Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website, globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Now, if you have your Bibles, if you'll take those, please, and turn to the book of judges, 17th chapter. That's a lengthy passage of scripture that I'm going to read. I want to read the whole chapter, the 17th chapter of judges.
Now let me just give you the setup for what's happening in this chapter.
There is a woman, Ephraimite woman, who has saved up some silver. 1100 shekels of silver.
And someone steals the silver.
And she is cursing the thief. She doesn't know who it is. Now, by cursing, we use cursing just to mean, you know, using profanity on somebody. She is not doing that. She is actually placing a curse on the thief. She's sending a curse upon that thief. Her son hears her and races in to say, mother, please don't do that. I stole the money.
So here it is, Judges, chapter 17. And there was a man of Mount Ephraim, whose name was Micah. And he said unto his mother, the 1100 shekels of silver that were taken from thee, about which thou cursest and speakest of also in mine ears. Behold, the silver is with me. I took it. And his mother said, blessed be thou of the Lord, my son. And when he had restored. Please keep track of the numbers. When he had restored the 1100 shekels of silver to his mother, his mother said, I had wholly dedicated the silver unto the Lord from my hand for my son, who to make a graven image and a molten image. In other words, two false idols. I dedicated the whole thing to God to make two false idols. Now therefore, I will restore it unto thee.
Yet he restored the money unto his mother. And his mother took 200 shekels of silver, not 1100, 200.
And gave them unto the founder, who made thereof a graven image and a molten image. And they were in the house of Micah. And the man Micah had a house of gods.
If you've traveled in Asia, you've seen these, a little house of gods that might be tacked on the outside of the building or inside, and they place little morsels of food or incense or something and worship these false idols. And the man Micah had a house of gods and made an ephod and Teraphim and consecrated one of his sons who became his priest.
In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.
And then there was a young man out of Bethlehem, Judah, of the family of Judah, who was a Levite. And he sojourned there. And the man departed out of the city from Bethlehem, Judah, to sojourn where he could find a place. And he came to Mount Ephraim, to the house of Micah as he journeyed. And Micah said unto him, whence comest thou? And he said unto him, I'm a Levite of Bethlehem, Judah, and I go to sojourn with where I might find a place. And Micah said unto him, dwell here with me, and be unto me a father and a priest, and I will give thee ten shekels of silver by the year and a suit of apparel and thy victuals. So the Levite went in, and the Levite was content to dwell with the man. And the young man was unto him as one of his sons. And Micah consecrated the Levite, and the young man became his priest and was in the house of Micah.
Then said Micah, now I know the Lord will do me good, seeing I have a Levite to my priest, or as my priest. Now, just before we pray, let me just summarize. I want to make sure you understand this chapter.
So here's a woman who has saved up 1100 shekels of silver, which she says she has dedicated the entire amount to the Lord God Almighty, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, in order to make two false gods to give to her son to worship.
He, not knowing all that, steals the money.
She is now calling down a supernatural curse, which is basically an act of witchcraft. She is calling a curse down on the thief. The son hears that and races in and says, mother, don't do that. Please don't do that.
I'm the one who stole it. So she says, I consecrate the entire amount to you. He returns the money to her.
But she lied to him. She does not take 1100 pieces of silver. She takes only 200 and makes two false idols and give them to her son and pockets the 900. He takes the two false idols, put them in a godhouse, and then a wandering Levite pass. A Levite passes by, and he says, will you be my priest? The Levite says, sure. So he pays him. He comes into his house, and Micah, this man consecrates the Levite himself.
He makes he has no right to consecrate a priest, he consecrates the Levite.
And then he says to himself, now I know God will do me good because I have a priest. I have a Levite as my priest.
So we have stolen money, a lying mother, a thieving son, money consecrated to God in order to make false idols, a witchcraft curse that's placed.
