June 2, 2024: Message: The Qualities of Repentance | Scripture: Ezra 10:1-6 | Speaker: Pastor Stephen Choy
Worship Songs: O Come All You Unfaithful | When I Survey the Wondrous Cross | Turn Your Eyes
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Introduction
If able, please stand as I read to you from Ezra 10:1-6. TWoL: 1 While Ezra prayed and made confession, weeping and casting himself down before the house of God, a very great assembly of men, women, and children, gathered to him out of Israel, for the people wept bitterly. 2 And Shecaniah the son of Jehiel, of the sons of Elam, addressed Ezra: “We have broken faith with our God and have married foreign women from the peoples of the land, but even now there is hope for Israel in spite of this. 3 Therefore let us make a covenant with our God to put away all these wives and their children, according to the counsel of my lord and of those who tremble at the commandment of our God, and let it be done according to the Law. 4 Arise, for it is your task, and we are with you; be strong and do it.” 5 Then Ezra arose and made the leading priests and Levites and all Israel take an oath that they would do as had been said. So they took the oath. 6 Then Ezra withdrew from before the house of God and went to the chamber of Jehohanan the son of Eliashib, where he spent the night, neither eating bread nor drinking water, for he was mourning over the faithlessness of the exiles.
Just to remind us of where we are in the book of Ezra, the people of God are in sin. They’ve married themselves to those whom God had told them directly not to marry—non-Jews—not because God’s racist or intolerant of other people but because he is intolerant of his own people’s worship of other gods. And what often happens when his people marry into other nations is that the gods of those nations pollute the minds and hearts of Israel instead of Israel being an influence to bring the nations to God.
Ezra finds out about this, and he is broken over it. He rips out his hair. He tears his clothes. And he falls on his face in prayer, and in his prayer, what we saw two weeks ago was that he simply does not know what to do. God has shown Israel such great, unspeakable mercy. He hasn’t punished them as they deserve, and he’s allowed them to flourish when they should all be dead. So, he ends, “what now can we say? Who can stand before you because of what we’ve done?”
And the question, now, is what should Israel do? What should we do when our sin seems too great—when the wrath of God is the only thing we can reasonably expect? Should we give up? Should we keep our heads down and just continue in our sin, seeking to make no change? Or do we hear Ezra’s prayer, consider his words—the implications of what he’s saying, and fight to turn from sin again?
See, our text shows us the difference between the true people of God and those who simply pretend to be the people of God. This is what Ezra intended to do with his prayer. He desires to separate the true flock from the imposters, and what we see is that the true flock—the true Israel are a people who fight to turn from sin, again, not necessarily to benefit themselves, but to make things right with God. This is what true repentance is. In our sin, and in those moments where we fall, fight, once again, to turn from it and to make things right with God. Do this, firstly, by…
1) Find True Contrition in Godly Sorrow
As Ezra and the people are weeping and wailing for their sin, a man named Shecaniah, one, we’re told in chapter 8, who followed Ezra from Babylon to Jerusalem—a man who is himself a priest—comes alongside broken, incapacitated Ezra, and he says three things to their leader.
The first thing that Shecaniah says is that they’ve been faithless, or treacherous, as the Hebrew puts it, because they’ve married foreign women from the peoples of the land. And in this statement, Shecaniah gives us very clear principles for what we ought to do first with our sin. Notice, that this sin isn’t necessarily a sin against other people. No one was particularly harmed by this action. No one was lied to. Nothing was stolen. Lives are still largely intact—so there’s no person-on-person crime here.
Yet what Shecaniah does is he takes the initial step of figuring out what it is the people of God have done wrong. He’s able to articulate from the Law of God—from Scripture—what has led Ezra to such lamentation and put Israel in such a problematic position, possibly facing the wrath of God. He says, “they’ve married foreign women from the peoples of the land.” He understands the problem from the Bible, which is utterly important because some of us have very strong consciences—we call sin what isn’t sin sometimes—and others of us have very weak ones—we do things and are not inclined to ask if what we’re doing is wrong.
Yet, the solution for both isn’t by comparing one person to the other, as we tend to do, but to place our lives against Scripture. We know in later parts of chapter 10 that there are some who think Ezra’s reaction is too strong. Ezra likely thinks his people’s conscience is too weak. Who’s right? Well, Shecaniah finds out by going to the Bible.
