Todd Pylant, pastor at First Baptist Church, Benbrook, preached from Amos 2 , verses 4-5, in SWBTS Chapel on September 16, 2025.
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As we come to our scriptures, for we hear a word from Amos. Amos, chapter two, verses three and four, four and five, excuse me, Thus says the Lord, For three transgressions of Judah and for four, I will not revoke the punishment because they have rejected the law of the Lord and have not kept his statutes, but their lives have led them astray, those after which their fathers walked. So, I will send a fire upon Judah, and it shall devour the strongholds of Jerusalem.
So, Father, this morning, would you remind us that the church is built on the foundation of the prophets and the apostles, Christ, Jesus is the cornerstone, and the prophets and the apostles are all pointing towards that cornerstone. Father, forgive us, for we neglect a significant portion of our foundation of the prophets that speak upon which the gospel is built. So, I ask for your grace in this hour that you would open our eyes to the beauty of your word that is spoken through this group of minor prophets. And it’s in Christ’s name that we pray amen.
I have three kids, two girls and a boy, all adults, of course, now and for those fathers in the room, you know the unique pleasure of having teenage daughters in the home, clogged drains, the eternally clogged shower drain. So, I’m at my semiannual trip to Home Depot, where I’m in the aisle of trying to figure out what drain cleaner I can use, and one of the orange apron guys walks up, one of the helpers. Now, when you go to a home improvement store, whether it’s Home Depot or Lowe’s, you’re hoping for the retired plumber, the retired electrician, the retired contractor, someone who spent their life working with these things.
What you don’t want is the guy who walks up and no offense, Joe, but it looks kind of like you and I and we realize this dude doesn’t know any more than I do, but I was lucky the guy who walked up to me, I mean, he’s the right guy. Hands of leather. He’s already annoyed just because I’m on his aisle, I’ve got the right guy. And so, I tell him the problem, and he reaches down to the bottom shelf and grabs this bottle. It’s the only bottle on the entire section that’s in its own protective wrapper and its own thick zip lock bag. And he reaches down and he grabs that, and he hands that to me, and he says, you need to read the warning label. I say, thank you, and I grabbed it from him, but he doesn’t let go. So, I’m standing in the Home Depot aisle.
I’m holding on to this bag. He’s holding on to the bag. We’re having this moment in the aisle, and he does this thing where he you know, he lowers his gaze, he lowers his voice, and he says to me, you really need to read the warning label. Now we know why he was saying that, right. Because no one reads warning labels. If you ever looked at warning labels, like a can of spray paint or anything, it’s just all of these words. We look at them and think I already know this. I mean, I read a can of spray paint in my garage, it says, do not use internally. I think I already knew that before I read the warning label and so I don’t really think it applies to me. It’s for someone else. And if we’re really honest, I’m probably not going to do what it says anyway.
I’m going to use this product the way I want to use it. So, we all ignore warning labels, and we know what this guy was saying to me. Was saying, no, this product has such power and such potential to affect your life, you really need to read the warning labels. So, I walked out to my truck like I was holding nuclear waste, and you can bet first thing it is I read the warning label. Now why do I tell you that story? We treat the minor prophets like warning labels. They are lots of words. We kind of already know what’s in there. It’s just warnings. I mean, like the passage that we read about fire is going to fall upon Judah, but it’s really for another group of people. It doesn’t really apply to us. And basically, we already know what’s in there anyway, right? God’s upset because they’ve rejected the law of the Lord. They’ve not kept his statutes.
We kind of know that anyway, and it really doesn’t seem to have much to do with our lives today. This is 2600 years ago. What does it have to do with us today? And so, we treat the minor prophets like warning labels. And so, as we begin this series, The Fall chapel series about the prophets, I appreciate the invitation Dr Dockery to kick this off and basically answer the question, why should you care about the Minor Prophets? Why are they worthy of your time? Why do you really need to read the more the warning labels? So, I just want to try to do three things this morning before we go. Number one, I want us to be honest about why. Minor Prophets are so difficult to read. Number two, I want to give you five reasons why they are worth your time. And then I want to end by offering a challenge or an invitation to you. And I’ll be honest this morning, I’m really trying to direct everything towards this, the college students who are here this morning, because I want you to understand the beauty and the depth that’s in the Minor Prophets and for those to come alive for you this morning. So, number one, why are the minor prophets so difficult to read? The Minor Prophets are difficult to read for lots of reasons, but one is they are very historically bound.
