4/4 Ezra
I have no trouble at all identifying with how Ezra felt when he returned to Jerusalem from exile and found the country, including even some of the priesthood, living in such disobedience and sin. I feel we are in a similar position in the United States today. Alvin Toffler wrote a book entitled Future Shock, in which he compared the title idea to culture shock—the disorientation we feel when we travel to a different land and do not recognize how it works since it is so unlike our own. He said that the pace of change has increased so much that we don’t need to go to another land to experience the feeling of foreignness; we need only look about us and see that everything we have known, believed, and valued replaced by something else. What normally occurred incrementally now happens overnight. We go to bed in one world and awaken in another. Like Ezra, I am heartbroken at the sometimes willful, but often careless, ditching of our country’s core values and beliefs. It is true in our politics, in our morals and ethics, in our relationships, and even in our churches. Who could have imagined that the country we grew up in would become in so short a time the country we now inhabit?
In a real sense, we are in a foreign land because of our abandonment of God and His word. When we stopped reading it, we became prey to those who misrepresent it or to those who represent cults, or to our own desires and rationalizations that support them. I imagine that pastors everywhere mourn and weep at our loss. Lay people too. WE NEED AN EZRA. AND WE NEED TO JOIN WITH THAT EZRA AND RETURN TO OUR JERUSALEM, THE LAND OF FAITH AND OBEDIENCE THAT GOD COVENANTED TO US, AND WHICH, ESAU-LIKE, WE GAVE UP FOR A BOWL OF STEW. We are so prone to this immediate gratification and damn the cost mentality that we have lost all sense of our past and any concern for future consequences. Climate change? Pshaw. Hell? Phooey. Lots of the hymns that we no longer sing helped us to live with a greater sense of our spiritual inheritance. One that comes to minded contained these lines: “Faith of our fathers, holy faith, we will be true to thee ‘til death.” Another contained this chorus: “Hallelujah, Thine the glory. Hallelujah, amen. Hallelujah, Thine the glory. Revive us again.” I pray for that revival. Blessings to you, brothers.