We're going to be looking at Ezra 8 and 9, verses 8 and 9, and the title is... Okay, sorry. The title is Revival, Decline, and Revival Again in the Story of Ezra. Ezra is the main history book of the post-exilic period in Israel's history. after the people of God returned from Babylonian captivity in 536 BC to rebuild the temple and restore right worship in Jerusalem. But the seven years prior to that, there had not been a godly, proper place of worship anywhere in the world because we knew in the times of the Old Testament that was in Jerusalem at the temple or the tabernacle. Ezra tells the story of my two favorite prophets, Haggai and Zechariah. Unlike most of the prophets of the Old Testament, they were very successful and fruitful in their preaching. Their reforms were instituted in Israel when other prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah spoke the truth of God, but they had small or negligible response from the people of God. As much as any book in the Old Testament ever shows the fluctuation between times of revival and decline, times of blessing and backsliding among the people of God. And all this happens in a 78 year period between 536 and 458 BC. We all approach Bible study from different methods and different ways. Our best method should be book studies, line upon line and verse upon verse to get a sense of the meaning of scripture. This sermon method that I was taught in seminary many decades ago is a book study approach, and I think still that is the best overall. But today, I'm going to do a flyover of Ezra, all 10 chapters. And we will be zooming in and using a telescope on the book of Ezra, focusing briefly on chapter 9, verses 8 and 9. which may serve as a summary text for the entire book. And we will study looking at the forest today and then looking at a few of the trees in Ezra 9, 8, and 9. Now let's look at our text. OK. We're gonna see in the text of chapter nine, verses eight and nine, I'll read these and then make a few comments. Chapter nine, verses eight and nine. And this is a summary, in my opinion, of the book as a whole. And Ezra says, now for a little while, grace has been shown from the Lord, our God, to leave us a remnant to escape and to give us a peg in his holy place. I'm reading from the New King James. That our God may enlighten our eyes and give us a measure of revival in our bondage. For we were slaves, yet our God did not forsake us in our bondage, but he extended mercy to us in the sight of the kings of Persia to revive us. to repair the house of our God, to rebuild its ruins, and to give us a wall in Judah and Jerusalem." So we see from this text and really from the book as a complete total, all 10 chapters, we'll see that God showed favor to Judah and Israel for a brief time and for the remnant And we look at the very first chapter when Cyrus issued a decree that they would return to their holy land. and rebuild the temple after 70 years in exile in Babylon. And that was the very beginning and I'll just make, read that very quickly. Now in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled. The Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia. So he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing. Well, it's a pretty long proclamation, but he sent them back. Sent them back to Jerusalem and back to Judea with express intention that they would rebuild the temple. Now we know they started rebuilding and then they had severe opposition from the surrounding provinces and cities and they got discouraged and they gave up rebuilding for a period of time. I think about 16 years they didn't carry out their assigned mission. And then the prophets Haggai and Zechariah stood up and admonished them and encouraged them and they began to rebuild again. And so they completed it in four years. We'll get to that later. So we see that also our second point is that God awakens and opens the eyes of his people. And so we see that this is what's happening in our book. And he gives a little time of revival. And so they have experienced a revival in this early part of the book of Ezra. And they are seeing revival, they're rebuilding the temple. And then we go very quickly. I can say we're gonna move fast through all 10 chapters here. We go very quickly to chapter six, and we look at verse 14. you can go there I'll just read it. So the elders of the Jews built and they prospered through the prophesying of Haggai the prophet and Zechariah the son of Edo and they built and finished it according to the commandment of God of the God of Israel according to the command of Cyrus Darius and Artaxerxes, king of Persia. So there were three different Persian kings that were urging that this be accomplished. And then verse 15, it says, now the temple was finished on the third day of the month of Adar, which was in the sixth year of the reign of Cyrus. So it was actually completed in four years. We see that God delivered them from slavery. There was a revival. He brought about revival. And then the temple was rebuilt. And so the rebuilding of the temple is always a part of any revival work that God does. Now in our day, it would be centered