And two episodes. First, he consecrates his son as his priest, who's not a Levite at all, he's from Mount Ephraim. And then secondly, as a wandering vagabond, he takes this guy and consecrates him as his priest. And then he says to himself, now I know God will bless me because I have a genuine Levite as my priest.
If you don't know by now, let me just point out to you. The message today will be about spiritual confusion.
If you'll put your hands on your Bible and let's pray together. Heavenly Father, in the next few moments, I pray that your spirit will break through upon our spirits that when we leave here today, we will say, surely the Lord hath spoken unto us in the mighty name Jesus, the strong son of God. Amen.
Some years ago, I saw a really funny movie with the late Robin Williams. It's called Moscow on the Hudson. It was a story of a Russian immigrant at the height of the Cold War who came to Moscow, came to New York with a group of people from Moscow, and he jumped the party and defected and decided to stay in New York.
The Russians sent two KGB agents to arrest him to get him and get him back to Russia and. But while they are there, the KGB agents decide to go shopping. They may as well not waste the trip. So they go to Gimbels or somewhere, maybe Macy's, I don't remember. And the one Russian agent buys a beautiful leather jacket which he is delighted to have from America. On the plane on the way home, he looks at the tag and he is infuriated to find that it says made in Czechoslovakia.
Now here's what I want you to think about.
Inspect your own label.
Search internally and inspect your own label. Where are you made? Now? I'm not talking about where you were physically made.
I would just like to point out in all humility, that I was made and born in Texas.
That cannot really be done with humility, but I thought I would just use the word, but I'm not talking about where you were made in that sense. I want us today to investigate how we are made spiritually.
The first one we encounter is this man, Micah, this man of Ephraim this monstrously confused story of false religion and witchcraft and thievery and lying.
But all of that is not any big surprise. But is this closing sentence.
Now I know because I have a Levite who's a false priest, who I dedicated myself, but because I've satisfied some little element of religion. Now I know God will bless me.
The first way we want to talk about this is self made religion.
When we cobble together stuff that we believe. You ever hear people say this? I know you have. You've heard people say, I know what the Bible says, I know what they preach, I know all this, but I just know what I believe. I know what I believe. Well, who cares?
I mean, what conceivable difference would it make what you believe?
There are people who bring together all this stuff that they bring together that they believe they believe a little bit from Hinduism and a little bit from Buddhism and a little bit from humanism and, oh, there's just enough Jesus to come sort of sweeten it all up. And they pull all that together and then say, now I know God will bless me.
Now, I don't know how many people here lived at some time in your life or were born north of the Mason Dixon line, but I would like to inform the rest of you about an absolutely delicious northern food which we do not have here in the South. It's called skrapple.
Now, I wonder if there's just anybody here that as a child or young person or everything, ate scrapple when you lived in the north until you were able to escape. We're glad that you're here.
Now, scrapple. For those of you who are uninitiate Southerners, let me just point out to you what scrapple is. It is what it sounds like. It is scraps that are put together. So you take breakfast scraps, that's usually little bits of sausage or whatever is left over from breakfast. Depending on who is fixing it, they may scrape all the scraps in. So it might be, you know, little bits of leftover egg and scrambled eggs and, you know, maybe gravy and some biscuit stuff and stuff like that. Just scrape it all together. Then they pour on top of it some kind of molten animal fat.
It may be from the melted pig's feet or, or even the head of a pig. You can buy that. You pour it on there and you put it into a mold and then you put it in the refrigerator until it congeals. So you have this congealed loaf of scraps suspended in animal fat.
And then you take it out of the refrigerator and you slice those congealed into slices and, and pan fry that.
And that is scrapple.
Now you Yankees that are in the house, I want you to listen to me.
Don't ever say anything to me about grits ever again.
If you grew up eating scrapple, we know why you live in Georgia now.
