Well, hello church. If you would open to 2 Kings chapter 22. 2 Kings chapter 22. And we're going to cover two chapters tonight, and so I will not read all of that right now. But I do want to read these first two verses of chapter 22. 2 Kings chapter 22. This is what God's Word says. Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign. And he reigned 31 years in Jerusalem. His mother's name was Jedidiah, the daughter of Adidiah, of Bozeth. And he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and walked in all the way of David his father. And he did not turn aside to the right or to the left. And so Father, We pray that the virtue that we find in this very young King, that is Your virtue, that is Your character, that is Your righteousness, Lord, that we could imitate in Him what is of You. And so, Father, teach us. Come and be our teacher, but we pray even beyond just teaching, Lord, motivate us and empower us and strengthen us to be learners. to be learners, to learn for the rest of our lives those things that will lead to the most fruitful God-honoring labor. We pray it in Jesus' name, Amen. Well, we will continue this series on virtue tonight. For those who are new or may have forgotten, this isn't a series on popular virtues like love or joy or peace or hope. This is about neglected virtues. So those virtues that we often ignore or overlook. And that certainly applies with the one we'll be studying tonight. This is the virtue of learning. And we'll even call it lifelong learning. And in seminary, early on in seminary, I remember one professor saying, you know, you're not here to just learn everything you need to learn. You're here to learn how to be a lifelong learner. And that's true for ministry. That's true for all of us as Christians. Those of us of the Reformed tradition, there's a saying, Augustine apparently coined, called Ecclesia Reformata. The church always reforming. So the church, us, or individually, we never arrive, but we always are in need of growth, we're always in need of reform and change and to learn. And I want to clarify something before we get into this text, just regarding virtue and how we're thinking through this, because there could be some confusion. I know I mentioned this a few weeks ago, that when we come to virtues, You know, we may say like with learning, right? We could say, well, I know non-believers who have way more passion to learn than I do. And there's a lot of truth in that. And so I've said this before, and let me maybe try to clarify this a little bit different way than before. I've argued that Christians pursue virtue and can embody virtue, and so do non-Christians, but Christians have a special capacity, spiritual capacity, to pursue virtue. And what I mean by that is I don't mean if a non-Christian can be kind, then a Christian can be really, really, really kind. That's not what I mean. I mean that a Christian is able to embody virtues that God embodies. We have a distinct spiritual ability to display virtues in the way that God displays them, meaning that there's a genuine display of that virtue. And what makes a virtue a virtue is its genuineness. So God is able to display love or kindness or patience, and He does it for His glory, and He does it for others' good. And it's pure. And it's genuine. And Christians have the capacity, the spiritual capacity to do that. It's also worth noting that all people have the capacity to be lifelong learners. But think of the things that we learn. We can learn sports. We could learn astrophysics. You could learn real estate. Or even a non-Christian could pick up and begin to learn this book. But that's very different than I don't know how many of you read the group meet this morning. I posted a passage of Scripture from Ephesians 4 that says, you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding. So there's a type of understanding that's still darkened. And then he says, that is not the way that you learned Christ. assuming that you have heard about Him and were taught in Him as the truth is in Jesus. So that's a spiritual type of understanding or learning. 1 Corinthians 2.16 says, we have the mind of Christ. And then it goes on and it says right before that, what no eye has seen, or ear has heard, nor heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him. These things. God has revealed to us through the Spirit. He says, we have received the Spirit who is from God that we might, here it is, understand the things freely given to us by God. So there is an understanding that the Spirit enables in a Christian that is not something anyone can do. Here's a bring-us-down-to-the-ground-level passage. I think 1 Corinthians 13 reminds us that our learning is limited. So it says we know in part, but then, or in the future, we will know fully. So all of our knowing right now is partial knowing. It's incomplete knowing. In the future, there will be a full and a perfect knowing when we're in heaven, when we have new minds and a perfect intellect, But we are not in heaven yet. We are here. And learning matters a lot in the Christian life. Unfortunately, some of