around the building of the church, the local church. We don't have a temple in the sense that they did, but we have places of worship. And so we are all to put our energies and our efforts into building up God's house wherever we are. We should be concerned about our local church. And we have a very good one here. We have a happy. a place of worship, a place of friendship, a place of ministry. We're supporting missionaries, we're doing things to expand God's kingdom, but we also should be concerned about the blessings of the church at large. So rebuilding the temple is part of the revival. Okay, let's go to the next one. But something always seems to interrupt. And I've been, for the last five years, I have been, or four years, I've been thinking a lot about the word entropy. Most of you have probably heard of that word. It just simply is a physics term for decay, decline, backsliding, And we see in Romans, excuse me, 1 John 5, 9, that the whole world lies in the lap of the wicked one, or the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. And these are just two texts introduce the idea of Romans 8, 20. for the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope. Because of the creation itself will be delivered from the bondage of corruption to the glorious liberty of our Lord, liberty of the children of God. So the fall, this looks at the fall, is a fundamental important part of human experience. anytime I speak, but you're going to get a short physics lesson as well today, states that there's a tendency in any physical system to degenerate into a more disordered state. Entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. And we usually think of the word entropy or the second law of thermodynamics. There are two basic laws. The first law is the law of creation. and energy, the second law is the law of entropy or decay and decline or disorder. And that is a result of the fall. Also in society or culture, entropy is seen in the decline of the natural decay of structures, buildings, automobiles, houses, Laws and the norms of society, we have laws and norms that seem to govern how we operate in our culture, and we see they are now under severe attack. We just experienced something recent with our Congress supporting the Respect of Marriage Act, which is actually the Disrespect of Marriage Act, and that is going to become the law of the land. Organizations and any social system tend toward decline or decay. This could also mean that marriages, families, churches, denominations, and countries can be affected as well. So what we're saying is that entropy or decline or decay is a fundamental part of the human experience and the natural process. It's inevitable. We live with it every day. And just one example that you may not think about, if you buy a new car, and you drive it off the parking lot and you take it back the next day to bring it back, you've had entropy in one day. You won't be able to bring it back for the same price that you took it off the lot for. So decay, decline, sometimes in the time of Spurgeon they used the word the downgrade, mission drift, And systems tend toward disorder. All systems, physical, spiritual, cultural, tend toward disorder. That's just inevitably a part of the human process. And I don't think we think enough about it. We see things happening around us, bad things happening right now in our day, and we don't really understand why it's happening or where it's coming from. And it's just a part of the natural disorder. Science has defined entropy as a law of physics. Mostly in the physical science, that's what we think of in engineering and physics and structures, but it is also a law of society and culture. And if you're not aggressively pushing back against entropy, it can happen to you. I'm thinking about creating a new bumper sticker called Fight Entropy. You know, we need to be thinking about it every day in ways that we can contend with this thing that's dragging us down at every step because of the fall. We are fallen creatures ourselves, and entropy is a powerful thing in the world. I only know of one thing that's really more powerful than entropy, and that's the gospel of Christ. to save us and break the power of evil and sin in our lives. So God is more powerful than entropy, but it is still a very vital part of us. And we see it in the story of Ezra as well. It's 10 chapters. And our theme this morning is revival, decline, or entropy, and revival again. Entropy is our story. And it can be very personal to you, your family, and your business as well. If you are not reforming, renewing, repenting, you will not be stationary very long. You won't just stay in one place. You're gonna either be moving forward or backward. And you will find yourself in entropy. Now let's look at a few examples down through history. Well, we see it in nations. Now, we know the Roman Empire was not a Christian empire at its beginning, but it lasted for a long time. And then the Christian element came in during the time of Augustine and others, and then the Roman Empire collapsed. And I don't know how many, it probably lasted a thousand years. There's