But there are many, many people that create their own kind of stuff, self made religion, which is just kind of a super spiritual scrapple that is just cobbled together and poured with some kind of stuff on it and congealed and sliced up. And they use it when it's convenient to them. But the problem with it is that they top it all off with this spiritual entitlement. Now I know God will have to bless me because I have something, something that I make is mine.
This man Micah is living in the depths of profound spiritual confusion.
I just want to say this before we move on to the next one.
We are living in an age of serious spiritual confusion. There are people that do not literally know the difference between the prophet Jeremiah and Oprah Winfrey.
They live in deep spiritual confusion. They go to church on Sunday and on Monday they buy the horoscope while they stand in line at the grocery store.
It is serious spiritual confusion. We have to come to the place where we are able to sort out what is God's truth, what is our own cobbled together scrapple of religion. God's truth is immutable, unchangeable, clearly revealed in his word.
If it's not in the Bible, if it's not clearly in the Bible, if it somehow or another transcends the Bible, adds on to the Bible, subtracts from the Bible, then it is merely man made scrapple.
And it's not the truth of God.
So the first is man made or is self made? The first is self made. It's self made scrapple.
Now the second one I want to look at. We're not going to read all these scriptures, but it's man made. And it doesn't depend as much on religion as it does on the power of the secular world. In Matthew, chapter 2, verses 16 through 18, you'll remember the passage, the three wise men, the magi come to Herod the Great and they say to him, we have heard that the new king of the Jews has been born. Well, Herod is the king of the Jews. That is not a happy announcement to him.
And they say, we've come to find him, we've seen his star and we've come to find Him. And Herod says to them, when you find him, come back and tell me so that I can come and worship him too. Of course he wants to kill him.
So the three wise men leave. And Herod asks his advisors and religious advisors around him, where should the King of the Jews, where should Messiah be born? And they said, well, in the Old Testament, which is all they had, it would be in Bethlehem.
The three wise men go, they find Jesus, and then God warns them in a dream to go home a different way, don't go back and tell Herod. So they go home a different way. And when Herod realizes that they've eluded him, he sends his soldiers down to Bethlehem and every little baby boy from 2 years old and younger is killed. It's called the slaughter of the innocents.
Now many secular historians cast doubt on that story as being a made up biblical story in order to vilify Herod the Great.
And it isn't recorded elsewhere in secular history.
But listen to me on this, just a moment. Herod the Great was a genocidal maniac.
He was a murderer, class A psychopath who killed so many of his own family, including his sons, that Caesar said of him in Rome, think this is Caesar. Here's another psychopath that Caesar says of Herod the Great, it is safer to be Herod's pig than to be his son.
Now Bethlehem is a small little village. At that time there might have only been 30 or 40 little male babies under the age of two.
So to wipe out 30 or 40 Jewish babies under the age of two might not even be worth recording when you're talking about the bloodbath, which is Herod's household. But the killing of these babies, whether it's recorded in secular history or by Flavius Josephus or any of these people, whether it's recorded by them or not, it is clearly consistent with the murderous nature of Herod.
So what is Herod's, what is he? He is man made.
Micah is self made. He cobbles together his own religion. But Herod says, I don't need God, I don't need any of that. I make myself in my own image.
He is the representative of the secular world, the man made world.
Now I just want to offer this for you.
We are confronted, those of us who are believers are confronted with how we live in, in the context of man made culture.
How do we live in this?
We can make the kind of decision to say the Amish did pull away, go back to some point back in history and decide to all Dress in black and grow our beards long and not use modern equipment and drive horse and buggies and all that kind of thing. But there's nothing about that. That's a biblical decision.
That's a cultural decision to reverse a culture.
Because they don't go back to the Bible. They don't say we're dressing like they did in the Bible. They're dressing like they did in 1851.
What makes 1851 culture any better than the 21st century?
So that Amish response doesn't really work.
The other is we can sell out the culture.
We can say, I don't want to look different, I don't want to dress differently. I don't want to sound different. I want to laugh at the same things, go the same places, enjoy the same.