And in his scriptural understanding of Israel’s sin, Shecaniah takes responsibility for it by confessing it to Ezra. Ezra already knows this information, but Shecaniah says it to him anyway because he’s not trying to hide or soften the problem. We all know that tendency, right? The way that we talk about our sin as if it’s not so bad, or like I said two weeks ago, how we downplay our misdeeds as mere mistakes and not true problems with our character.
Shecaniah doesn’t think that. He attaches him and his people to the sin because he knows what they are, and he wants to be accountable for it by exposing it. This is what we need to understand about accountability. It’s not merely asking people to pray for us and speaking abstractly or softening our language to make us look better and keep the true nature of our hearts hidden. No, it’s bringing our sin into the light of scripture so that we might not remain slaves to the darkness.
And we’re to confess our sins to other Christians, even if they’re not against another person, because the foundational problem of sin isn’t in how it hurts other people but in how it is treachery and treason against our God. All sin is a heart problem, thus we can’t be selective about what we confess because all of it needs to be brought to the light—all of it is a product of something wrong inside of us. That’s why Shecaniah confesses to Ezra: “We have broken faith with our God.” It’s the same as David who says in Psalm 51:4, “against you, and you only, have I sinned.”
Do you remember the context of that passage in Psalm 51? It’s a psalm from David after he’s slept with Bathsheba, impregnated her, and killed her husband Uriah. And for those of you who might have forgotten, he doesn’t just kill some stranger whose wife he desired. No, Uriah was one of his best friends, most trusted warriors, and a man of deep integrity. He was one of David’s mighty men of valor, which you can read about in 2 Samuel. When David tries to bring him back from war, after finding out he’s impregnated Bathsheba, he tells Uriah, “Go home and lie with your wife,” and Uriah responds, “How can I go home and find comfort when my brothers are on the front lines fighting, dying?”
This is who David kills, and yet, even in doing this—in stealing this man’s wife and killing the man to whom she belonged—David writes, “against you, God, and you only have I sinned”? Why? Because what David realizes is that his first sin wasn’t sleeping with Bathsheba, impregnating her, or killing her husband. No, his first sin—all of our first sin—is that we don’t trust God. We don’t believe his plans are good enough. We think that we know what’s better for us than him.
The true nature of sin is this. Sin isn’t just the act, such as when we hurt other people or when we break some law. Sin is a meditation and attitude of the heart that says God isn’t as good as he is, he doesn’t love me like he says, he doesn’t want what’s best for me. Sin is going against the will and character of the very one who made us—the one who knows us better than we know ourselves—the one who authors us—the one who owns us as the giver of our every breath and life, and saying instead, “my will be done.”
This is what David, Ezra, and Shecaniah are so sorrowful about—that before breaking the law, they had broken God’s heart. They had placed themselves where he belonged, and this, Paul says in 2 Corinthians 7:10, is the start of true repentance. This is what he calls godly grief. Godly grief—godly sorrow—recognizes that our sin is first and foremost a displacement of God’s priority in our lives—it’s seeing and grieving the fact that we’ve committed cosmic treason—that we’ve stabbed God in the heart by saying, “I don’t believe you are who you say you are, and I don’t believe you know what’s best for me.”
And we need to make sure that we’re contrasting this with worldly sorrow or grief, which is a sorrow about anything but God. In fact, worldly sorrow is usually synonymous with self-pity and arrogance where you want to rid yourself of dependence upon God as much as possible. It’s making it about yourself, “oh look how stupid I’ve been—I’ve killed my best friend—I took his bride—O, woe is me!” It’s a self-victimization. It’s mourning over the consequences you’ll face—that you’ll lose your job, that people won’t like you, that it’ll cost you your money.
So, what do you do? You try to fix things your way, leading to bigger and worse sins and greater and greater guilt—greater and greater self-pity and self-hatred. Why? Because it’s not true repentance. It’s not dealing with the root problem.
True repentance begins by changing and turning your focus from yourself and moving it outward. It stops us from thinking selfishly, and it considers, instead, how we’ve forgotten about the goodness and sufficiency of God. It reminds us that only he can truly love us as we need to be loved—that only he can give us what we need to be satisfied. And when we start to remember that we’ve removed from our lives the only one who can satisfy us, we begin to feel satisfied again. Where we were hopeless in our attempts to save ourselves, as we turn to the only one who can save us, there we find hope
This is why Shecaniah says at the end of verse 2, “but even now there is hope for Israel in spite of our actions.” Because he realizes, after all this time, that their sin wasn’t just marrying foreign women, it was a rejection of faith that God and his plans are always best for us. And if we only go back to trusting him as the one who will do what is best and good for us, then there is hope still because he is still God. His desires for us—for those who trust in him—do not change. It’s only when we change our desires, when we reject him, when we make ourselves to be gods—that’s when we warrant his wrath.