you, like me, got a really late start, probably, in your seeking of this virtue of learning. I know for me, I may have said this, some of you have heard this, I didn't read my first book until college. I didn't study for a test until college. I was that unique, really stubborn, rebellious child and teenager who used all of my mental capacity to learn how to cheat, to learn how to manipulate teachers, so that I never had to study, never had to read, and even my ACT and SAT, I finished in 10 minutes. Not because I was smart, but because I Christmas-treated the whole thing and then walked out. And then a few months later, I was converted and became a Christian. And one of the first fruits of conversion for me was, I want to learn. I want to study. I want to do something. My mind works. And so I went into college. People told me, don't go to college. I finally decided I wanted to go to college. And then I became a philosophy major because I wanted to think. And I wanted to learn. But I was way behind the game, and many of us are like that. But here's what's interesting about King Josiah is that he got an early start on learning. Very early. And it's pretty amazing. He only lived 39 years, but he spent that 39 years learning. And because he did, he was extremely fruitful and effective in his life. And so I want to take our time tonight and look at 2 Kings chapter 22 and 23. And I want to start, here's my first point. We'll call it the early years of learning. The early years of learning. So, if you'll go to chapter 22 and then look at verse 1, it says, Josiah was 8 years old when he began to reign. You can't just read over that too quick, right? 8 years old when he began to reign. And he reigned 31 years in Jerusalem. So I know he had advisors and all of these things when you're eight. You know, you don't just start making every decision. You have people that are telling you what to do. But still. A lot can go wrong when you put an eight year old in power and an ancient monarch, right? There's no there's no house or seat or senator or, you know, state legislator. There's nobody to slow down a bad leader. This could go really, really bad. And it it didn't actually. King Josiah wasn't a foolish leader. Look at verse 2. It said, he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, and he walked in all the ways of David his father. And he did not turn aside to the right or to the left. That's amazing. So at 8 years old, then at 9, then at 10, then 11 and 12, 15, 17, 22, he doesn't ruin the kingdom. And He doesn't turn it in a bad direction. And guess what? It was already in a bad direction. It was already in a bad condition. He stepped in when it was already corrupt. And He didn't keep it in that corrupt state. And He didn't make it worse. He actually made it better. And then this is where it becomes even more amazing. As you think of who his father was, his father, and I won't go into detail, you could read right before this, it talks about Manasseh was, I believe, his grandfather, and Amon was his father. Those were the two kings before him, and they were both evil and corrupt men. And so he was groomed from a young age in the secular ideologies and the polytheistic pagan practices of these fallen Israel kings of Israel that was his father and grandfather. And all he knew was this stuff. So what are the chances an eight year old from a broken home is going to turn a whole nation morally and religiously in a different direction than everyone before him? That's impossible. It doesn't happen. I would imagine people expected, okay, he's hearing the same sort of religious teaching from all the advisors, all the corrupt priests, all the false prophets that all the other leaders were hearing. He's going to do the same things. He's going to embrace the same immoral worldview and secular ideologies that all the kings before him had. I would think that this wouldn't even make the front page of the Jerusalem News. King Josiah is now king. Nobody cared. It's going to keep going the way it's always going. What is an eight-year-old going to do to change the culture and the nation of Israel at this point? They did not expect God to raise up a virtuous child prodigy. They did not expect this. I've been meditating on these two chapters this week, You know, I think the thing that really jumped out at me is, man, it is tragic how we underestimate the intellect and abilities of children. That's really tragic. I remember the first time I saw the movie Master and Commander. Ever seen that? The war movie of the Revolutionary War back in the early 1800s? You have two 15-year-old boys, commanders of the ships with men three times their age. One of those boys gets his arm, I don't know if it was cut by a sword or hit by a cannonball or something, but they take him down low and then they chop his arm off. And then next scene, you see him with his arm bandaged up and he's leading these men in war again. Thirteen years old. And you think about what we're doing in our generation to raise our young people when we put them in front of video games and excessive entertainment for hours. It's