We All Have One

Well, brethren, we all have one! The title today, are you thinking what you all have? We all have a nose and they all smell. That's one thing about it, but no, there's more than that. And I want to talk about something today, as Benjamin is making sure I'm recorded here. I was not seeing the red light, but he told me I could... I'm good. So let's go into this, because I want you to think about something that we all have. We all have a picture of a woman here. I'd like you to reflect. Do you know her? You've seen her? If you haven't seen her, or pictures of her, maybe you've heard about her. Her name is Cory Timboom. Cory Timboom. She's passed away now, but Cory Timboom was a very famous writer. And she, as Mike was talking earlier, she was a woman who had courage, a lot of courage. But also, she had one. She had one, as the title of the sermon goes. It was 1940 in the Netherlands. Cory Timboom and her family ran a jewelry store. They repaired watches. They sold various things. In this little store, and over the top of it was their house that they lived in, her and her parents. And, as you see, they even preserved it now more as a museum. You can see the bottom part was where they all worked, and up above is where they lived and stayed. The interesting part was that during the Second World War in 1940, as the Germans were hunting down Jews to send them to concentration camps and work camps, many of the Jews ran to the Netherlands, trying to get out of trouble, get out of being sent to these work camps. And there were many in the nation of the Netherlands who wanted to help people. And so, one of the things that they did was to hide them. One of the things that Corey Ten Boom did was to work in the underground railroad to bring people in and try to save them. And her family worked like that and would feed these people and hide them out. And behind Corey Ten Boom's room or bedroom was another hidden room. It's a hidden area there that they would put the people behind. And it was only one way in, and people would be able to stay there for days, sometimes weeks. And the Boom family was so known for this that over the time, from 1940 to 1945, when they were finally found out, they were able to save over 800 people from being sent to not only concentration camps, but to their death. She had one. You might know this picture. It's a picture of another young Jewish girl, Anne Frank. Anne Frank. She became famous after her death for the diary of Anne Frank. Of many of you, I was required reading when I was in school. But we got to see how she lived for two years, a little over two years, as she and her family also were in one.

A hidden room, a compartment built above an office that was only about 400 square foot, covered by a bookcase, and the only way you could get in or out. And looking at it, you would never know. It was a room behind this bookcase in the top of this office, a room of 400 square foot, where eight people lived for two, two and a half years, until they were found out.

This also took place in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam. But when they were found out, the house, the building, was raided, and they were taken to a concentration camp, work camp, as it was called then, and of course, Anne Frank was already slim at 15 years of age, and so she did not make it but a couple months before dysentery.

Took her life in the camp, according to those that were there. She was only a couple of months from freedom when the Allied forces came in and freed everyone there.

But she knew what it was to hide out in one of these. She knew what it was, and if you visit her place even now, you can read about or hear about this special room, this separate room. Another man you might recognize had one of these. It's my knock and beg, and he was the prime minister of Israel for years. But before he was the prime minister of Israel, he was part of an underground terrorist, as the Brits called him. He was a terrorist, as he was wanting to uproot British rule over Israel, not only before they became a state, but even afterwards. And he worked and kind of headed up this group called Ergon. And so he was constantly having to be on the move as he was trying to hide out for those trying to get him for his deeds that he did against the British rule at that time. And they knew he went into a house, and they waited days to get him. Hopefully he would come out, but they waited three or four days. He did not come out of this house. And so they went in to get him, and they couldn't find him. They could not find this man they had been searching for to arrest him, put him on trial, because he had seen to it that there was a secret room, a secret chamber, a small room behind the chimney that was only four foot by four foot.

He stayed in there for days just having some water and a little bit of food. And he waited them out because they didn't know that room existed. There was no way to find it. There was very little evidence of anything like that existing. So, knock and beg and have one. Have one. For us, we all have one, too. We all have one. In the English language, it's called a hater. H-E-D-E-R. Hater. And yes, you do have one. I would like to look at that because in Hebrew, it's actually called hater. Hater. There's a K in front of it. And hater means in Hebrew, a room, a separate room, a secret or hidden room, a secret or hidden area or compartment.

