Stop Waiting for Perfection

All right, go ahead and make your way to the book of Ezra. Ezra chapter 3 is where we will be focusing this morning.

For those of you who are just joining us, or haven't been here for a while, we are in the beginning stages of making our way through the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. These books are often referred to as postexilic books, which means they're directed toward the people of God after they've returned from exile.

So, kids, just imagine that your parents have grounded you from Minecraft. You haven't been able to be on the server for quite some time, and then you return and want to see what has happened in your little world since you left. That's kind of what's going on with the people of Judah. They've been in exile for 70 years.

Now a large contingent of the Hebrew people who were in Babylonia are back in Jerusalem, and the situation is far from ideal. The land and the structures, including the temple, had been destroyed and left in ruins for pretty much that whole time.

The people have come back with supplies from Cyrus, the king of Persia, and some supplies from their fellow Hebrews who did not return with them. But they have very real and substantial needs in this land. And they have no temple. They are surrounded by people who aren't happy that they have come back and want to stop their reconstruction efforts. That's going to become more and more obvious as we make our way through the book of Ezra. But suffice it to say, the priorities for them are clear.

That priority, as we looked at last week, is worship. Worship is the number one priority. Even in the midst of all the rubble, even under the imminent threat of hostilities from the people surrounding them, with no defensive walls or anything like that, the priority is worship, the worship of God as he has prescribed.

So let's take a look at Ezra chapter 3. It's not a long chapter, but it's an important one as we look at that idea of the priority of worship. Ezra chapter 3 begins this way:

"When the seventh month came, and the children of Israel were in the towns, the people gathered as one man to Jerusalem. Then arose Yeshua the son of Jozadak, with his fellow priests, and Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel with his kinsmen, and they built the altar of the God of Israel, to offer burnt offerings on it, as it is written in the Law of Moses the man of God. They set the altar in its place, for fear was on them because of the peoples of the lands, and they offered burnt offerings on it to the Lord, burnt offerings morning and evening. And they kept the Feast of Booths, as it is written, and offered the daily burnt offerings by number according to the rule, as each day required, and after that the regular burnt offerings, the offerings at the new moon and at all the appointed feasts of the Lord, and the offerings of everyone who made a freewill offering to the Lord. From the first day of the seventh month they began to offer burnt offerings to the Lord. But the foundation of the temple of the Lord was not yet laid.

"So they gave money to the masons and the carpenters, and food, drink, and oil to the Sidonians and the Tyrians to bring cedar wood from Lebanon to the sea, to Joppa, according to the grant that they had from Cyrus king of Persia.

"Now in the second year after their coming to the house of God at Jerusalem, in the second month, Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel and Yeshua the son of Jozadak made a beginning, together with the rest of their kinsmen, the priests and the Levites and all who had come to Jerusalem from the captivity. They appointed the Levites, from twenty years old and upward, to supervise the work of the house of the Lord. And Yeshua with his sons and his brothers, and Kadmiel and his sons, the sons of Judah, together supervised the workmen in the house of God, along with the sons of Henadad and the Levites, their sons and brothers.

"And when the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the Lord, the priests in their vestments came forward with trumpets, and the Levites, the sons of Asaph, with cymbals, to praise the Lord, according to the directions of David king of Israel. And they sang responsively, praising and giving thanks to the Lord, 'For he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever toward Israel.' And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid.

"But many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers' houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people's weeping, for the people shouted with a great shout, and the sound was heard far away."

This is all about that worship priority. What's important for the people of God in the middle of this very difficult time? There's really only one point in this, and I'm going to express it in three different ways based on what we have recorded for us in this chapter. The first is really the main point, and the other two are just restatements of it. But the thing I want you to get into your minds, and the thing I want you to take with you as you leave today, is this idea: when it comes to worship, participation trumps perfection. I'm going to explain what I mean, because this, to me, is what is so evident in what's going on in this chapter.

We've got the city walls of Jerusalem basically nonexistent. They were destroyed when Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem. There's no temple. The whole temple complex had been torn down. It sat on top of a large hill and is basically in the same condition as the rest of the city. It's in rubble.