just, our kids are capable of a learning that's far, far more than what we often think. We have our, I guess we just finished our sixth year in a classical Christian school with our kids. Some of y'all, I think, have told us that that's kind of your plan for your children is classical Christian education, younger ones coming up, and then some of you are even homeschool and you do classical education. And I point this out, the classical part, because I think what a classical education mindset is, and I think they do it effectively, is they believe that children should be There should be a high bar at what a child is able to do with their mind. And we want to cultivate a passion to learn and to be lifelong learners in that child. And that that's no small thing. You know, because learning is more than making good grades or passing a test or getting a scholarship to make money. Learning is a discipline you learn that you mature for a lifetime. It's more than memorizing some facts so that you can take a test that you forget a day later. Education, I'll speak for myself and my family, it's just not about grades or scholarships or degrees. It's just not. I'm not interested if my kids can regurgitate information they learned and crammed in their head that they'll forget two days later. That's not that important to me. Just so that they got the right grade on the test. I want them to learn. I want them to think. You know, when my kids come home from school, I don't want to say, hey, did you make an A? Did you make an A? Did you make an A? I would rather ask questions like, how well are you thinking? How hard are you working? What quality of work are you producing? Do you understand the subject matter? What is your attitude? How loving are you to your friends or honoring to your teachers? Are you able to spot errors in something and recognize truth? What is excellent and beautiful in whatever you are reading? You know, you hear stories, or maybe not stories, you hear questions from people, kind of silly ones we'll ask these things sometimes. You know, did Jesus make straight A's in school? That's not really the right question. The question is, did Jesus think rightly? Did Jesus discern error? And recognize truth? And rejoice in truth? And love truth? And hate lies? Jesus loved to learn. It says that He grew in wisdom. Mary and Joseph, when they lost Jesus and then found Him, they didn't find Him off playing, they found Him what? Learning. sitting at the feet of a rabbi gaining understanding of truth. A few years ago I heard a man, I think it was a pastor I was listening to, he was confessing that after church he would always ask his kids, did you have fun? And he realized that's not a good question to ask. after church. I mean, it's a good question after the beach or after a ball game or after a movie. How was it fun? But he said, I realized that wasn't a great question to ask after church. And he said he began to ask them, what did God say through the teaching today? What does God want us to do differently this week? What could we ask him to help us in for the coming week? Those questions are aimed at wisdom and worship and love. You know, and sometimes parents, you know, we want to guard our children from boredom. We think, I don't want my kids to be bored at church. And let me, you know, here's what I think we have to understand. What are our ultimate aims for our children? What do we really want for them? Because if all week long it's entertainment and fun, and that's how we're forming their minds, and then we bring them to church, of course, boredom is going to be the thing that they're going to say. But if all through the week we're giving them chances to have fun, but we're also building categories that learning matters, wisdom matters, serving others matters, worship matters. Then when they come to church, they're not expecting six flags over Jesus. They'll still ask to go to Six Flags, but they won't expect it to be here. Because that's not the expectation. That's not the category. And I know some of y'all are already thinking, Pastor, why are you talking about kids so much? And two things, it's not evident tonight, but we have in our church 70 children. Over 70 actually at this point. Young ones. In a small church. And then on top of that, I'm looking at this passage and I'm seeing a wise, righteous, virtuous, 8-year-old king. And I'm thinking, man, if God enabled him to rule and lead this kingdom at 8, and 9, and 10, and 11, I can expect God to work in the heart of my 8th and 11-year-old. In city group, and in the service, and at school, and in the home. And this is a good thing for them, and God wants to work there. You know, I remind us of this often, but there wasn't even such a thing as a youth group or children's church until 50, 60 years ago. For 4,000 years, God's people expected the children to understand and to learn with them in the corporate gathering. And it's a blessing. for our kids. We love to, in our family devotions, we used to read the kids' Bibles. I'm all for those when the kids are young, but what a blessing it is now. We're in 2 Samuel as