And many houses used to have those because you could hide your jewelry, perhaps, or even hide various things of value and no one would know they were there.

We might talk about even a storm cellar because there are storm cellars built in the ground that nobody knows are there until you need to go there. What I want to talk about today is this word, hater. Hater. I want to explain it because I think we can all learn so much from this that even God, since He designed and gave the plan to David, who then gave it to his son Solomon, the plans to build the temple, Solomon's temple. And the amazing part is, you can see actual drawings of it here, but if you went down to great detail all through and different places in Solomon's original temple were haters, were rooms, little small compartments where things could be hid, where actually people could be hidden, where they could put things of value, where they would not be found by those who came in and wanted to steal or destroy things in the temple. So even God laid out hidden chambers, these haters, and it showed that they came in handy if we'll go for you go the story of King Hezekiah. King Hezekiah wanted to put Israel back on the strait and narrow road, wanted to have Hezekiah as the king of Judah after they had gone off after bad kings and followed bad kings and followed other gods. Hezekiah came in and said, yes, I want to clean this mess up. We want to start worshiping God as we were called to do, just like us, called to do. That's what we're called to do.

So I'd like you to go, if you will, to 2 Chronicles. 2 Chronicles 29. 2 Chronicles 29. And here it says, in the first year of his reign, in the first month, he opened the doors of the house of the Lord and repaired them. This is talking about Hezekiah, because everybody had just let it fall down and didn't really keep up anything because they weren't really worshiping God. At other gods they were worshiping, and they became very apathetic in their actions and working with God. Verse 4, then he brought in the priests and the Levites and gathered them in the east square and said to them, Hear me, Levites, now sanctify yourselves, sanctify the house of the Lord God of your fathers, and carry out all the rubbish from the holy place.

What do you think was in there? They had let the house of God fall into ruin, and stuff was just, I'm sure there was dust, I'm sure there was, there were things that just thrown in there, because it was no longer the house of God to these people. And Hezekiah told the Levites, told the Levites, No! We're not going to allow that to happen. Not under my watch. We're going to change things. So let's clear out, let's get all this rubbish out. And what did they do then? Verse 15, go down to verse 15. And they gathered their brethren, sanctified them, and went according to the commandment of the king, at the words of the Lord, to cleanse the house of the Lord. To cleanse the house of the Lord. What about us?

Does our temple need a little cleaning? Do we need to do a little cleansing in the temple of God? Do I need to remind you where the temple of God is today? Where God exists, where He lives, where He takes up occupancy, the very essence of Him in us. A part of Him is in us. We're called the temple of God. Well, here these people realized they had let it deteriorate. And as we used to say, go down the tubes, and we had a king, a righteous king, who decided, no, we need to get back on track. We need to get this thing going. Verse 16, then the priests went into the inner part of the house of the Lord to cleanse it and brought out all the debris that they found in the temple of the Lord to the court of the house of the Lord. And the Levites took it out and carried it to the brook kidron to get rid of it. Had junk enough they needed to clean, others, they were burning and get rid of it. They wanted to get rid of all the stuff that did not belong. It's the first part of getting right with God. It's showing the proper respect to Him, making sure that your temple is clean, making sure we work on ourselves. This is what was so important to King Hezekiah. So I ask you, do you have some debris in your life? Are there things in your life that you need to clean up? Are there things we need to look at? Debris, garbage. A lot of us have a lot of garbage in our lives. You're looking at what? We have to work out. Junk, as some people may call it. Junk that doesn't really fit in our lives. There's no purpose for it.

And there's filth. Filth, just like I'm sure they had to clean the walls, clean the floors, clean all this in this temple because it had become old, dusty, contaminated, deteriorated. Have you seen it? All parts of the world. There's just junk. There's just junk. There's garbage, and some people just let it go. I've been to countries where they don't even care. You look on the sides of the road and it's piled up high. There's just been one country where it's just piled right. It's like a little mountain, and people just go over there and throw their stuff in it, and there's no cleaning it up or anything. How about our lives? Do we have some of that? Is that something that we need to look at? When we do our cleaning, our spring cleaning, where they came from, we usually do some spring cleaning. As soon as the weather gets a little better, we maybe clean our screens or windows, clean up around the place. God had a plan for everybody that wants to follow Him to do some spring cleaning in their lives. And that spring cleaning is putting some stuff out and putting other stuff in those haters.