Now, all of scripture has a context. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth or whether it was David who wrote Psalm 51 after a sin with Bathsheba, all scripture has a context, and if you’re going to rightly handle the word of truth, you have to know what the context is. But the context of the Minor Prophets is difficult for us because it deals with the period of biblical history that most of us don’t know very well. The Minor Prophets are a group of 12 prophets. They’re the last 12 books in your Old Testament. They are. We call them the Minor Prophets. I think Augustine was the first one who called them. Gave them that label, didn’t do them any favors. He was trying to distinguish between Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel and these minor prophets, they’re not minor because of their significance.
They’re just minor because of their length and they span a period of history of about 340 years. Some of the prophets are sent to the northern kingdom of Israel. About 100 years later, some of the prophets are sent to the southern king of Judah, and about 100 years later, some of the prophets are sent to the exiles as they come back to Jerusalem. It’s 340 years the United States hasn’t been around that long. This is a huge swath of history, and most of us just don’t know it very well. The entire Old Testament story hangs on two events, the Exodus and the exile. The exodus is God bringing his people out of Egypt into the land of promise. The exile is God taking his people out of the land of promise and into exile and then bringing them back in.
We know the Exodus story really well. Moses, the 10 Plagues crossing the Red Sea, the wilderness stories Passover. We know that the exile, not so much. It’s more complicated. It’s got more actors in the story. There’s Assyria and Babylon and Egypt and Israel and Judah, and there’s all these different kings, and there’s a lot of stuff going on, and we just don’t know the history very well. And so, when you read the Minor Prophets, understanding the context is much more of a challenge to us in other parts of Scripture.
By the way, crossway did a study years ago, of 6000 Bible readers asking their Bible reading habits, and surprise, the least read portion of Scripture in all scripture is the Minor Prophets. And when asked to identify what’s the most difficult to understand, it’s the Minor Prophets. And so, we stay away from these because of that. Another reason why it’s difficult for us to read the Minor Prophets is because they’re so culturally bound. In other words, the prophets are using images and analogies and allegories from that culture that when we could pick up the Minor Prophets and read them, they don’t intuitively make sense to us. For instance, just out of out of Amos, there’s analogies. Talks about the cows of Bashan. It talks about selling the needle for selling the needy for a pair of sandals, garments taken and pledged. The latter growth after the Kings mowing baskets of summer fruit. All of these images that we read, and we really have no idea what they’re talking about.
It takes more effort. We just don’t intuitively understand the Minor Prophets and the analogies, like we might the book of Philippians or something like that. So, it takes a little bit more work. Another reason why the Minor Prophets are a challenge to read for me anyway is this whole idea of the day of the Lord. The day of the Lord is all throughout the Minor Prophets. Technically, the day of the Lord is anytime God acts decisively in history. But that can be anything from God acting decisively in history by giving the northern kingdom over to Assyria, or God acting decisively in history and giving the southern kingdom over to Babylon. Or God acting decisively in fall of Babylon to Persia and bring the exiles back. Or God acting decisively in history with the Incarnation God becoming flesh and dwelling among us. Or God acting in history with the kingdom of God that we’re living in now. Or God acting in history, when the Lord returns, the second coming of the Messiah or the eternal kingdom, it can be all of those.
And sometimes the Minor Prophets are confusing because they it’s hard to figure out what day are we talking about. And if it’s not confusing enough, they go back and forth between the days. Sometimes in the same paragraph, it’s like they have ADHD or something like that. It’s just getting to be focused on one day. And so there are challenging reasons why it’s difficult to read. And so if it’s such a challenging section of Scripture, then why is it worth our time? Why is it worth our time? I want to give you five reasons why you will come to love the Minor Prophets if you will give them your time. Okay? Five reasons. Number one, if you are interested in hearing the voice of the Lord, you’re going to love the Minor Prophets. The book of the 12, the 12 Minor Prophets begins by saying the word of the Lord that came to Hosea, saying, and that’s basically all the minor. Prophets are. Is God speaking the prophets hearing that voice and turning around and speaking that to other people?