a family, reading through the biblical narrative, and it's amazing the insights and the understanding that young children have with the real biblical text. We don't want to rob that from them. You know, someone said earlier this week, I read, someone is going to indoctrinate your kids. Let it be you. Which is what Deuteronomy 6 says, teach them diligently, that is the scriptures, to your children. You shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise. Monday, we were driving to go camping, me and my boys, and I see a bumper sticker on the back of a car that says, Unitarian Universalist. And I'm like, alright, that's a ten minute conversation on the gospel. We're always looking for opportunities to pour wisdom and knowledge and especially gospel understanding into their young minds. And you say, Pastor, where are you in the text at this point? Well, I'm moving us forward to 2 Kings 23. Look at what Josiah, he's a little older now, but he expects the kids to be there when he begins to read the Bible. This is chapter 23, verse 2. The king went up to the house of the Lord, and with him all the men of Judah, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the priests and the prophets, and here it is, all the people, both small and great, And he read in the hearing all the words of the book of the covenant." Do you hear it? The small and the great. The children and the adults. Together, hearing the word of God read. Now, sometimes people will ask me and maybe some of you, so I want to say this publicly just because I know some of y'all may get this question as well. People will ask, because we do want children in our service as early as possible, they'll ask us, are you a family integrated church? That phrase may mean nothing to a lot of you. That's fine. I just want to speak to that really quick. Family integrated means that by design and by biblical conviction, you don't have a nursery. And you believe that all children should be in the service. Now, there's other reasons for that. Sometimes it's because they baptize those kids and they believe those children are part of the covenant. And so why would you have them out of the service if they're part of the church as much as anybody else? But that's a different discussion. What I usually bring up to someone who says, maybe they would point out a verse like this and say, look, he's reading the Scriptures and it says the kids and the adults are there. Therefore, we need all the kids in the service always. And here's the verse I bring up. I say, yeah, but have you read Nehemiah chapter 8? Which says this, verse 2 and 3. The priest brought the law before the assembly, that's Ezra. and the men and the women and all who could understand what they heard. And he read it facing the square before the water gate from early morning until midday in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand. And the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law." So Ezra is standing like I am before everybody and he's reading the Bible to who? It says those who were able to understand. So can a 13-year-old understand? Yes. Can an eight-year-old understand? Yes. Can a two-year-old or a three-year-old understand? We have a nursery for that reason. Parents can make that judgment, but we provide a nursery because I don't think that a two-year-old is able to understand, and often they make it difficult for the parent to understand. And so praise the Lord for the 22 women who, side note here, the 22 women who are on the nursery rotation to serve us, because that is a blessing. That is a blessing for us. And so it says that these who are able to understand were there. Now, maybe you're thinking, okay, what about those kids that they don't have a parent who loves them enough to bring them under the Word of God, to hear the Word of God with the people of God. What about them? And I would say that's King Josiah. He didn't have a godly mother or father to bring Him under the Scriptures. And so listen, here's the point I'm making. Whether a child is raised well, and from a young age, their mind is being cultivated to love what is good and right and true and pure, or whether they are completely neglected, and maybe like many of you, just put before a TV for hours growing up, or exposed to wicked things, In all of us, listen, in all of us, God must put in us a love for learning. God must do that. That's what happened with Josiah. From a young age, God put in him a a love for learning. Now, this leads to the second point. It says, number two, learning is always connected with humility. Now, this is the rest of chapter 22. And there's two things I want us to see here. Learning takes humility, and learning should produce humility. So we see both those things. So if you want to learn, you must take a posture of humility. You say, where do we see that? King Josiah is having them repair the temple, and when they're repairing the temple, they find something. What do they find? The Scriptures. And scholars believe they found actually some early manuscripts of the book of Deuteronomy that none of them had ever read. These are