True repentance—fighting to turn from and defeating sin—begins with possessing a proper contrition in godly sorrow—a godly sorrow that understands from Scripture what it is that’s wrong with our hearts and our faithlessness towards him—a godly sorrow that confesses our sin to others so that it no longer has mastery over us—a godly sorrow that leads to renewed hope that God is God and that he can and will deliver us from not only our sinful actions but our sinful hearts when we’re unable deliver ourselves.
Godly sorrow leads to saving hope, which brings us to our second point because as we return to the true God of our true hope, there’s only one way to respond and that is to humble ourselves in order that our relationship with him might be restored.
2) Restore Your Relationship in Humility
Verse 3 begins with a therefore, and the inference that Shecaniah makes is a staggering one because his next words are, “let us make a covenant with our God to put away these wives and children.” Now, I hope you see why these words are staggering because what Shecaniah is suggesting is not only that the men who are married to foreign women get divorced, but the verb that’s used is the verb meaning “to send out,” or “to cast out.” It’s the word that you find often used in the New Testament in the context of demons possessing an unwitting host, for example, in Matthew 8:31, the demons ask Christ to cast them out into a herd of pigs nearby, which then rush down a steep bank into the sea and drown.
This is the kind of condemning language that Shecaniah is using to describe what to do with these wives and children—that they are a stench—an evil—a pernicious, intolerable presence amidst God’s people, and they need to be gone now! They can’t spend a moment more in our presence.
And we might tend to think that this is quite harsh for all who are involved—not just the women and children but the men who have to have these conversations with their wives—wives that I imagine they love, and their kids, who I imagine they hoped to watch grow up, marry, and have their own families. There must, we think, be another way to restore the broken faith between God and his people. There must be an alternative to treating women and children like they’re demons to be cast out and left to die.
Isn’t God a kind God? Isn’t God a loving God? How could he allow something like this? And what we must remember right here, church, is that as much as we, in our own sin, like to define who God is on our terms and within our own framework of fairness—we must remember that God is above all things holy and jealous for his name—that in him dwells no darkness whatsoever—in him, there is no variation or shadow due to change.
So, we may think that it would be a little thing for God to extend mercy to his people in this way—to just let a little bit of sin in for their comfort—no one’s hurt right? But to do so would be to put ourselves over God, wouldn’t it? To do so would be to make ourselves gods, right? And what happens to other gods when they come into the presence of the God?
See, the mercy is the putting out of sin. God isn’t taking away from them something that they deserve. He’s pruning them of something that they shouldn’t have had so that they might receive that greater thing that he means to give them. The women and children had become the stumbling blocks—they and their pagan religions had become the idols of Israel’s heart and had taken the place that was rightly reserved for God. And it’s worldly sorrow—it’s self-pity that says, “let me figure out another way where I can keep what I like—the sin and idols that are really dear to me—and still call myself a child of God.”
But godly sorrow, the kind displayed here by Shecaniah, knows that the heart can serve only one master. Godly sorrow knows that we’re naturally corrupt—that it tends to choose the master that’s bad for us—that when given the option for an alternative, we will always choose the way contrary to holiness.
So, the true, repentant child of God doesn’t just seek another way while the old way remains in us. No, he or she humbles himself or herself, and seeks a new way. They seek a new heart. They desire a new birth, a new creation, a newfound relationship. True repentance goes to God and says, “give me your truth. Plant it deep into my heart. Show me in my guilt how I’ve spurned your love and restore me in that love—make with me a new covenant. Create in me a clean heart. Renew in me a right spirit.”
In other words, the man or woman of God is a person willing to humbly do whatever it takes—to give up whatever needs to be given up so that he or she might have and be right with God—even if it means forsaking oneself. And notice that’s exactly how Shecaniah intends it to be. He says let’s make a covenant—let’s re-establish our relationship with God, but not according to Shecaniah’s own wisdom or knowledge. Rather, let’s make a covenant according to the counsel of my lord—who is Ezra—the man of God and his word—and according to those who tremble at the commandment of God—that is people like Ezra who have gathered with him and are weeping with him over their sin against God’s Word—and according to the Law, which is, itself, the Word of God.