a good example of how it declined and even ordinary family life and marriages and things like that seem to decline in Rome. Now let's look at the history of Israel, okay? Next slide. Okay, here we go. We're going to spend a lot of our main time on this. The history of Ezra. Remember, Ezra is a book that's sort of a theme book, a history of the people of Judah and Jerusalem and Israel from 536 to 458 B.C. So here we see the steps in the book of Ezra. We've already mentioned they returned to rebuild the temple. Then in 520, after a 16-year delay, you might say they backslid or they stopped, they were not faithful to go forward and complete the mission that they were assigned, but they restarted it in 520 B.C. after, actually it was a 16-year lapse, I've got that wrong. They rebuilt the temple and completed that in 516 BC. And the rest of chapter six, we see rejoicing, celebrating the Passover, and a period of great joy and revival in the remaining verses of chapter six. I'll just look at a couple of them. 17. Now remember they rebuilt the temple after four years and they are now operating in the temple. They offered sacrifices in verse 17 at the dedication of the house of God. 100 bulls, 200 rams, 400 lambs as a sin offering for all Israel, 12 male goats, etc., etc. They assigned the priest to their divisions and that means their work, and the Levites to their divisions over the service of God as written in the book of Moses. They celebrated the Passover in verse 19 on the 14th day of the first month. And then in verse 22, they kept the feast of unleavened bread. seven days with joy. Obviously this was a revival. They were having great times of revival and rejoicing. For the Lord made them joyful and turned the heart of the king of Assyria toward them to strengthen their hands in the work of the house of God, of the God of Israel. Now verse 7, I mean it's chapter 7 verse 1, it says, after these things, now after these things, and let's go to the, well I'm getting ahead of myself, let me, we're going, let's go to the next slide, I'll have to, I'll bring that up in a minute. Let's look at the history of revivals in America. From 1620, we sort of date that as about the time of the birth of our nation, even though we didn't become formally a nation until, you know, 1776. But 100, more than 100 years prior to that, we were operating as a people in the Pilgrim and the Puritan era. And that was a time of revival and great blessing. But within a few short years, things were, had deteriorated there. Then in the 1740s to 1770 was the Great Awakening under George Whitefield. Most of you have heard of him. He was a great evangelist that made dozens of trips from England to the United States preaching all up and down in the colonies at that time from Georgia to Massachusetts and Rhode Island. I think they claim he may have spoken, there were three or four million people living in the colonies in those days, he may have spoken and preached to about a million of them. It was incredible. And he said they didn't have amplifiers in those days, they said his voice would just carry great distances. Benjamin Franklin, who I don't think was a Christian, would print his sermons. And he was just a great evangelist, probably one of the greatest of ever. He died in 1770, but in some ways they think he was sort of the founder of the American Revolution because the people were converted. Probably millions of people were Christians in those days as a result of the First Great Awakening. But not long after, in 1805, Harvard was the first college or university in America that was a distinctly Christian, evangelical Christian institution for several centuries. But in 1805, the Unitarians got control of the board at Harvard. Years ago, I read a book by Samuel Blumenfeld. He said that the Unitarians capturing Harvard which was our leading educational institution in 1805, may have been one of the most important events of American history. How many have heard of that before? Because it affected all of education. And today, higher education is completely in the hands of the left and the Marxists, even right here in our own city. The University of South Carolina is just rife with Marxists teaching on the faculty. So there's a good example of entropy. Then in 1800, 1805 was the Great Awakening, the second Great Awakening, I'm sorry, and that was a big event, but it had some elements that weren't always sound, but it was still a great spiritual awakening. 