the leaders of Israel. And they had never read the Old Testament text, the covenant, or the law, And so the humility is that Josiah doesn't go, okay, that's nice, you know, and throw it away. Or he doesn't just set it up as some ancient relic. He says, open it. Read it. Verse 10, he says to the priest, give me a book. And he read it before the king. And when the king heard the words of the book of the law, he tore his clothes. So what he learned humbled him. It took humility to even open the book and read it, but then the reading of the book humbled him even more because he realized God is not happy with us because of our sin. He's utterly broken at what he hears about God's anger toward this people, and he tells the leaders in verse 13, go and inquire of the Lord for me and for the people and for all of Judah concerning the words of this book that has been found. For great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us. because of our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book to do according to all that was written concerning us. I said a few weeks ago, it's really hard to find examples of the virtue of humility in the Old Testament, and that's true. But when you see a man broken over his own sin, broken over the sin of others, you are seeing the virtue of humility. That's why it's called humbling ourselves before the Lord. Verse 19, God said to King Josiah, because your heart was penitent, and you humbled yourself before the Lord, when you heard how I spoke against this place and against its inhabitants, that they should become a desolation and a curse, you have torn your clothes and wept before me. I have heard you. Because you heard me, Josiah, I have heard you. And so guys, If Josiah is displaying humility by opening this book and humbling himself before it, and being broken over the sin that's revealed in him and in others, and that's humility, what does that say about us if we don't put this book before us and hear and learn and humble ourselves? Accept that we're prideful. Pastor Kent made the observation, we were talking earlier this week, and he said the most free from sin and mature people are those who weakly gather themselves and put themselves under the preached Word. Those who in their own private time spend time before this book. I agree. I agree. The Puritans used to say, study the Bible on your knees. We need the humility that the Bible can bring. And that leads to the third and final point, that learning must always lead to reformation. We could actually take it back one step and make it a little more practical and even say that reading should lead to reformation. That's what the text says. Look at verse 1. This is in chapter 23, verse 1. Then the king sent, and all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem were gathered to him. And the king went up to the house of the Lord. And with him all the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the priests and the prophets and all the people, both small and great. And he read in the hearing all the words of the book of the covenant that had been found in the house of the Lord." All the people are wanting reformation. Look at verse 3. The king stood by the pillar and made a covenant before the Lord to walk after the Lord and to keep His commandments and His testimonies and His statutes with all His heart and all His soul to perform the words of the covenant that were written in this book. And here it is. And all the people joined in the covenant. So they're all hearing what the Word of God says. They're all learning together. And then what happens? There's a full out assault on idolatry in the kingdom. Luke 4, the king commanded Hilka the high priest and the priests of the second order and the keepers of the threshold to bring out of the temple of the Lord all the vessels made for Baal and for Asherah and for all the hosts of heaven. And he burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields and in the Kidron and carried the ashes to Bethel. And then if we were to go on, verse 5, he disposed or killed the priests who burned incense to Baal, the sun and the moon god. Verse 6, He brought the Ashraf out of the house of the Lord and beat it to dust. It actually says He scattered the dust of the ashes of that false god over the tombs of the people. Verse 7, He broke down the houses of the male cult prostitutes who were in the house of the Lord. Verse 10, He made sure no one would burn His son or His daughter as an offering to Molech. I mean this is unbelievable wickedness going on in Israel at this point. And Josiah is having none of it. And none of the people want it. And they've all recognized this has got to go. And this is actually a fulfillment of a prophecy. I didn't know this until this week. It's really amazing. 1 Kings 13 verse 2. 