It is God speaking. And when God speaks, God is revealing Himself to us. He’s revealing his heart, he’s revealing his mind. He’s revealing what he cares about. He’s revealing how he thinks about the world, how he interprets the world, what he’s up to, what he’s gonna do in the future, what he cares about, what he concerns about. When God speaks, He is revealing himself so and for college students, here you are. You are beginning your journey in life. You’re leaving your parents’ house, you’re stepping out into this world, becoming the people that God has created you to be, to do the good work God has called you to do, and a significant key part of that is your ability to hear the voice of the Lord.
And so, if you want to tune your ear so that you can recognize God’s voice, tune your ear so that when God speaks, you know what his voice sounds like. How you distinguish his voice from the crazy thoughts in your head, or his voice from your friends, or giving your bad advice. How do you know what the tone of God’s voice sounds like? Read the Minor Prophets. Because all it is God speaking and you’re going to be able to tune your ear to hear his voice. Second reason that you should love the Minor Prophets is because you love righteousness if you are intent of living a holy, righteous life, you’re gonna love the Minor Prophets.
Now, if you have, if you are a follower of Christ, that means you’ve come to this place in your life where you confess that you are a sinner, and you believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins, and you have cried out and asked that Christ would forgive you of your sins and come into your life and cleanse you from all unrighteousness, and you’ve made this baptismal confession, buried in the likeness of Christ’s death. I don’t know where my mic went, so we’ll just go back here, buried in the likeness of Christ’s death, raised to walk in newness of life. This happened in my church a while back, and it was because I put the battery in backwards. I don’t think that’s what I did this time. Does this work?
Testing, testing, 123, it’s the whole system. It’s all right back row. Can you hear me back there. All right, when I prepared for chapel, I knew exactly this was going to happen, so it’s all right. So if you’re a follower of Christ, and you’ve come to that place in your life where you have confessed your sins and you have repented of your sins, and you’ve been buried in the likeness of Christ and raised to walk in newness of life, you have now are living your life under the Lordship of Christ? You are submitting to His Lordship. Now, let me ask you the question, how do you know how God wants you to live? What does it look like to be a follower of Christ in a real, messy world? What does he want you to do? What is what makes him happy? What makes him angry. What does he like? What does he not like? The Minor Prophets are God revealing Himself to His people.
This is how I want you to live. And if you live like this, it makes me angry, and I will discipline you for that. So, if you love righteousness, if you have an intention in your life to spend the rest of your life as a follower of Christ, living under His Lordship, you’re gonna love the Minor Prophets, because God is gonna speak and give very detailed things of what he wants. I mean, the passage we read today just simply talked about rejecting the law of the Lord and keeping his statutes, but the rest of the Minor Prophets get very specific about justice, about righteousness, about caring for the poor, about honoring marriage vows, very specific examples, and you’re gonna love the Minor Prophets. It’s gonna train you in the life of righteousness. So why should you bother with the Minor Prophets? Because you want to hear the voice of the Lord. You want to tune your ears to hear his voice. Number two, because you love righteousness. You want to walk in obedience to Christ, Jesus. Third reason that you should read the Minor Prophets is because you like to worship.
And I was trying to decide whether to use worship or you enjoy the presence of God, but I think this is genuine worship. We want to draw into His presence. We want to experience the presence of God. Now there are in I think there are many in your generation that they’re not necessarily desiring the presence of God. What they are desiring is music and the emotion of the moment. But I’m going to say, because y’all are here at Texas Baptist College that doesn’t apply to you when you draw near, you are not interested in just music and emotion. You are interested in experiencing the manifest presence of God. There is joy in his presence, there is truth in his presence, there is life in His presence. Good timing for the mic to come back so. Yes, that is why you worship. You’re gonna love the Minor Prophets, because the Minor Prophets are going to say to you, this is the kind of worship that God likes, and this is the kind of worship God finds offensive.
