Actions Speak Louder Than Words

If we want spiritual awakening in our land, revival in our churches, and renewal in our hearts, our actions must align with our desires. We must ruthlessly eliminate all the things that dishonor God, or even detract in the mildest way, from our full devotion to him. Does that sound a little fanatical to you? Isn’t that going just a bit overboard? Isn’t that calling for spiritual extremism? Yes! Yes! Yes! What else could the Scripture mean by a fully devoted heart? We must become rigorous in our refusal to allow people, places and things to get between us and our radical devotion to God. Perhaps then God will revive us again.

Going Deep // Focus: 2 Kings 23:3, 25

King Josiah took his place of authority beside the pillar and renewed the covenant in the Lord’s presence. He pledged to obey the Lord by keeping all his commands, laws, and decrees with all his heart and soul. In this way, he confirmed all the terms of the covenant that were written in the scroll, and all the people pledged themselves to the covenant…Never before had there been a king like Josiah, who turned to the Lord with all his heart and soul and strength, obeying all the laws of Moses. And there has never been a king like him since.

King Josiah truly loved the Lord God with all his heart, mind and strength. He offered his full devotion to God and his passionate commitment to God’s Word like no other king of Israel or Judah, except for King David. And not even for a moment, at least that we know about, did he drift from his pure love and obedience from the Lord as David did in the sordid affair with Bathsheba. Josiah reformed the nation of Judah at a time when it had drifted morally and spiritually the farthest it had ever been from God. But under this God-following king’s reign, revival happened!

In Josiah, God finally found that man with a fully committed heart, as we are told in 2 Chronicles 16:9, that he desperately scoured the earth to find,

For the eyes of the LORD search back and forth across the whole earth, looking for people whose hearts are perfect toward him, so he can show his great power in helping them.

In modern times, we often speak of the need for revival in our personal lives, renewal in our churches, and spiritual awakening in our desperately drifting nation. We long for it and sometimes we pray for it, though probably not nearly, consistently and urgently enough. We pine for the days when God will light the flames of our waning passion, bring the backslidden home and inexorably draw the godless to his heart. And several times in our nation’s history, there have been significant seasons of spiritual awakening when the sovereign hand of God intersected the repentant hearts of people, and revival happened.

That brings us to the two critical conditions of a spiritual awakening: the sovereign timing of God and the humble, determined, repentant heart of man. For revival and reform to take place, our part must be a desperate determination to align our lives to the will and ways of God. We must come to the point where we are ready to offer actions that back up our cries for revival.

That is what King Josiah did, and that is why God sent a season of refreshing to Judah. No less than thirty times in 2 Kings 23 do we read words that demonstrate the king’s ruthless commitment to purge his kingdom of sin. Thirty times we read of the king smashing pagan altars, destroying idolatrous shrines, removing false priests, burning implements used in godless rituals, tearing down, grinding, executing, scattering, desecrating, defiling and carrying away anything that had to do with the spiritual unfaithfulness and moral filth that had been taking place in Judah over the years.

Josiah didn’t just talk about revival. He didn’t just pray for it. He did something about it. He put his money where his mouth was and he took action. And he became one of the greatest kings in the history of God’s people because his actions spoke louder than his words. He proved the full devotion of his heart by the passionate commitment of his hands to do away with anything and everything that violated the covenant that God established with Israel under Moses.

The point to all of this is obvious: If we want spiritual awakening in our land, revival in our churches, and renewal in our hearts, our actions must align with our desires. Like Josiah, we too, must ruthlessly eliminate things that dishonor God, or even detract in the mildest way, from our full devotion to him. Does that sound a little fanatical to you? Do you think I am going just a bit overboard with this, perhaps a tad legalistic?

Yes! Yes! Yes! What else could the Scripture mean by a fully devoted heart? I am not sure we need to become legalistic in the same sense of the Pharisees of Jesus’s day, but we must become rigorous in our refusal to allow people, places and things to get between us and our devotion to God and his Lordship over us.

There must come a time when our actions speak louder than our words, and then, perhaps God will revive us again.