Those compartments.

How about your cleaning? Will you see people cleaning them? Will you start your cleaning? Not only physically, but also spiritually. Because the job of physically cleaning stuff, and you may see it, my wife loves to clean, and I'm glad she does. I don't know. That's just something that she just hadn't gotten me to do enough of, or I don't do it well enough for her many times. So that's probably right. And I don't know. Maybe I'm doing it that way, so I don't have to do much. But we all have some cleaning to do.

Do we want to do it? Do we want to dig deep and do some physical cleaning and spiritual cleaning?

I'd like to look at a man, a king. His name is King Josiah. King Josiah was this incredible man who came along because his great-grandfather was Hezekiah. But after Hezekiah died, guess what? The nation went back. It had a king Manasseh who was worse than the king before Hezekiah. And he was terrible. He's called the worst, the most wicked king of all of Judah.

And he let the nation fall back down into idolatry and where they really didn't care. They were worse than being apathetic to God. And he reigned for 50 years. That was King Josiah's grandfather. He would have been alive at the time and been a young child. But then his father, Emma, became king. And he was worse. He was as bad as his father. He was worse about putting the nation back on track. He didn't care. Thankfully, he only lived a few years before he was killed. Because then a young eight-year-old king, King Josiah, sat on the throne. And he wanted to change the nation. And during the next 18 years, he put himself to learn, to study, and to know about God by the teachers who were the only ones left. Because the nation had fallen so much that they had forgotten so much knowledge. They had forgotten so many of the laws of God. And the only way he could get them is through some priests or some old people might tell him what God wanted.

And so when he was 26 years old, he called, just like his great-grandfather has a guy, called all the priests, called all the holy men, and said, we've got to clean this mess up. We've got to start worshiping in the temple. We need to do what's right. So he said, go in. We need to hire. We need to hire people to repair. Let us hire those men to come in and carpenters, construction people, to build this temple back up, to put it in godly condition, not the condition it had become.

He wanted to learn. And then this amazing thing happened. In 2 Kings 22 and verse 8, you want to turn there, 2 Kings 22 verse 8, said, Then Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan, the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord, and Hilkiah gave it to Shaphan. And he read it. So here was the book of the law. Here was the only thing it seems like left, left to know what God said, what his instructions were. And it was a book, book of the law, like the first five books of the Bible, as we would know the Torah.

And it was hidden. They were cleaning it up. They were working and refurbishing the temple. And guess what? They found the book. Where do you think it was? According to theologians, it was in a hater. It was in a hater. It was in a compartment, a small little room where they hid certain things. And God allowed it so that his word, his law, would be able to be continued, no matter how wicked the kings became. A really good story, an incredible story of Josiah, who was a man young enough. So anytime you think, well, what did he do? He started his whole turning of an entire nation at age 26. Do you think you're too young? I think not. Think you're too young to have the courage that he takes to follow God, even in the face of adversity? This is what we've been called to do.

Josiah went against the norms. Even though he was king, you know, he had the power, it's still, at that age, it's easy to go along, isn't it? In our society, sometimes it's easier just to go along than to stand up for what's right.

But King Josiah did it. He had the confidence. He wanted to follow God. And isn't that what we are all wanting to do? That's why we're here, every Sabbath. We're here because we want to follow God. God said, I want an appointment with my family, with my children, with those who have called out, those I've sanctified and set apart.

I want to be there. I'll be there in spirit. And he is. And we want to do our part.

Now, I want to talk about this hater. And there is a unique place in the Bible because this is explained. And I'll give just a little history here because it's explained in Ezekiel. And the amazing part about this story is that Judah fell under the Babylonians, and they actually took them back to Babylon in three separate moves.