So what are the people to do? They return from captivity and they have supplies. They've been given resources from Cyrus and from their fellow countrymen who are still in Babylonia. But even if they had all the resources in the world, they wouldn't be able to rebuild this structure quickly. You're talking about working with stone and hand tools, and everything has to be done manually. They wouldn't be able to get the temple up quickly, but they had to do something. They can't just say, "Well, we'll get around to it eventually, and let no worship happen until the temple is built."

So what are they to do? Well, they start with the altar. The altar was a structure outside of the temple building. This is where the animals were burnt as sacrificial offerings to God. For obvious reasons, if you're burning animals and grain and these other offerings made throughout the year, you can't do that inside a building. It's got to be outside. So when you think of sacrificial offerings under the Old Covenant system that was given by God through Moses, this is where the bulk of that is taking place. What this means is that if they can rebuild just this altar, the people can quickly resume many of the prescribed worship practices that God gave to Moses, even without a temple, even without that structure being built.

That's why this is the key for us, and this is what I want you to take away. I'm laying it out at the beginning in case you do fall asleep. I'm not the best communicator, so I don't blame you if that happens. But you'll know what you need to know, and it's simply this: they didn't need everything to be perfect in order to start participating in worship. All they needed was the altar, and then they could go through all of these various prescribed feasts and offering practices that God had given to Moses hundreds of years earlier.

If they had waited until everything was perfect, they'd still be waiting to this very day, because nothing's ever perfect. They could rebuild the altar and start making sacrificial offerings. If perfection was what they were waiting for, it would never have happened, especially given the circumstances they were in, where everything they were required to do would be exponentially more difficult than it had been prior to the captivity. Even the resources they have are sparse compared to what they would ideally have wanted.

And what you see at the end of this chapter is that even when the foundation of the temple is built, many of the old-timers are weeping, because they realize this structure isn't going to be anything like it was when Solomon built it. It's not going to be a spectacular edifice that we can be proud of. But the point we can see in this chapter is that they don't need it to be that. They don't need everything to be picture perfect.

When I went to college, I went to Cedarville College, a small liberal arts school in the middle of a cornfield in the middle of Ohio. At the time, the college president was named Paul Dixon, interestingly enough, spelled with an X like our Dixon. The campus was beautiful. The structures all matched. They looked the way you would want your college to look. He would always say that the reason he was such a proponent of the school looking so nice was that everything done for the Lord should have quality stamped all over it. He would say that all the time. It was one of the things he would drum into our heads. We weren't even allowed to walk on the grass unless we were going to pick a dandelion. That's what he would tell us: unless you're pulling weeds, you can't walk on the grass.

I would agree with that, with one caveat: that quality should be measured against your abilities and your resources. Even in this situation, where things are hard post-exile, we want the worship of God to be the top priority, and we want to worship him with the highest quality that we can. But if that highest quality can't be what it once was, that should never mean we don't worship him. It should never mean we don't engage in the things he has commanded us to do.

What that means is that we here today, just like the people from the tribes of Judah and Benjamin who returned to Jerusalem, should always be striving to worship God right here, right now, to the best of our abilities, with the provisions God has given us. We should never say, "I wish the structure were better," or, "I wish we had better things to offer God, so we're not going to do anything." We should never be paralyzed by the fact that we can't achieve perfection, so we give nothing. Don't ever think that.

Don't ever think, "I can't worship God if I can't worship him with perfection. I can't ever sing until I can sing like a professional. I can't ever pray until I can pray with rapturous eloquence. I can't ever lead a Bible study or a small group or teach a Sunday school class until I can teach like somebody who's been doing it for decades." That should never be the thing that keeps you from engaging in service and worship. It doesn't mean you can't strive for excellence. But just because you're not as good as you possibly can be, or you're not as good as the expert or the professional, that should never be what's holding you back. It should never be your barrier, so that you say, "Well, I guess I just can't give anything to the Lord, because I can't give what that person over there is giving. I can't worship the way they do."

People of God, as we see, they rebuilt the altar and they got started worshiping. And don't hear me say that you should never strive to grow, that you should never strive to mature in your worship of God. In fact, what we're going to see is that Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, who is one of the men mentioned here, is the one spearheading this rebuilding effort. He didn't stop the rebuilding work once the altar was built, right? He didn't say, "Well, we've got an altar. That's pretty much all we need, so we'll call it quits right there." No, they kept doing the work. They kept improving what they could offer to God and the tools they had to worship him. They continued to improve the situation. But just understand that an insistence on perfection can paralyze any act of worship. So, just like the people who returned with Zerubbabel to Jerusalem, we need to be okay with worshiping God with what we have.

