Broken Kingdoms: WK5 - WED
2 Kings 23:1–3 (NLT)
"The king took his place of authority beside the pillar and renewed the covenant in the Lord’s presence… The king and all the people pledged themselves to this covenant."
A member of my church told me once that the worst day of her life wasn't when she found out her son was an addict. It was the day she finally said no to him. He'd done well for a stretch, long enough that everyone had started exhaling. And then he slipped. She did what she'd always done, what any mother would do, caught him before he hit the ground. For years that's how it went, recovery, addiction, recovery on and on. Until someone who had gone through it themselves, finally said to her, with more gentleness than it probably sounds: he has to hit rock bottom before anything real can change. You keeping him from the bottom is keeping him from the bottom. So she said no with a broken heart, and he ended up on the streets.
She prayed every single day for years not knowing if he was alive. The not knowing had a particular quality to it she still couldn't quite describe. And then one day he came back he wasn’t fixed, or suddenly transformed, but he was ready in a way he'd never been before. And slowly, over a long time, with a lot of help something real changed in him and he pointed his life in the right direction. What she did was right and necessary. But the external act and the internal transformation happened years apart, with a lot of suffering in between.
I think about that story when I read this passage. Josiah does something extraordinary. He gathers the entire nation, reads the scroll publicly, renews the covenant, and launches one of the most comprehensive reform movements the kingdom has ever seen. Idols are removed pagan altars are torn down and corrupt practices are dismantled. It's sweeping and real and it matters in the history of Israel.
And Scripture just quietly lets it sit there without resolving it. Because a few chapters later, after Josiah is gone, the nation drifts back. Which raises the uncomfortable question of how deep the renewal actually went, not in Josiah, but in the people who stood there and pledged themselves to the covenant that day. He could tear down the altars, but he couldn't tear down the desire for them.
Reform can change structures faster than it changes hearts. Behavioural change without internal transformation tends not to hold, you can restructure the external system, but if the brokenness underneath hasn't shifted, the old patterns find their way back through different doors. The mother couldn't change her son by managing his circumstances any longer. The change had to come from somewhere inside him that she simply couldn't reach.
Josiah does what good leaders do, he addresses what he can see and creates conditions for renewal. But most of us have done our own version of this. You make the change, have the conversation, set the boundary, and something does shift. But sometimes there's a else, a thing underneath you haven't quite got to yet. You've changed the outside but the inside hasn't caught up, or maybe you haven't let it. I think most of us have a version of this somewhere in our lives. Something we keep coming back to. Something we still haven't been fully honest with ourselves about. The external change matters, it just sometimes lets us feel like we've done the work when there's still something harder waiting a little further down. Sitting with what's in that gap is genuinely uncomfortable. Most of us would rather fix the next visible thing and keep moving
"The king took his place of authority beside the pillar and renewed the covenant in the Lord’s presence… The king and all the people pledged themselves to this covenant."
A member of my church told me once that the worst day of her life wasn't when she found out her son was an addict. It was the day she finally said no to him. He'd done well for a stretch, long enough that everyone had started exhaling. And then he slipped. She did what she'd always done, what any mother would do, caught him before he hit the ground. For years that's how it went, recovery, addiction, recovery on and on. Until someone who had gone through it themselves, finally said to her, with more gentleness than it probably sounds: he has to hit rock bottom before anything real can change. You keeping him from the bottom is keeping him from the bottom. So she said no with a broken heart, and he ended up on the streets.
She prayed every single day for years not knowing if he was alive. The not knowing had a particular quality to it she still couldn't quite describe. And then one day he came back he wasn’t fixed, or suddenly transformed, but he was ready in a way he'd never been before. And slowly, over a long time, with a lot of help something real changed in him and he pointed his life in the right direction. What she did was right and necessary. But the external act and the internal transformation happened years apart, with a lot of suffering in between.
I think about that story when I read this passage. Josiah does something extraordinary. He gathers the entire nation, reads the scroll publicly, renews the covenant, and launches one of the most comprehensive reform movements the kingdom has ever seen. Idols are removed pagan altars are torn down and corrupt practices are dismantled. It's sweeping and real and it matters in the history of Israel.
And Scripture just quietly lets it sit there without resolving it. Because a few chapters later, after Josiah is gone, the nation drifts back. Which raises the uncomfortable question of how deep the renewal actually went, not in Josiah, but in the people who stood there and pledged themselves to the covenant that day. He could tear down the altars, but he couldn't tear down the desire for them.
Reform can change structures faster than it changes hearts. Behavioural change without internal transformation tends not to hold, you can restructure the external system, but if the brokenness underneath hasn't shifted, the old patterns find their way back through different doors. The mother couldn't change her son by managing his circumstances any longer. The change had to come from somewhere inside him that she simply couldn't reach.
Josiah does what good leaders do, he addresses what he can see and creates conditions for renewal. But most of us have done our own version of this. You make the change, have the conversation, set the boundary, and something does shift. But sometimes there's a else, a thing underneath you haven't quite got to yet. You've changed the outside but the inside hasn't caught up, or maybe you haven't let it. I think most of us have a version of this somewhere in our lives. Something we keep coming back to. Something we still haven't been fully honest with ourselves about. The external change matters, it just sometimes lets us feel like we've done the work when there's still something harder waiting a little further down. Sitting with what's in that gap is genuinely uncomfortable. Most of us would rather fix the next visible thing and keep moving
- Where in your life are you focusing on external change without addressing deeper roots?
- What habits or patterns might God be inviting you to examine beneath the surface?
- What would true renewal, not just reform, look like for you right now?
No Comments