The first one where they came in and took some of the leaders and their leaders, young people like Daniel, Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego. And then another seven years later, they came in and they took another group of people. And in that group of people was a young man just out of his teens called Ezekiel. And Ezekiel was there in Babylon as a street preacher. God was working with him, and he was trying to tell the people in Babylon that there's a reason you're here.

There's a reason we're here. And even though there was still a nation and a people back in Jerusalem, the people in Babylon were saying, oh, I hear everything's great back in Jerusalem. I hear that they're following God, and they're doing all these things, and maybe he'll release us and we'll be able to go back to Jerusalem.

And God talked to Ezekiel, and he said, no, that's not right. That's not right, and you need to go back and tell the people. So God did an amazing thing. He took him in the Spirit, and he took him the 500 miles in the Spirit, and he took him all the way from Babylon to Jerusalem, to the temple.

So Ezekiel could see what was going on at the temple of God, and why there was not going to be this celebration and everybody going back to God, but it turned the opposite way. And that God would eventually have to destroy Jerusalem and the temple and allow the Babylon Babylonians to do it because they turned away from God. And one of the things that are amazing is that they didn't all want to show it, though. So I'd like to go to a set of scriptures, and it's really unique of all the scriptures in the Bible.

If you'll turn in the book of Ezekiel, we'll do the New King James Version, chapter 8, Ezekiel 8, and verse 6. Ezekiel will start in verse 6. As God has taken now Ezekiel back to see what's going on back in where they thought, oh, we're all going to be able to return to soon. So furthermore, he said to me, Son of Man, do you see what they are doing, the great abominations that the house of Israel commits here to make me go far away from my sanctuary?

Now turn again, and you will see greater abominations. Verse 7. So he brought me, Ezekiel, to the door of the court, and when I looked, there was a hole in the wall. Verse 8. Then he said to me, Son of Man, dig into the wall, and when I dug into the wall, there was a door. And he said to me, go in and see the wicked abominations which they are doing. Who was doing it? The religious leaders in Jerusalem at the time. He said, So I went in and saw, and there every sort of creeping thing, abominable beast, and all the idols of the house were portrayed all around on the walls.

So they had carved these images, these idols of different beasts and animals and false gods, and they had done that in a hidden room so that really everybody couldn't see it. And then they would go into these rooms and they would worship. Talk about idolatry to the max! These were the religious leaders of the day. And they allowed themselves to not only buy into other gods, but then they began to worship. And the whole country was going to pay for it. You're going to pay a price for betraying God. Let's go to verse 11.

Verse 11, And there stood before them seventy men of the elders. Seventy like the Septuagint was named after. Before them seventy men of the elders of the house of Israel. And in their midst stood Jehoshanael, the son of Shaphan.

Remember Shaphan who was in our story earlier? He was a son and here he was, involved in this idolatry. Each man had a censer in his hand, which with pictures wide, worshiping. They were part of it. They just didn't show up here. They were very much involved, and a thick cloud of incense went up as they're worshiping these fake gods, these animals, these idols that are on the wall. And there stood before them seventy, as I said, and a thick cloud of incense went up. Verse 12. Then he said to me, Son of man, have you seen what the elders of the house of Israel do in the dark? Every man in the room of his idols. So they were beginning to have these rooms. They were beginning to use these rooms, these haters, to go in and worship and have their own little prayer closet, I guess you would say. For they say, the Lord does not see us because the Lord has forsaken this land. Well, he was about to forsake the land and turn it over for seventy years. But they say they don't see us. But here they were doing all this in hidden rooms, hidden compartments. So what about these haters? Do you have one? Do you have one? Let me show you a picture of what God refers to as maybe a hater for us. Yes, it's a heart. A heart. The human heart, it has what? It has four chambers in it. Four chambers. But it's used in Scripture as a metaphor for the inner you, for so many of our thoughts, so many of our actions, our inner life, your very core.

God brings us to say, what's in your heart? What's in one of those chambers? What's in the hater?

Maybe a hidden compartment of your heart that we don't like to visit very often because it's not very clean. It may be filled with thoughts, sex, lust of all types, greed, and even idolatry. Where other things in here mean more to us than our God and our way of life.