There's a gospel component to this. Jesus Christ came into the world to save whom, according to Paul? Sinners. Not perfect people. The message of the gospel is not that once we got our act together, Christ died for us. It's that even when we were dead in our sins and trespasses, Christ died for us. The gospel assures us that Christ is our perfection. That's where we look for perfection. He lived the sinless life. He died the death in our place to pay the penalty we could not pay, so that we could receive in exchange his righteousness for our sinful brokenness. We come to him with humility. We come to him with brokenness. We come to him pleading for mercy, trusting that Jesus' life, death, and resurrection is enough, because he is the perfect sacrifice.

So our worship is a response to what he has done, not an addition to it, not something we add on to make it better or to make us better. If you want perfection, you look to Christ and you lean on him, and you offer what you have, not to gild what he's done, but as an act of gratitude and humility. Offer what you can.

So, participation trumps perfection. Another way to say this, and we find it in this passage, is that offering trumps abundance. Let me explain what I mean by that. Look at verse 3 of Ezra chapter 3. "They set the altar in its place." Now I want you to glance down through the next handful of verses and take note of how often you see words like "offering" or "offered," some derivative of that word. You see it a lot, don't you?

An offering is something you give up or give over. That's what it's saying. In all of these different festivals and prescribed sacrifices given by Moses to the people, what they were supposed to do was relinquish something of theirs, a possession, typically an animal or some byproduct of the harvest, and give it over to be used in a sacrifice of worship. And keep in mind, these people are not living lives of opulence in lavish palaces, with such an overabundance that we could never use it all up, so we might as well give it to God. They weren't making these sacrificial offerings from a place of excess.

They're more like the widow in the temple, who put in her two little copper coins. Jesus says she gave more than all those who gave out of their wealth, even though they put in large sums, because her offering to God was such a sacrifice that, in Christ's words, she literally gave everything when she put those two little coins in the offering box. Perhaps from our perspective the proportion is not the same, not even comparable. But from the perspective of the two people giving, she gave more, Jesus said.

So they jump in with both feet, and they get into doing as much of these prescribed offerings as they possibly can throughout the year. And it says they're even participating in the freewill offerings. Those are offerings to God that go above and beyond all of that, that people can give simply out of their own heart's desire to give to him.

Praise the Lord when God blesses people with riches. We see in Scripture how people like that are used in mighty ways. Let's not forget Solomon, who built the first temple and was one of the richest men of his time. The Bible talks about how in Solomon's day silver was so common that they treated it like rocks. He was a truly wealthy king, and Israel thrived under his leadership. He was able to build for God this magnificent temple complex that was the pride of the people of Israel. It was a true thing of beauty, and the Lord blessed it when the temple was dedicated. It was an amazing time, both to worship God and for the people of God to celebrate. Praise God that he uses people in their wealth.

I think of Lydia in the New Testament. She helped Paul and Silas and Timothy and was instrumental in planting the church in Philippi, because she was a wealthy woman, a seller of purple, selling the dye people used to make royal garments. She was very wealthy, and so she was able to let the church be planted in her house, and later she showed hospitality to Paul and Silas and Timothy as they traveled back through Philippi. That's another example of God using someone in their wealth, and using their wealth to further the cause of Christ. But it's certainly not required.

So we go back to Jerusalem, here at the time of the return from exile, and they are primarily supplied by donations and handouts. It's like when we ask for stuff for the rummage sale. Imagine living off of that. They returned with what Cyrus decided to give them and what the other people gave. But I want you to see something here in Ezra chapter 3. There are phrases that indicate something very significant. They build the altar and then return to the sacrificial system, and as I've mentioned, there's all this language of offering, offered, offer, offer, offer, this giving up and giving over to the Lord. But look at the expressions that follow: "as prescribed," "each day," "by number," "each festival day," "each month," "regular."