300 years before Josiah was born, listen to this, you don't have to turn there. It says, the man cried against the altar by the word of the Lord and said, oh altar, altar, thus says the Lord. Behold, a man shall be born in the house of David, Josiah by name. This is 300 years before Josiah is born. And he shall sacrifice on you the priests of the most high places and make offerings on you. Human bones shall be burned on you. He's saying this man Josiah is going to burn human bones on the altar, which he did. And he gave a sign the same day saying, this is the sign of the Lord has spoken. Behold, the altar shall be torn down and the ashes that are on it shall be poured out. And you got to understand, OK, here's what's not happening. This is not a crazy religious man walking down the streets of India, modern day India. Seeing all the false gods and false religions and then just going to town on it. That is not what's happening. This is ancient Jerusalem. This is the city of God. That's where this is happening. So the modern day parallel, or the parallel that we could bring from this, would be Jesus seeing the money changers in the temple in Jerusalem and flipping the tables. And saying, you're making my father's house a den of robbers. That's the type of zeal that King Josiah and these people have for God's city. And then in chapter 21, they stop tearing down the idols and they start calling for biblical worship. So it says, the king commanded that all the people should keep the Passover to the Lord their God as it is written in the book of the covenant. And then it says, verse 23, that the 18th year of King Josiah, this Passover was kept to the Lord in Jerusalem. So here's the significance of the Passover. So in the Old Testament context, bringing back the Passover was bringing back the centrality of the atonement. This young righteous king is forcing them to remember only one God redeems. He doesn't overlook sin. He atones for sin. Because we have to understand, in the Old Covenant, to ignore the Passover was to ignore the Gospel. To ignore the Passover, the blood over the doorpost and the angel of death comes by, that is the New Testament equivalent of us to forget our sin and to forget Christ's death and His blood shed on the cross. So for King Josiah to centralize the Passover is for us to centralize the Gospel, and I would take it a step further, and the Lord's Table. Because remember what happened? Remember how this started? The last Passover was the first Lord's Supper. Jesus on the last Passover instituted this ordinance. And said, you don't take the Passover anymore. It is now a remembering of the atonement in my blood. Do this in remembrance of me. King Josiah. Man, for this man, I mean, for them to forget the Passover was for them to forget redemption, and for them to forget redemption was for them to forget their God. for them to keep the Passover, saying, we remember that the God who passed over sin did it because of a blood sacrifice. This man's learning led to amazing worship among God's people. It took them back to what was central. Remember even in the study of Daniel we did a couple of months ago, that King Josiah, do you know who some of the people were under his rule? Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Daniel. They were there watching all of this. They were there watching Josiah and their parents probably tearing down the idols and reestablishing atonement centered worship. That's what formed these men. They watched their parents learn And then they began to learn. And they began to learn in such a way that they even went into Babylon and learned the customs of Babylon so that they could be witnesses of Jehovah in a foreign land. Guys, learning this book is our highest priority. I hope you believe that. Gathering with the people of God and putting yourself under this book. Studying it. Bringing it with you so you can make sure what I'm saying is right. Studying it on your own. Serious study and careful reading of the book does not produce prideful religion. A serious study and careful reading of this book helps us see idolatry and the need for the atonement. That's what my wife said at least. I was talking to Priscilla earlier this week about this. And she said, learning should lead to not just seeing idols, but seeing them in our own lives. And learning should lead not to just recognizing and knowing what the atonement is, but actually beginning to remember it correctly. And that's true. You know, there are some who learn, but they don't learn, right? Paul warned about that. There are those who are always learning, but never coming to a knowledge of the truth. They have a form of godliness, but they deny its power. Paul says it this way, the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. There is a way that you can actually learn this book and never learn anything about this book. When you take this book and you study this book, you learn this book, all these things, but you do it without the Spirit, death. The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. I hope everything I'm saying, I hope you hear, the Spirit of God is what enables the learning. It's what makes the learning real learning. What King Josiah is doing and what these people are doing, this is spirit-wrought reformation. This is no dead orthodoxy. Think back to Ezra and Nehemiah standing for hours. It says for half the day they stood and read the