I think I'll turn to a few Scriptures to make my case here because I think it's time as we come to only a month away from the Passover and the Days of Unleavened Bread to as we take the next 30 days to examine ourselves that we start maybe looking in our heart more than cushions for the sin that may exist or the leavening in our lives. I want us to think about this hater because God understands we can sometimes think we are hiding from Him just like those priests of God. Thought that He couldn't see them but God sees everything. God sees the parts of our hearts and wants us to change just like He wanted them to change. He would have done anything at that time if they'd have turned and repented. He could have brought them back. He put them in Babylon. He could have brought them back. Well, guess what? He can take us wherever we want to go.

But He wants us to go and follow Him. That's the path.

Turn, if you will, with me to Proverbs. Proverbs. Proverbs 27, verse 19. It's a verse that many of you have maybe not read or thought about. But it shows us this instruction about checking out what's in our hater. It says, as in water face reflects face, so a man's heart reveals the man. So God is taking it back to this hater, this heart that we have, a man's heart. What's in your heart? And sometimes we have to examine ourselves because we'll look at something that we didn't go, I don't know why I did that. Or boy, I wish I hadn't said that. Why did I do that? Why did I treat that person that way? You know, that's not really me. Or is it? Or is there something in that, just like the water or a mirror reflects us? So a man's heart, it reveals sometimes really who we are. What's at the core of us? Do we want that type of representation where we just do things and think, well, I guess I shouldn't have done that. Was it like David, when he was standing up on the top of his roof, looking where he shouldn't have been looking at a man that served him's wife?

We have to look at some of the examples in Scripture and help it to cleanse and to start working on and looking at ourselves. It starts with the heart. Why did God say, what's the first and greatest command? You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart.

Do we? Or is there a little bit that's held back? Do we have a little chamber in there?

Metaphorically speaking, do we have a chamber that we kind of have this little dark side? We. We are the ones that have to look at ourselves because God already sees. And we can fake it with our wives, we can fake it with family, we can fake it with church members, we can do all this stuff. And sometimes it's not really who we are, but it's still in there, and we say or do something. This is what God wants us to work on. Turn to Jeremiah. Book of Jeremiah 17. Jeremiah 17, verse 9. We all know this one, don't we? We've heard it quoted for years, I did growing up in the church. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? Who can know it? So they say, okay, am I okay there? Okay, it's deceitful because a lot of times we can tell ourselves that we're pretty good, that we're not like other people. Boy, I'm not like that person. Remember when the two men went up to pray?

And Pharisees, boy, I'm glad I'm not like this tax collector. Oh, man, this guy is scum.

Look at me. I fast. Twice a week. Ties of everything. So good.

And yet Christ came to reveal, not so good. Not so good. Let's go to verse 10 in this Jeremiah 17 from the New King James Version. Verse 10 says, I the Lord, after I said, search the heart. Guess what? He checks the heart out. He knows all about it, created. And he says, I the Lord, search the heart. I test the mind. What's in your mind?

The sermon not long ago about that. Well, that's about the heart. And sometimes stuff can get in there. Even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doing.

And that may not be a good fruit. And that may not be what we want.

And so it's time for us to look into the heart. Because God is searching the heart. He knows. We can't hide anything from him. We have a responsibility to him to try to get that. What did David say after he got caught? Create in me a clean heart. Create in me a clean heart. Maybe we need to spend a little time asking God to help us search that hater. That heart. That inside that we're holding. And create a clean one. Maybe this is a year. We finally, like Hezekiah and Josiah, we get all the junk, all the garbage, all the filth out of our lives. Could it be that year? I hope so. I hope so. Let's go back to Ezekiel. Ezekiel 18. Ezekiel 18 and verse 31. Ezekiel 18 verse 31 says, cast away from you all the transgressions which you have committed and give yourselves a new heart. God is saying, get rid of the transgression, give yourselves a new heart and a new spirit because He told them, why should you die, O house of Israel? It's just like what we looked at earlier. He wanted them to. He wants us to.