In other words, what I want you to see is that this wasn't a one-off event. It wasn't, "We just did it for our grand opening weekend for the altar. We ran out the banners, fifty percent off coupons, a big ribbon-cutting ceremony for the altar." No, this was now a part of their life. This was ongoing. They did what they could to reestablish the complete worship system prescribed by God through Moses. Everything they could do to get that system back up and running, they did.

The text specifically identifies that they celebrated the Feast of Booths in verse 4. The Feast of Booths was known as the Feast of Ingathering. Like so many of these feasts, it was a time when the people of God offered thanks to God for what he had provided. In this case, the focus was on the idea of dwelling. It's a seven-day festival. People traveled to Jerusalem and lived in tents, meant to be a reminder of the fragility of life and how utterly dependent they were on God's care. Throughout that feast, according to Numbers 28, they make daily food offerings to the Lord, in the morning and at twilight.

Then, as we go on in Ezra chapter 3, we're told that they participated in all the offerings the Mosaic law required. Many of them are found in Leviticus chapter 23. Burnt offerings are one of the things specifically mentioned in Ezra. A burnt offering was when you burned the whole animal. It represents total consecration to God. You're giving it all. They celebrated the Sabbath, that weekly day of rest, as an act of worship to God. They celebrated the Passover, a week-long festival remembering God's deliverance of the people of Israel from captivity in Egypt. They celebrated the offering of the firstfruits, a reminder that when they entered the promised land they didn't have to sow any crops. The crops were already there, ripe for the picking. They celebrated the Feast of Weeks, also known as Pentecost later on, celebrating the grain harvest. In that festival there's a strong emphasis on bread and on providing for the vulnerable and the needy. They celebrated the Feast of Trumpets, which was a celebration of rest. They would blow trumpets and offer food to the Lord. They celebrated the Day of Atonement, with sacrifices for sin to restore right standing before God. And, as the writer of Ezra makes clear, they gave freewill offerings.

So what we see is that in their poverty, they give generously to the Lord. The very idea of offering to him trumps the need for abundance in order to make this happen. It was a true act of worship, intended to express gratitude to God and remind them of their utter dependence on him.

I might have forgotten to mention this, but as we make our way through Ezra, it's going to be a little convicting for us. I'll start by asking a rhetorical question, because you don't need to raise your hands: how many of us sitting here haven't given anything back to God out of our abundance? How many of us, when we do give, don't treat it as an act of worship to God? We just write our check and drop it in the box, or we have direct deposit, and it's just routine. There's not any real act of worship about it. How many of us are waiting for God to give us just a little bit more before we're able to give back to him? That tends to be how much we need in order to give back to God: just a little bit more. If I just had a little bit more, God.

Well, when we look at where the people are here, living off handouts in crumbled, rundown buildings without even a temple, and yet wanting to get back to worshiping God as he prescribed, it begins with being able to offer things back to him, to sacrifice them, to give them up to God. That should be a reminder to us that we don't have to be in a position of abundance or living lives of excess before we are able to give back to God. We can be just like that widow in the temple. Even in our poverty we can give to the Lord, and we should. It should be a priority of his people to express humility and dependence on him by giving back to him.

Participation trumps perfection, and offering trumps abundance. And then we see here that progress trumps nostalgia.

At the end of the chapter, the foundation of the temple is completed. The temple's not built, but they've got the foundation rebuilt. Remember, it's on top of this hill, so if the whole temple mount is in ruins, they have to build a flat space first to put the temple on. It probably wasn't an easy thing to do. But they build this foundation, and they roll out the carpet to celebrate. The priests and the Levites get all decked out in their garments and lead this procession of the people to celebrate and offer praise and thanksgiving to God that this foundation has now been built. We've got an altar, and now we have a foundation for a temple.

In Ezra chapter 3, if you're still there, look at verse 11. They sang responsively, praising and giving thanks to the Lord, "For he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever toward Israel." And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid. So they give thanks to God, they praise God, they are celebrating. It's cause for excitement. It's cause for expressive joy. This is so wonderful. There's so much to be done. But after decades and decades of being isolated from Jerusalem, the city of God, now being back in this place where they can begin to reconstruct, there's just this sliver of hope. It's almost like, "Well, we've got this altar, and now we've got a temple foundation. This is so crazy, it just might work. We just might get this thing back up yet." It's a sign of progress. It gives hope for what can be in the future. We see where we're at now, but we're looking toward the future. We might get ourselves a proper temple after all.