Three things Shecaniah lists upon which Israel’s covenant with God should be based but notice none of them are about him. None of them seek his own glory. None of them seek his own way. Instead, all of them prioritize his submission to God, his servants, and his Word as the only way to secure their hope and restore their relationship with him. There is no other way. It is either all of him or none of him, and he will have all of us or none of us.
The question is are we humble enough to desire him and trust him over ourselves? Do we trust that his ways and his joy are better than our sin? If so, choose this day to fight and turn from sin once again by putting it away—putting it to death—casting it out using any and all means and seek, instead, his righteousness—his holiness—his happiness.
3) Walk With Others in Bold Accountability
And, perhaps, the most powerful of those means by which we fight to turn from sin—to put it to death—is accountability. It’s something I’ve alluded to already in our first point—that we ought to confess our sin to one another. But what we see in our text regarding accountability is more than just confession. Accountability done right ensures our perseverance—our survival in this incredible fight of faith.
Up to this point in the book, I’ve been very intentional to paint Ezra as a kind of stalwart, God-fearing, law-abiding, messianic figure come to save the people of God. But Ezra, we must remember is still just a man. In our text this morning, Ezra isn’t the hero. No, the heroes are two others, Shecaniah and Jehohanan, who come alongside Ezra when he is destroyed and in despair.
You see this, right? When Ezra can’t even look to heaven, it’s Jehohanan who comforts him and gives him a place to stay. When Ezra cannot answer, “what shall we say—what can we do—because of how great our sin is?” it’s Shecaniah who answers. Shecaniah sees the fault of the people. Shecaniah shows Ezra that there’s still hope. Shecaniah initiates the purification of the house of God. Shecaniah points the people back to God. And when it’s time to act, it’s Shecaniah who tells Ezra, “Get up, man. No one can do this but you. You’re our leader. You’re our scribe. You’re our priest. Get up. Be strong and do it.”
And here’s what the Bible doesn’t tell us explicitly, but such a thing must have been terrifying for Shecaniah to do not only because he is saying this while Israel is in the throes of sin, and not only because he’s saying it in front of the entire congregation gathered there, but because he’s calling out Ezra. This is Ezra, we’re talking about—Bible-reading, prayer-defying, body-sacrificing, unimpeachable Ezra who could, in his righteousness, strike Shecaniah down without blinking. GET UP! BE STRONG! DO IT!
And he is courageous in this because he realizes, what we all need to realize about sin—that it is the greatest problem in the entire world. Our problem is not with war, famine, sickness, race relations, political or other religious systems. It’s with sin. So great is this problem and the fight it presents that, truly, on our own, none can survive it.
Ezra took sin so seriously that he didn’t know how to move. He saw it as such a great problem that all other problems in Israel paled infinitely in comparison. He saw it as the key, unsolved issue that left Israel defenseless. Sin isn’t just a problem; it is the problem. Ezra got this, so much so that he needed someone to come alongside him in the greatest night of his soul to remind him that he is not fighting the problem alone.
How great it is then that our true Shecaniah is far greater than Ezra’s? That when he was terrified to death over our great problem of sin and the punishment that it demanded, he took courage, and he faced it without stumbling all the way to the cross. In the great night of our soul, he bore the entirety of its weight, and he conquers it in his own body. He does the thing that Ezra was too afraid—too frozen to do. He faces our guilt and transgressions. And he dies our death, so that in his resurrection he might come to us and say, “Get up with me. Be strong in me. And do it as I have done it.”
And still yet, Jesus died—he was forsaken on that cross—not just to bring you out of guilt and to fight your sin but so that you might be brought into his fellowship, into his flock, into his church and, therein, help others fight their sin in an unmatched display for the power of his gospel.
It doesn’t matter who you are. I don’t care if you’ve been a Christian for 60 years or for 60 seconds. You have been called to the task of fighting sin, but you aren’t to do it alone! Everyone of us has a Christ who gives us his Spirit to help us through every trial, and that same Spirit mingles our souls with other Christians so that we might have a Shecaniah who has the courage to get in our face when we’re deflated, defeated, or defective in our walk with the Lord. And in the same way, through the Spirit, every single one of us has been called, in courage, to be Shecaniah to others. And the only reason why we can do it, even better than Shecaniah, is because we follow our greater Ezra in Christ.
This is the value of being in church. This is the value of being covenanted brothers and sisters in Christ, and he died so that we might be that kind of church in this life and his people forever. Get up, then, and fight to turn from sin, once again, together. Be strong in the hope of his salvation. And do it to the praise of his glory and grace.
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