I don't want anybody in culture to be able to look at me and know that I'm any different. But that's a sellout.
One is a cop out, the other one's a sellout.
But we can say, I am who I am in Christ and I am not made or defined by this world. I am not man made, I am God made.
Now that doesn't mean we have to try to make ourselves different.
We all want to look nice, we want to look good. Look at this resplendent.
No, it hurts me when you laugh at me.
No, we all want to look nice. And we go places, do things. We live in this world. But it is to say this scripture is perfectly clear. Do not let the world squeeze you into its own mold.
But be ye transformed by the renewing power of God within you, in your mind, your spirit. If that transformational power of God is working in you, you don't have to look sound, talk different. It will show up.
People will say, that person is not man made, that person is God made. They'll be able to tell him.
So we have this self made spirituality, the smug, self satisfied, self defined spirituality. We have the secular man made, the power mongers of the world.
But then we have a third, and that is the king Manasseh. Again, I'm not going to read all the passage, but in the 23rd chapter of 2 Chronicles there is a king Manasseh and his despicable in his evil. He is the son of Hezekiah, who is the king during a great revival and a wonderful man, a righteous king. Then comes his son Manasseh, who comes to the throne at 12. And he leads Israel back into all of the evil that his father erased of idol worship and idolatry and all the rest of it. Even child sacrifice, even human. He throws one of his own children into the fire to worship the God Molech.
And so God breaks him.
The Assyrians are brought in. They conquer his kingdom. They capture him.
They take him and make him a humiliating slave. He crawls around. I want you to imagine this. He crawls around under the table of his captors, picking up crumbs. He is a captive, lost, undone. He is finished.
Micah is self made.
Herod is man made. Manasseh is unmade.
He is wiped out by God.
One of my favorite poems. I don't know if you've memorized poetry or not. I never have been very good at memorizing poetry. So I like poems that are really short.
Here's my favorite one. John Donne, who many of you know, the great English poet and essayist. He wrote, never sin to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. If one clod falls off of the continent of Europe, then the whole continent is the less. That's all John done. When he was young, he married a young girl named Ann against her parents wishes. They found out about it before the marriage could be consummated. They arrested him, annulled the marriage, took Anne away. He never saw her again. And they threw him in prison.
And while he was in prison, John Donne wrote a poem which when you go to that prison, you can see it carved into the wall of the prison. And it's brilliant in its economy.
It says, john done, Ann Dunne undone.
That's a poem I can memorize.
Well, I would say this.
Manasseh is undone.
He is unmade by God.
All right, now here's the hard part of this. I struggled with this sermon all week. This is Labor Day weekend.
I wanted to preach a teaching message on our place in the secular economy. I wanted to preach on the ethics of work. I wanted to preach something on that. I worked on it all week.
I couldn't get my mind around that sermon. And finally I said, lord, why won't you help me prepare this sermon? And I'm going to tell you what he said. I won't help you prepare that sermon because you're preparing the wrong sermon.
And he led me to this message. And I struggled with it because of what I'm going to say now.
And it is this.
I love to preach grace.
I love to preach forgiveness. I love to lift up the positive hope of salvation and release from bondage. I love that.
But there's another side to this.
The God who forgives us and redeems us by the blood of Jesus Christ is also the righteous judge of the universe.
And he will judge.
We don't like to talk about it. I don't like to talk about it. I don't want to preach the judgment of God. But it's real. We can't get around it. How can we understand grace if there's no judgment?
God can unmake you.
You're a self made man. God can unmake you in a New York minute.
You're man made. The highest power systems in the world, God can unmake. If he can take Manasseh and put him on his knees looking for breadcrumbs, God can unmake you.
When I was pastoring my very first Methodist church, I was 22 years of age, 1970.
I went to be the pastor of a small church in the mountains of North Georgia. And there was a man there in his 60s. And he told me about something that had happened in the 20s when he was a little boy.