But we're told that there are people who were old enough to remember Solomon's temple before it was destroyed. Now, if they've been in captivity for 70 years, you're talking about people who saw the temple when they were little kids. They see this foundation and realize it isn't going to be what it was. It's going to be smaller. Maybe it's like a double-wide trailer now instead of a two-story, five-thousand-square-foot building. It's going to be diminutive. They're not joyful. They're not thankful. They don't see this as evidence of God's faithfulness. All they can think about is how good it used to be.

Have you ever noticed that there's typically a fair amount of irony when we pine for the good old days? The irony is that we're often at least partially responsible for why things are different now. There's a reason your favorite restaurant closed down: people quit eating there. People quit buying the food. In this instance, the whole reason Judah lost this magnificent temple 70 years ago is that the people of God stopped using it the way God intended. Their whole worship of him was perverted and corrupted. He sent prophets again and again, warning them: "You had better change what you're doing. You are desecrating my worship. You're not acting the way I want you to act. You're defiling my name. You're defiling my temple. You're defiling my worship." And they told those prophets to kick rocks. "Get out of here. We don't care." They're the reason the temple was destroyed to begin with, not Nebuchadnezzar. He was just an instrument of God's judgment. As we pointed out in Jeremiah, the promise was, "I'm going to use him, and then I'm going to destroy him for his wickedness." And Babylon was destroyed by the Persians. Exactly on the timeline, too. God said after 70 years.

It's ironic, because the people of God had turned the temple, a structure meant to facilitate the worship of God, into an idol itself. They didn't use it as it was intended. You remember when the Israelites were released from captivity in Egypt? It wasn't very long before they were longing for the good old days of slavery. "At least in Egypt, we had onions." They actually said that: "We had onions in Egypt." I would gladly be a slave if I could just have an onion. Lord, that stupidity. That's the whole idea of our nostalgia, our romanticizing of the past. We often overlook a lot of the realities of what we experienced. It is a lot easier to sit here and look back down the annals of time and reminisce about the way things were. We're not actually remembering them how they were. We're remembering them how we fantasize they were. And we sit here and bemoan the sorry state we're in right now. It's way easier to do that than to commit to worshiping God proactively in the midst of the wreckage we're in right now.

Accept where we are. Accept that God is in control, that his plan and purposes are being fulfilled according to his will and in his time. We can often be just like these old-timers. Rather than seeing it as a good thing that this temple is being rebuilt, we just wail that it's not going to be as nice as it used to be.

You have to understand that the temple itself was viewed as a worship offering to God. You remember it was David who first asked God, "Could I please build you a house?" He couldn't stand the fact that he had a palace and God was still being worshiped in the tabernacle, in a tent. David didn't think it was right that God's tabernacle was a tent. God's people wanted a temple that would be worthy of him, worthy of the God they served, and that's what Solomon undertook to build. But over time, the worship aspect degraded into a simple matter of personal pride. It became a national symbol. And so they lost it.

I want to encourage you, because it's so easy, since we're bombarded nonstop with realities about how bad everything is. The economy, politics, this and that, whatever. You name it, the list seems infinitely long of the things we're reminded of about how bad they are. But I want to encourage you to resist the urge to romanticize the way things were and let that be the thing that distracts you from actually worshiping God and living for him right here, right now.

On a similar note, we can often do this as believers. We can long for the sins we used to use to numb us into believing the world isn't this horrible place, to feel like it's not as bad. We wish we could do the things we used to do. But look at the people celebrating the fact that this foundation is built. They see it as evidence of God's goodness to them, a reason to be thankful, a reason to give him praise. We need to let that be the characteristic of our lives as well in the midst of a broken world. We need to worship him right here, right now, with what we have in this moment.

Maybe what we had in the past was so much better than what we have right now. But we do have something right now that we can use as instruments of worship. We do have resources that we can give as offerings to God, in gratitude, as an expression of thankfulness for all that he has done for us.

Remember, participation in worship is so much better than waiting for the perfect circumstances. Let's pray.