1858 was called the Layman's Revival, and that was a prayer revival. You may know the story of they gathered in New York City just to pray at lunchtime, about a dozen men, and within a few years or less, it swept the whole United States, and people were gathering in businesses at lunchtime by the hundreds of thousands praying for God to bless the nation. all over the country within a short time. And it began in New York City in 1858, before the Civil War. Then you had in 1904, the Welch Revival. It started in Wales, but it came to this country as well. And then I've kind of described the period after World War II, the Billy Graham era. That was a revival-like period. It took place really after World War II for several decades. Not well known, but Gail and I, we lived in Augusta, Georgia from 1969 to 1971 when I was in the Army at Fort Gordon in my first assignment there. And I noticed, and I may have shared this before in some form here at the church, I noticed that Augusta, Georgia, Seemed to have a high number and percentage of evangelical Christians more than even any other Bible belts city that I knew about it was very very peculiar and And even the large denominational churches, the downtown churches that usually go liberal quicker than the country churches, were very sound. First Presbyterian Church is there today, Curtis Baptist, they're still very solid, sound churches in Augusta, Georgia. Kind of an unusual thing, even today. But we were living there in 1970. And I remember asking a local preacher who had grown up in Curtis Baptist Church, and he's long deceased now, but I said, tell me, Brother Liddon, how do you explain Augusta having such a strong Christian presence, even today in 1970? And he says, it's very simple to explain. Oh, well, okay, well, tell me. He said, Mordecai Ham, And I barely knew who that was. And he was a famous evangelist that preached through the south from 19, mid-20s up to World War II. He was very active for about 20 years throughout the south. He didn't really go into the north. I don't know why. I don't think he was against that. But he just concentrated on the southern states. And he said he had a crusade in Augusta, Georgia in 1930. And he was here a month. He put a big tent up on where the Sears Roebuck parking lot is today, but I believe that's been changed since I was living there in 1970. But just a big parking lot. And he said he preached every day and every night for a month. And he said one day he preached and it was just men there, only men. He would have men's meetings, women's meetings, children's meetings. Men and women together, he just went for a whole month. And he said one day, 5,000 men got saved in that evangelistic crusade. 5,000 in one day. It was just such a powerful move of the Holy Spirit. He said, it was like everybody in Augusta got saved, got converted to Christ. And I said, you mean everybody? He said, well, there were some that didn't, but you couldn't find them. And that crusade of 1930 was still having impact in 1970, 40 years later. And I think it may still be having impact in Augusta today. I know Dr. Davis is from that era and he probably could fill us in. So God, when revival comes, it can carry a culture a long time. But we're now living in, I'm afraid to say, a day of entropy, a day when there's decline. Now here's the next one is, let's go to the next slide. All right, these are the cycles of nations, when nations go through these cycles. And we're probably in one now. First, there's bondage. When we turn away from God, turn away from Christ, and turn away from his word, he brings bondage and slavery Issues happen in a culture and problems come it's because of sin and because of turning away from the Lord And it gets bad enough and we we should it's bad enough now It causes people to repent and turn to the Lord and when they do God will bring recovery restoration and revival then the revival comes and and we get complacent again, we get lazy, we get sloppy, and then decline comes, and we cycle back around to bondage. And this is the story of Ezra, all 10 chapters. The first six chapters of Ezra deal with Zerubbabel, Joshua the high priest, Haggai, and Zechariah. And then verse one of chapter seven now and remember Ezra is the author of this book he's writing the entire history of Ezra but he's not in the first six chapters he's maybe just barely born he's maybe a young lad back in Babylon but he's the one that's the historian telling the story of this period of time. But in verse 1 of chapter 7, he says simply, now after these things, in the reign of Artaxerxes, king of Persia, Ezra, the son of Saria, and I'm not going to give his pedigree, he came up from Babylon. So he's making the trip to Babylon, I mean from Babylon to Jerusalem, after these things. guess how long a gap that was? I think yeah it was a gap of 58 years. He was coming back to Jerusalem and I don't think he had ever been there before. After 58 years after Zerubbabel Joshua, Haggai, and Zechariah were probably gone. And I think they're gone because he would have mentioned them in the last seven through ten if they had been alive at the time. So there's a 58-year gap, and he's coming back now, and he's going to restore what's been affected by a decline in entropy. He's back in Jerusalem. in 458 B.C. and he's been sent back by Artaxerxes. Okay. Let's go back to that other slide. Yeah. Okay, who was Ezra? Well he's a direct descendant from Phineas and the grandson of Aaron the high priest. You may remember him. He worked with Moses. He was Moses' brother. He was a high priest with Moses. And so he has got a pretty good pedigree and he's a pretty sound guy. He's called a scribe of Israel and in verse 10 of chapter 7, and this is a great life verse for you if you're looking for one. It