them away. Quit them. Remove them completely. Do away with them. I love these pop-up study Bibles; you can read the definitions: to desert, to quit. Put those things completely away. You are done. You are not going back to those idols anymore, the Baalim and the Ashtaroth. I know they were pleasurable for a season, but they leave you so empty. So put them away, and prepare your heart. Man, prepare it. Make it steadfast. Anchor it in something firm and strong; that is what is going on with that word prepare. It is an upright position. Make it steadfast. Drop an anchor in your soul and say, “I am firmly planted in the Lord.” The next phrase is “serve him only.” A worship that changes your heart changes your actions too. It changes how you live. If your heart is for the Lord, you bring the Bible home every single day. Your true worship of God continues not just on Sunday but on Monday as well; true worship continues all week. Crying over sin is not real repentance if you do not change, if there is no follow-up to serve Him only. Look what they did in verse 4: “Then the children of Israel did put away Baalim and Ashtaroth, and served the LORD only.” They did it. That is incredible. Good job, Israel. They actually followed through on their commitment. “And they gathered together to Mizpeh, and drew water, and poured it out before the LORD, and fasted on that day, and said there, We have sinned against the LORD. And Samuel judged the children of Israel in Mizpeh.” Here they are admitting out loud, “Yeah, we have sinned against the LORD.” That is not just regretting their sin; it is not just crocodile tears. Here is true repentance: they actually put away the false gods that were among them. Until you confess these things to the Lord, until you say out loud, “I am still in my sin”… God is not going to share His glory with anybody else. He expects you to renounce all loyalty to all the other gods out there and give your loyalty to Him only. It is Him only, or it is nobody at all. He does not share the throne with anybody.
Checkpoint Three: Revival
So checkpoint three is when the revival comes. They have gone from ruin to returning to God, and now God restores. He revives them. God responds, protects them, and blesses them. We see that in the rest of the chapter, which we will get to in the next video: the children of Israel put away their gods, Samuel prays for them, and the rest of the chapter is God actually delivering them. In many ways this serves as a model for us as Christians. It is the same message Jesus Christ and John the Baptist preached: repent. Christ was crucified, He was buried, He rose again, and He conquered sin, the very sin that put Him there. Because of Christ’s work on the cross, there is an open call to every one of us to repent and turn to Jesus Christ and allow that to be the framework of our very lives. The forgiveness we have received gives us a new heart that no longer desires sin. We turn away from sin to Jesus Christ. We return to the Lord with all our hearts. As a manner of life, a way of life, we live a life of repentance, putting away the Baalim and Ashtaroth that plague us, those gods of sinful pleasure that so often creep up in our hearts as they did for Israel. In the New Testament, in 1 Corinthians chapter 6, we see different kinds of Baalim and Ashtaroth, different things we give our lives to, ways of living we had before we were saved. Paul lists them: “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.” There is a whole list of vices there, and these kinds of lists run all the way through the New Testament. But he is saying, “Look, that is what you used to be.” Look at verse 11: “And such were some of you.” That is what you used to be. There were thieves and angry people and extortioners and homosexuals and all kinds of people in this church at Corinth, and he says, “That is the old you. That is how you used to be. Such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.” That is the kind of true revival where you turn from what you used to be, where you are washed and sanctified and justified by Jesus Christ.
As Christians, revival means returning to that washed state: “I know I am washed, so I need to be what I am. I need to act like what I am.” When I return to the Lord with all my heart, that should create in me a heart of repentance from the old man, the old nature. It should create in me a heart that wants to serve God alone, and that is when my soul is fully revived before the Lord. And when you have a revival in your own spirit, God takes that revival spirit and restores you. In our text in 1 Samuel chapter 7, Samuel gathers the people and prays, and God defends them. Revival is not just a revival meeting you might have at your church. It is not just having a guest preacher in and going through a series of meetings. No, revival is for you today, every single day of your life. It is just normal Christianity. Revival is putting away the false gods, preparing your heart, and serving the Lord only. When your heart is prepared before God, He can take the tangled-up mess of the ruin of your past and turn it right side up and use it for His glory. Sometimes we say God turns your life upside down and changes you, but no, your life was already upside down. He is the One turning it right side up. He delights to redeem you. He buys back the mess and gives you His perfection. Maybe you have wandered away from God, but you can still be revived and come back to Him. As we reach the end of this journey, this road map from ruin to return to revival and restoration, I ask you, where are you in that process today? Are you still in the ruin phase? Are you halfway down the road back? Are you thinking about coming back? The truth is, to avoid ruin, you have got to return and repent. Only then will you experience revival. That is the only way to experience revival. Do not expect God to just blow into your life and turn things upside down while you have no changes to make. No, you have got to return to the Lord with all your heart. This is such a wonderful truth, and it really gets to the heart of what Christianity is: a heart for God. Well, thank you for watching, church. If this has been an encouragement to you, like the video and share it with somebody who needs a little spiritual shot in the arm, and we will keep on bringing the Bible home through these YouTube videos week after week. We will see you next time, when we complete chapter 7. In the meantime, grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. God bless you. We will see you in the next video.