Maybe we need a new heart in a lot of ways. Maybe we need a spiritual heart transplant to where we begin to start working and dealing with people and caring for people from the heart instead of the head. And maybe that heart will help control this mouth that sometimes gets us into trouble. Maybe you don't have those problems. Maybe your heart's just pure.

Well, I'm glad for you. But this old guy still got some work to do and a lot of people I know. A lot of my friends, a lot of the brethren, they know they still have a little work to do. We're not perfected yet. But isn't it interesting? We had one in Proverbs, we had one in Jeremiah, and we have one in Ezekiel telling us what? About the heart. About how important the heart is.

So here, God just gave us two or three witnesses. Three witnesses. Three witnesses. Where he says what? We're by the mouth of two or three witnesses. Is a matter established? Brethren, this is established that we have a heart problem, and we need to work on ours. We need to make sure we've got that thing clean. We need to make sure that if there's a hater in there, if there's a hidden compartment, we get that cleaned out. We get that purified. We get that clean.

Why did David ask, God created me a clean heart? Because what? God is a great Creator! This is what he does! This is what he's done for all this time he creates! He's still creating us into a new creation every day. So he loves to create. So why don't we, like David, come back and ask God to create some clean hearts in the United Church of God. Clean hearts. Hearts that are bitter. Hearts that aren't hard, harsh. Hearts that show love, they show agape, because that's what God wants. So are you preparing this year to work on yourself? To do a little spring cleaning, not only in our physical lives, but also in our spiritual lives, so that we can address some of these things that maybe have we've let slip. We've allowed ourselves, our temple, to become a little polluted this year, and we need to clean it up. That's all God wants. He's not gonna, he's not like this cruel God that says, okay, you're gonna die, you're gonna die, you're gonna die, die, die. No, he's a merciful guy. He only does what he has to do when he has to do it, because we won't do what he wants us to do. He came that we may have life and live it more abundantly, rather than that's what we need to do. And it starts with just some looking at ourselves, really examining ourselves. Now, one last scripture as I finish up here today, and I'd like you to go with me to Matthew 15, Matthew 15, because we heard about it in Proverbs, we heard it from Jeremiah, we heard it from Ezekiel, but how about hearing it from the King of Kings? Jesus Christ Himself, because He understood this, created us. He knew. He knows now. He's also sitting at the right hand of God as an atoning priest for us. He knows those sins. And He also knows what we confess to God, and sometimes maybe what we don't confess to God that we probably need to. And it's time, rather than that we can become better, like Mike said earlier. And until we're out of our comfort zone, we a lot of times we cannot see ourselves or see the growth that is needed.

So let's turn to Matthew 15. Matthew 15, verse 19. Matthew 15 and verse 19. For out of the heart, this is Christ speaking, for out of the heart proceed evil thoughts. Had any of those this year?

How many? Murders. Wait a minute. I didn't murder anybody. Well, you had enough people murdered in this country, but murders? Remember what he forgot? What you might have forgotten about? What he was speaking about on the Sermon on the Mount? Anger.

Can you control your anger? Have you had any problems with that this year?

Adulteries? Even in the mind? Well, I wouldn't do that, but my mind sure went somewhere. Fornications?

Spirit of the law? How about thefts? These? I didn't steal anything, but just pick this up while nobody wanted that. But false witness? I always speak the truth. I never lie. Well, you just did.

And blasphemes. Have we taken the Lord's name in vain and how we lived? Or what we said or how we did something? Very, very important. Christ understood that it comes from the heart, and that's why we need to work on this heart. You're saying in the South, bless her heart. Well, you can say about anything you want to say to somebody as long as you say, well, bless her, bless her little heart. It's like that's the ugliest kid in the world, bless her little heart. Well, sorry. That's not what Christ is teaching us. We don't want. We want to be in the heart. We want to have a clean heart. And we can reject this stuff that's coming in. But first, you got to clean it out before you can, what, defend it and keep it clean as we strive to do. So haters, haters, brethren, are you ready to clean yours? Are you ready to clean your hater?

Because the fact of the matter, the truth of the matter, whether we want to admit it or not, we all have one.

Well, brethren, we do want to venture to now real