says, for Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of God. So he studied the law of God. That's what we need to do as Christians, study God's word. and to teach its statutes. So if you study something, you must also teach and communicate. This is actually the process of learning. If you learn something and you don't teach it, you don't really have it quite yet. And then it says to teach its statutes and to obey God's statutes as well. So there are three steps in learning, studying, obedience of carrying out God's word and then teaching God's statutes as well. So he was that kind of a man. And he came back in 458. He brought with him a large freewill offering of gold and silver. The king, remember the Persian kings were assisting this process and they were probably pagan kings. I mean, some people, there's a big argument about whether Cyrus was a believer or not. He certainly recognized the God of Israel, but there's every evidence that he really worshiped Marduk, who was a god of that country. He received authority from Artaxerxes to appoint magistrates and judges with power of life and death. He received credentials from the seven members of the royal council. And when he came back, he may have acted as the governor. There seems to be a political as well as a moral, spiritual vacuum at this particular time. And what does he find 58 years later? The revival had died. Entropy had come. Decline had set in. This is what he discovered. And so, I'm going to skip over chapter 8, the rest of chapter 7, it gives you the decree of Artaxerxes, we don't need to read that. And then in chapter 8, it's the travel, they're coming over from Babylon, so it talks a lot about their travel and what they did on the road to Jerusalem from Babylon. So we're gonna jump to chapter nine real quick. Told you we're gonna fly through and I still have about 10 minutes to fly over Ezra with you. When these things were done, he had gotten back now and he had passed off the gifts to the temple. And so he's now in town, been there maybe a week or so. Don't know for sure, but when these things were done, preparations after he had arrived in Jerusalem, the leaders came to me saying, the people of Israel and the priests and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the land with respect to the abominations of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. And they have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves. and their sons, so that the holy seed is mixed with the peoples of those lands. Indeed, the hand of the rulers and the leaders have been foremost in this trespass." I can still remember my days in seminary decades ago when this chapter came up in class. It was one of the hardest chapters to look at and discuss, because we're going to look at some difficult things here in a few minutes. It's hard in our contemporary Christian setting to understand how they could have done what they ended up doing here, and I'll try to give my best explanation at it. So when he heard this saying, that is Ezra, he tore his garments, his robes, he plucked out some hair of his head, sat down, and he was astonished. I mean, he was amazed that this had happened. the people of God 58 years later after this great revival when they had built the temple. Remember, one of my points was if you're not moving forward, you're not reforming, repenting, and growing in a day-to-day basis as a Christian, entropy will come. It's gonna come even when you're doing that, but you fight back and you resist this tendency to decline and decay and to go to disorder by maintaining a strong, vital Christian life, worshiping, having a regular quiet time, regular worship in the Lord's day. Do not forsake the assembling of yourselves together as a manner of some, but all the more, as the day approaches. So regular gathering in the house of God, whether you feel like it or not, you show up on the Lord's day for the preaching of the word. You come for the sacraments or the ordinances of the Lord's table. These are things that we do as Christians to maintain our walk and to make sure we do not cascade into entropy like these people did after 58 years. Everyone who trembled at the word of God of Israel assembled to him. They came around him and gathered with him because of the transgression of those who had been carried away. So this went on for a period of time. I'm not going to get into his lament, but basically the command was that they set aside their pagan wives. Now this is hard to explain, and I'll do my best to explain it. Just put that slide up. Okay, next one. Real repentance leads to hard and painful decisions sometimes. And that's why you want to keep short accounts with the Lord. Make them short accounts and you just have to repent a little bit. But if you go a long time, and get into a bad way of life, you can come back a couple of years later and you're going to have some strong correcting to do. Keep short accounts with Jesus. Confess regularly. Worship regularly and you won't have a hard repentance and a painful decision to make. But he did command them to put away their pagan wives. The Old Testament law, and this is the best