Bible. What makes people do that? The Spirit of God. That's revival. You think of the Protestant reformation under Luther and Wycliffe and Zwingling and Calvin. These men got the Bible into the hands of the people so the people could read it. Calvin preached six days a week. People are coming to listen to an hour sermon every day of the week. Centralizing the Word of God. The Spirit does that through the centering of God's Word. What about the first Great Awakening here in America with George Whitefield and John Wesley going outside because they couldn't fit everybody inside, and they're preaching. Hours in the cold or in the heat. And people are just listening and being broken under the Word of God. You could make a good argument that King Josiah is the Martin Luther of the B.C. era. What Martin Luther was for the church in the Protestant Reformation, King Josiah was in the Old Covenant for the people of Israel. God used him mightily. and he was only 39 years old. And look at verse 25. It kind of sums up his life right here. It says, before him there was no king like him who turned to the Lord with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might according to all the law of Moses. Nor did any like him arise after him. I'm going to go so far as to say this. I think King Josiah in many ways, was greater than King David. Because King David had a public scandal. And King Josiah never did. And both of them had a heart for the Lord, it says. And neither of them fell away. And there was a faithfulness that marked David and Josiah's life forever. But King Josiah never had a public scandal. He walked faithfully with the Lord his whole life. But listen, it wasn't enough to save God's people. Look at verse 26. It says, still the Lord did not turn from the burning of His great wrath by which His anger was kindled against Judah, because of all the provocations in which Manasseh had provoked Him. And the Lord said, I will remove from Judah also out of My sight, and I have removed Israel, and I will cast off this city that I have chosen, Jerusalem. and the house of which I have said My name shall be there." And then in verse 28-30, it shows this virtuous King Josiah was killed at 39 years old, and he died, and he was buried, and he was dead like every other king before him. And here's the point. The peak of all learning. The virtue of learning pinnacles right here. This king wasn't enough to completely reform the city because he couldn't rule forever. This earthly Jerusalem was a failed project. Even Jesus shows up and he weeps over Jerusalem and then who was it who actually killed Jesus? The citizens of Jerusalem. The New Testament says God's people need a king and a kingdom Come down from heaven. We need a King who can stay on the throne forever, and even if He dies, He rises again and continues to rule. We need a Kingdom that comes down, a new Jerusalem, Revelation 21 says. When King Jesus came down, what did He say? He said, repent, for what? The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. We're not just talking about a kingdom that's to come. We're not just talking about something in the future. Jesus said, the already kingdom is set up among you. If your heart is submitted to me, you're in my kingdom. Jesus ruled your life as He reigned. You're in the kingdom. Let me close with this last verse. Matthew 6.33, Jesus said to those in His kingdom, He says, this is your highest priority. Seek first the kingdom and His righteousness. Christ's kingdom and His righteousness. Seek that first. Above all, it would be the same as saying this. Seek first His kingdom and His virtue. His virtue. Church, as we pursue the virtue of lifelong learning, we aren't magnifying King Josiah. We are magnifying King Jesus. Who has called us to be lifelong learners in His kingdom. Because we want to be fruitful in His kingdom. And learning is a sure path to that. Guys, let's go to the Lord and let's ask Him to help us in these things. Father, Lord, we know our minds are prone to what is trivial, what is temporary, what is earthly, what is fleeting. We just gravitate toward all that doesn't matter. And so Lord, we need You. We need You to incline our hearts toward the virtue of learning and a type of learning that learns those things that are of eternal value, that make for the advancement of your kingdom, that magnify the worth of our King. Lord, help us as parents to not shortchange our children. Lord, help our children from a young age to love, to learn, Not just God's Word, but about God's world. Father, You must do this. We can't make these things happen in our own hearts, or in our children's hearts, or in this church. So we pray for Your Spirit's work among us. That we would centralize the Word of God. daily submit ourselves to it and week by week come together under the Word of God. And Lord, help us to be learners like this man Josiah so that our life brings reformation. So that we get rid of idolatry. So that we centralize the atonement. And so Lord, we ask You to do these things for Your namesake and for the good of our church. And we pray it in Jesus' name, Amen.