His dad was a member of the Holiness church in the area. And they got a new preacher, a Holiness preacher who said, I've heard that there's a moonshiner out in the area and I want to go out to his house and I don't have a car. This man said he was a little boy, remember? He said my dad had one of the only automobiles in the whole county. And he agreed to drive the preacher out there to speak to this moonshiner.
But he said to the preacher, he said, this is a very dangerous man and you're taking a great risk. The preacher said, if you don't want to go, don't go, but I want to.
And this man said, my dad for some reason allowed me to go.
So there I was, a little boy sitting in the back seat of that Model T with my dad driving and the preacher. And they drove up in the yard of this moonshiner. When my dad and the preacher got out of the car, they said, stay in the car to me. They got out and that moonshiner came out on the front porch with his shotgun and he said, get back in your car.
The preacher said, I'm not a revenue agent. I'm not from the law.
I'm the pastor at the Holiness church and I've come to talk to you about Jesus. He said. The man raised his shotgun and said, I know who you are and I'm ordering you to get back in your car. I'll cut you down.
He said, that old preacher was just as Bold as brass, he stepped forward and he said, don't shoot me. But he said, I'm telling you, I'm not come to hurt you in any way. I've come to tell you about the love of God. And he said, that moonshiner lowered his shotgun and raised his fist. And he hit that preacher with the butt of his fist, right between the eyes. And he said, I know who you are. I know why you're here. And I curse you, and I curse your church.
And he hit him between the eyes.
And this man who was a little boy in the backseat said, I watched as that old preacher raised his hands and he said, thus saith the Lord, as you have tapped the man of God, God will tap you.
He got back in the car and they left.
He said, about a week later, they were driving down the road, he and his father driving down the road. And there were a group of people looking down over a little cliff, a little area down there, and they were gathered around. And so he pulled over the car and he said, stay in the car, son. And he went over, and when he came back, he said, son, I have something I want to show you, and I need you to see it. It's bad. Come with me. And that man took that little boy, who is now an old man telling me the story, and he said, come with me.
He said, do you remember that moonshiner?
He said, he's wrecked his car. He's down in the ditch.
They went over there and the people were all around. And he took the little boy and they scrambled down that little embankment and looked in the car. And that moonshiner had wrecked his car. And the steering wheel shaft had been driven right through his face.
And that man told me, he said, I have never forgotten that.
He said, there may be some coincidence involved. He said, all I know is that old preacher said, God will tap you. And he said that steering wheel hit him exactly where his fist had hit that preacher.
Now, you may say that's a pretty rough gospel story.
Listen to what I'm saying to you.
If we stand before God Almighty in pride and in the arrogancy of our hearts, and we say, God, I am self made, I am man made. I belong to the world, and I vaunt myself against you. God is not obligated to give you 80 years of life and a long, lingering death on the deathbed so that you can be forgiven. He's not obligated. He may give you that, but he's not obligated.
God can pull your ticket at A moment's notice and he can tap you. He can unmaker everything that you've made and he can do it in a minute. He can unmake your fortune, he can unmake your family, he can unmake your fame. There is no one famous enough, rich enough or powerful enough to withstand the unmaking power of God Almighty.
But thank God Almighty, it doesn't end there.
Manasseh, broken, wounded, had lost everything. A slave in a foreign country, it says. And Manasseh humbled himself and repented. And it just says, this simple little verse is so simple. It says, and God lifted him up and restored him to his throne.
None of the details, none of the mechanics of that.
I've wondered, how did that look.
Did the king who had captured him and enslaved him one day seen him crawling around on the floor picking up breadcrumbs? He said, you know, you can go home and have your kingdom back, climb up on the throne. How did it happen?
The Bible doesn't tell us that. What it does tell us is that when a man who was unmade comes to God in brokenness and repents of his sins, that God can take that man who was unmade and he can be remade.
We don't have to live in the unmade disaster of our own sinful lives.