explanation I think that I can give, and I've looked and studied and checked with some commentaries on this well, that God was very concerned to preserve the purity of the race of the Jews and their ethnic identity. as well as their covenant and religious community. Notice it wasn't just a religious community, it was an ethnic community. He was very concerned to maintain that they be marrying among their own people. Now here's the argument. The New Testament model is entirely different. We see the church It's a covenant or religious community, but we're not identified primarily by our ethnicity or race. If it matters at all, it's very secondary. We are the people of God, regardless of our race, our ethnic identity. And so that is not significant. It's very clear in the New Testament you know, and there is a change from the Old and New Testament law. In 1 Corinthians 7, 1 Corinthians 7, 10 through 20, I'm not going to read them all, but these are the regulations on marriage in the church among believers and unbelievers. Now to the married I command, yet not I but the Lord. A wife is not to depart from her husband. If she's an unbeliever or he's an unbeliever, she's still not to depart. You don't put away, if you're a Christian and married to a non-Christian, you don't put that person away and divorce because they're not a Christian. You're not allowed to do it. And there are other places where it says that if you're a Christian married to a non-Christian, you can sanctify, you set apart your spouse and your children by your faith. They could be saved and come to Christ because of your believing faith. Even if she does depart, let her remain unmarried. And the husband is not to divorce his wife. In the economy of the New Testament, we're not to practice divorce. Now, we know it does happen, and sometimes it can't be avoided, and I'm not going to get into a discussion about that, but the point is that you're not to willingly do it because a person is not a Christian. You try to win that person to Christ by your behavior and by your love, and they can be sanctified. So we are in a different era, a different than the Old Testament. But the point is that sometimes with the chapter 10 of Ezra, God does sometimes command difficult things, and this was a very unusual situation. Now, chapter 10, they agreed to do it, and we believe they did carry out his command, and they put away their pagan families and returned back to the way God wanted them to be as a people. And the whole chapter talks about this, and I can still remember vividly in seminary class that day when we discussed it in Old Testament studies. It was very hard to explain and hard to take in some ways. But the chapter 10 describes the people and how they did carry out this command to return to God's economy to maintain the purity of the ethnic identity of the Jewish people. Interestingly, in verse 18, It says, among the sons of the priests who had taken pagan wives, the following was found of the sons of Joshua. Remember him? He was the one who built the temple in the first place in 520. It was Joshua and Zerubbabel, the two main people supported by Haggai and Zechariah that led the revival in the temple in 520 BC. So you see in one two generations his family had left the covenant. It says the sons of Joshua and the son of were part of this group that had taken pagan wives. So it even was happening in the best and the highest leaders. That's the thing that I'm noticing today with some of the things that are going on in the evangelical world. We're in a time of real desperate entropy today in our movement where many of our top leaders are leading us into the social justice movement. If you haven't read Votie Bauckham's book, Fault Lines, I urge you to read it. It's probably the best book that describes this phenomena, this entropy that has struck our movement, the believing community, and it's a very, very important book, and he's quite a good scholar and a person that I know personally. Okay. Next slide. All right, well, go back to the one before that. All right. Well, what is the application today for us in this pattern of Ezra versus chapter 1 through 10? I will tell you, I didn't intend to pick chapter 10. This would be one that I would probably tend to avoid because it's so controversial and hard to explain. But it's here in verse 44. The very last verse he says, all these had taken pagan wives and some of them had wives by whom they had children. So it was a very hard, hard decision. But it's every indication that they fulfilled it and when you repent and go back to doing God's word the way God says it, there can be revival. Christians are, here's the application, Christians are not to marry non-Christians intentionally. And there are places for that, not being unequally yoked together. We're to seek out among, when we're young, to marry believers, find a good Christian girl from a good Christian home, and you'll be happy. And find a good Christian boy from a good Christian home, and you're likely to be happy. You need to marry a Christian at all costs. And today it's even more risky not to do it because when we were