“God’s Grace at the Edge of Collapse” (Ezra 9-10), November 16th, 2025
- Brian Lee
- Nov 16
- 5 min read
Introduction
There are moments in the Christian life—and in the life of a church—when we suddenly realize how far we have drifted. No one drifts on purpose. Drift happens quietly, slowly, almost imperceptibly. And then something wakes us up.
D. A. Carson once said:
“People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it ‘tolerance’; we drift toward disobedience and call it ‘freedom’; we drift toward superstition and call it ‘faith.’ We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it ‘relaxation’; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.”
Ezra 9 is one of those moments—when the drift suddenly comes into view.
The people of God had returned from exile. They had the temple. They had the land.
They had God’s promises ringing in their ears.
But within one generation, they drifted. They blended in.
They adopted the values of the surrounding culture.
Quietly, socially, economically, spiritually—they compromised.
Their hearts were drifting long before their actions were exposed.
We may read Ezra and think, “That’s ancient history, pastor.”
But Ezra is reading our hearts.
Because Bergen County, New Jersey—where many of us live—is one of the most affluent, achievement-driven, opportunity-loaded environments in America. It is also one of the easiest places to drift from God.
Not by hostility. But by slow, silent compromise—career pressures, school pressures, social pressures, and financial stability pressures. And Ezra invites us to stop, to look honestly at our lives, and to return to God with whole hearts.
So today, we explore three truths from Ezra 9–10:
Covenant Love, Not Racism
True Repentance, Not Self-Loathing
God’s Grace Calls Us Back to Life
1. COVENANT LOVE; NOT RACISM
The problem in Ezra 9–10 was not genetics. It was not ethnicity. It was not racial discrimination.
The nations listed—Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Moabites, Ammonites—were not condemned because of race. They were condemned for spiritual reasons (Deut. 7:1–5):
idolatry
child sacrifice
temple prostitution
violent oppression
The issue was worship.
If you marry into their worship, you begin worshiping their gods. Israel had just returned from exile—precisely because they had flirted with the gods of other nations. And now, they had fallen back into the same pattern.
This is not racism. This is covenant protection. In fact, Matthew 1 shows us clearly that God welcomes Gentiles:
Tamar — likely a Canaanite
Rahab — Canaanite
Ruth — Moabite
“The wife of Uriah” — Uriah was a Hittite
God has always welcomed the nations. The problem is not ethnicity. The problem is idolatry.
And the same is true today.
We drift when we quietly merge our hearts with the values of the world. When comfort, approval, achievement, or security become our silent gods, we have drifted afar.
Your spiritual life rarely collapses suddenly. It decays by neglect.
Ezra calls us to recognize this decay before it becomes destruction.
2. TRUE REPENTANCE; NOT SELF-LOATHING
When Ezra hears the news, he tears his garment and pulls his hair from his head and beard. But here’s the remarkable thing: Ezra is likely the only one not personally guilty—yet he is the first to repent.
He doesn’t say, “Lord, look what these people have done.”
Instead, he says:
“I am too ashamed and disgraced, my God, to lift up my face to you, because our sins are higher than our heads and our guilt has reached to the heavens.” (Ezra 9:6)
This is gospel humility, not guilt manipulation.
Ezra grieves because the people have grieved God.
This is the heart of Christ.
John 11:35 says:
“Jesus wept.”
He weeps over sin’s devastation, not with condemnation but with compassion.
Tim Keller puts it this way:
“Repentance out of mere fear is really only self-pity. True repentance is loving God enough to be grieved by how you have grieved Him.”
Repentance is not self-loathing.
It is our hearts breaking because we have broken the heart of the One who loves us.
Remember, when God gives you that grief, He is not punishing you. He is healing you.
3. GOD’S GRACE CALLS US BACK TO LIFE
Ezra’s prayer reaches its climax in Ezra 9:15:
“O Lord, the God of Israel, You are righteous; what hope can we have if You give us justice?” (Living Bible)
Grace in exile: they were not wiped out.
Grace in conviction: God still pursues them.
Grace in repentance: God invites them home.
Christ is the ultimate Ezra—the greater intercessor. Christ our Lord is:
The righteous man who carries our guilt, though He is innocent.
The Savior who calls us to repentance not through shame but through love.
The Redeemer who rebuilds our hearts by removing our idols.
As Tim Keller said often:
“The gospel is not that we give God a perfect record, but that He gives us one. Christ takes our guilt, though He is innocent, so that we may be received, though we are guilty.”
And this grace is not soft. Grace is not indulgent. It is surgical.
It cuts to heal.
It convicts to restore.
It exposes to renew.
C. S. Lewis said:
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world." (The Problem of Pain)
God’s grace shouts when we are drifting.
Not to shame us, but to save us.
APPLICATIONS
1. Let God expose your drift before it becomes destructive.
Ask God today:
“Where have I blended with the world so much that I no longer notice?”
Accomplishment? Approval? Security? Comfort?
If God is troubling your heart, He is loving your soul.
2. Practice communal repentance—not ‘their sin,’ but ‘our sin.’
Ezra confesses sins he did not commit—because he is part of God’s people.
“Godly sorrow is sorrow for sin as sin. It weeps because sin has offended God. Worldly sorrow weeps because sin has undone us.” -- Thomas Watson (1620-1686)
Repentance is not about blame.
It is about belonging—belonging again to God.
3. Return to wholehearted devotion—especially on the Lord’s Day.
Hell is not filled with people God rejects, but people who refuse God’s joy. It is not so much that God sends them there. It's that the people won't come out of their miserable state. They prefer misery over joy.
C. S. Lewis reflects on his book, The Great Divorce:
“I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.”
In the book, God does not trap the "ghosts" in the Grey Town ("hell"); they are given the opportunity to leave and visit Heaven, illustrating their fundamental free will. However, upon meeting the "Solid People" (the redeemed), they are offered a chance to stay and become solid themselves. But, this requires them to relinquish the very things they stubbornly clung to in life—pride, resentment, self-pity, and intellectual vanity. Ultimately, nearly all of them refuse this profound offer. They choose to return to Grey Town, preferring their familiar, self-made misery over the humility and surrender required for true joy. They, not God, are the ones who turn the lock and keep the door to Hell closed.
Today, we need a “great divorce”—not from people, but from the idols of comfort, achievement, and busyness that have quietly replaced our Lord's Day worship in our lives.