God can lift us up. He can remake us.
That's the wonder of grace.
The problem is this.
Once people get into the place of being unmade, when all that they trusted in is gone, when everything is shattered, when all that is is lost to them, they have been so proud in the time when they were self made and man made, that now that pride informs how they live in the time being unmade, when they're broken and enslaved, they say, well, I've heard it. I've been in the ministry a half a century. I've heard it so many times, it's like a broken record.
I didn't turn to God when things were good.
I'm not going to turn to God when things are bad. That's craziness.
I was asked by a woman. She said her son had been convicted of a crime. He was guilty, wasn't wrongly convicted. He was going to be transferred to the state penitentiary in Jackson. But he was still in a holding cell at the county lockup between his conviction and his transfer to the state pen. And she asked if I would go and see him, that the boy wanted to see a preacher. And I said, I'll go.
I went there and I told him who I was. And I said, son, you asked for a preacher to come. He said, I need the Lord.
He said, I cannot face what I'm going to face. He said, pastor, I got seven to 20.
He said, I can't deal with that. I can't go through what I'm going to go through without God. I've seen my mother go through everything and God has sustained her. I need the God of my mother to sustain me in the next years in prison.
I said, all right, let's pray. He said, wait a minute, here's my question.
He said, I turned away from God when everything was good.
Now I'm in prison. He said, I'm afraid of myself.
He said, I'm afraid this is just jailhouse religion.
He said, I want you to look at me, preacher, and tell me, do you believe this is jailhouse religion?
I looked at him and I said, Son, I'm 100% convinced it's jailhouse religion.
It's jailhouse religion. He just looked shattered. He said, you think so? I said, I know so. The only thing is there's no other kind.
Nobody comes to God because it's a nifty idea.
We come to God out of a moment of self awareness.
In one way or another, we become aware of our need. In one way or another, we say, God, my family's in trouble, my marriage is in trouble, my business, my life, my mind.
God, somehow I trusted in all that I could make and that's betrayed me. I trusted in what the world could make and that's betrayed me. And now I'm unmade.
I'm useless, broken.
But it doesn't have to end that way.
I can be remade.
I can be changed. I can have the course of my life altered.
No one has to end in the brokenness and disarray of a life that's been shattered.
At that point, if you will be crucified to your pride and say, God, I didn't seek you when I was on top of the world. I should have, but I didn't.
I didn't seek you when I was a man made genius. I didn't seek you when I was living on top of the world's power systems. I didn't seek you, but I've been unmade.
I've been unmade.
And now, God, I need you. I need to be remade.
I've led 35 tours to Israel.
I was in Israel two years ago with a group and we were in East Jerusalem and little Arab boy came and a lady bought some beads from him. And she asked him the most astonishing question. I don't know what she thought. She said, are these real?
Well, beads.
What she think they were? They're just beads. I don't know if she thought they were real diamonds.
She said, are these real?
The little boy took her money and he looked up at her and he said, they're made in Texas. And he ran off.
Now listen to old Dr. Mark.
When you come to the end of everything and you stand before the throne of God Almighty, it's going to be the most tragic and horrible mistake of your life.
To appeal for restoration and forgiveness and eternal life based on the scrapple of some man of some self made religion, it's going to be a disaster.
If you tell him about the mighty jobs that you've had and all the money that you've earned and all the degrees that you've learned, it's going to be a disaster.
But if you will stand before God Almighty naked and with only this plea, God, I was unmade by my own sin and by your righteous judgment, I was unmade.
I don't deserve anything, but I plead the blood of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. That's the only hope.
That's your only hope.
When God leads me so to a sermon like this that I'm not even that eager to preach, I have to believe somehow it's for somebody specific.
[00:34:26] Speaker A: You've been listening to the leader's notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. You can follow Dr. Rutland on x@dr. Mark Rutland, or visit his website, Dr.markrutland.com where you can find information about his notebook materials and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