much younger in our parents' day, marriages would stay together, even bad marriages. People just didn't divorce. Now today, people get married and you could marry a non-Christian and she would not like something that you did or he would not like something that you did and you'd be in a messy place real quick. So you need to marry a believer. and not to ever initiate a divorce if you are married to a non-Christian. This might include business relationships and partnerships and church membership as well. I know a story, a case of not getting into a partnership with a non-Christian. This is a story of some years ago. A believer was an attorney, and he was in a partnership with a non-Christian, and it may have been more than one in the firm. And I guess the non-Christian partner was away on business, and something came up with some business that he had, the non-Christian partner in the firm, and I guess he had investments in houses of prostitution. Yeah, it was just that bad. And the believing partner in the law firm had no idea And suddenly, the law firm was under scrutiny, and the guy who had made that decision was not available, and so the Christian had to stand up for the law firm and explain the situation, because he was a partner, and that was his job to do it. And it was very embarrassing to him in the community and the church, and he had a lot of explaining to do to his friends, but he had no idea that his partner was behaving that way. How we raise our children through Christ-centered homeschooling and Christian schooling versus pagan and secular schooling may be another application. And you all know that that's what I do as a ministry. So I think it does matter. We don't want to give our children a pagan education. If we don't want to marry pagan wives and husbands, we certainly don't want to give them a pagan education. We are a separate holy people of God. And we need to live like that in a pagan world as much as we can. And if we live that way, we may find that we can see revival again in our time. Years ago, I had my son, Rippy, who is a pretty good poet. He takes after his mother, who is a first-class poet herself. I thought maybe he got the poetry gene from me, but I think he got it from her. And so I asked him to write a poem to honor Francis Schaeffer, who Gail and I grew up with when we were young, just married. Francis Schaeffer was Everybody studied Francis Schaefer. How many of you have heard of Francis Schaefer? All right, let's see those hands high. All right, good. So most of us, even a lot of the young people here, because he's been dead since 1984. I can still remember, I was somewhere and Gail wrote me in 1967, she said, I went up to Lookout Mountain with the inner varsity Campus Crusade chapters at Georgia Tech and Agnes Scott in Emory, about 30 of us kids there. She was probably about 18 years old. And there was a man there and his wife from Switzerland. And they were telling us it was Francis Schaeffer and his wife. One of his first returns to the States, he was always from the United States, but he spent a lot of time in Labrie, but he started making trips to the United States in the 60s. us and telling us things that we needed to do to correct our culture. But anyway, I asked Rippey, my son, to write a poem to honor Francis Schaeffer, modeling it after the famous poem by William Wordsworth called London 1802. It was to honor John Milton, who was a great Puritan The writer, his poem starts off like this. Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour. England hath need of thee. And I wrote Ripley and he came up with this poem. And I just love it, it's one of my favorites. I'll just read it and be done. Schaefer, thou shouldst be living at this hour. America strays from your thought today. She is a ship adrift, pulpit home play, fortune the people plead for guidance now. Without corrupted reason, blinding power has seized our courage. We are led astray. And show us value, meekness, talent, honor. It seems our ship now spins upon the sea of troubled waters. Folly sinks us here. Though you had vision set apart to peer into the heart of things, revive our soul and raise us over our despair and free us as you held truth encompassing and whole. Times of revival decline and revival again. If we can just bear down and do what they did In chapters 7 through 10 of Ezra, we may yet see a revival in our time. Let's pray. Thank you, God, for your word that doesn't leave us alone to figure out what to do. And we thank you that the book of Ezra lays out the journey of your people back from captivity to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple, to fail, then to complete the temple, and then to fail again. And yet you sent Ezra in, in chapter seven through 10, to help them pick up where they had left off. So we pray, Lord, you'd bring up revival in our time. Help us to do our part, to be steady, to continue in our worship, in our quiet time, our Bible study, in our carrying out the sacraments of the church, and that you'll bless us and make us steady and strong in these dark days in which we live. And we'll give you the praise in Jesus' name. Amen.