Later in Amos, it says, take away from me the noise of your songs. Now, when you come and draw near the presence of God and you sing to the Lord, do you want the Lord to think of that as noise or as a fragrant offering? If that question is important to you, you’re going to love the Minor Prophets, because the Minor Prophets are going to talk about the kind of worship that is pleasing to the Lord. So why should you bother with the Minor Prophets? Because you love to hear the voice of the Lord, and you want to tune your ear to hear His voice, because you love righteousness, because you’ve dedicated your life to live as a follower of Christ, because you love to worship. You love the presence of God. You love the experience the manifest presence of God. And number four, the fourth reason why you’re going to love the Minor Prophets is because you love Jesus. If you love Jesus, you’re going to love the Minor Prophets. You are going to be absolutely shocked at how much the Minor Prophets talk about Jesus. And there’s the obvious. For example, when the Magi show up in Jerusalem and they want to know where Jesus, when the king of Jews is born, where do they look minor prophet, Micah, when Jesus is talking to the crowds to tell them who John the Baptist is, what’s his preaching text? Malachi, the minor prophet.
When Jesus is teaching the religious rulers about the Sabbath and God’s design for the Sabbath. Where does he point? Hosea, minor prophet, at the triumphal entry when Jesus comes in, it is fulfilling the words of who Zechariah, minor prophet, when they arrest Jesus and the disciples flee, that fulfills another prophecy from Zechariah the minor prophet, 30 pieces of silver. That’s Zechariah, the minor prophet. It’s all over the Gospels of the minor prophet. But it’s not just the obvious ones. It is the hidden gems and the Minor Prophets that speak about Jesus that you’re going to absolutely enjoy. It is the easter eggs that are laid throughout the Minor Prophets that will help you to see the beauty and greatness of who this Jesus is. For instance, in Zechariah. There’s this image of Joshua, the high priest, and he’s before the Lord, and he’s enclosed clothed in filthy garments, and the voice of the Lord orders of those garments are taken off and replaced with clean garments. And then a few verses later, it talks about the righteous branch that is going to take away the iniquity of the land in one day.
Well, who’s he talking about? He’s talking about Jesus to take away the iniquity of the land in one day. And here is this picture of this high priest dressed in filthy garments, and yet those garments are removed, and now he is dressed in the white, clean garments. Isn’t that a picture of who we are in Christ, dressed in the righteousness of Christ alone? And there’s all of these pictures scattered throughout the Minor Prophets about who Jesus is and what his ministry and what he did. And so, if you love Jesus, and if you want to go beyond just the obvious and the things that everyone already knows about Jesus, and you want to really explore the depths of the beauty and greatness of who he is, you’re going to love the Minor Prophets, because Minor Prophets talk about Jesus.
So, number five, the fifth reason that you should bother with the Minor Prophets is because you’re looking forward to heaven, is because you love the eternal kingdom of God. We have such shallow visions of what heaven and eternity is going to be like, from silly images of floating on clouds and playing harps to streets of gold and mansions and that kind of stuff. You need the Minor Prophets to give you an understanding of the eternal kingdom of God in a way that’s just going to blow your mind. For instance, Amos uses an image where he talks about the day will come when the treader of the grapes is going to overtake the one who plants the seed. Now that makes no sense at all. How can the guy picking the grapes be picking faster than the person’s planting seed in the ground? You know why? It doesn’t make any sense to us, because all we know is living under the curse.
What’s the curse from Genesis three? By the sweat of your brow, the ground will yield forth its fruit. And so, all we know is the curse. You gotta work hard to prepare the ground. You gotta work hard to put the seed in the ground. You gotta work hard to water it. You gotta work hard to pull weeds. And then you gotta work hard to wait for a long time for it finally to grow. And then when it finally grows, you gotta work hard to harvest it, and then you gotta work hard to separate the fruit from the plant. It’s a lot of work, but when the curse is broken, when we’re no longer under the curse, what does massive fruitfulness look like? It looks like the seed is already sprouting fruit before it even hits the ground. You. Isn’t that an image of eternity, of what it’s like to no longer be under the curse, that it’s so much greater than we just get to walk streets of gold.
Those kind of pictures and images are all through the Minor Prophets. So, if you’re looking forward towards heaven and you want to have a deeper-rooted understanding of your hope, and it’s not just simplistic stuff, like you get a big house, no, it is a world where we are liberated from the curse. You’re going to love the Minor Prophets, because it’s going to talk about eternity in the eternal kingdom of God. So, I hope that you will approach the Minor Prophets as this gold mine, because you want to hear God’s voice. You want to tune your ear to tune your ear to his voice. You love righteousness, you love to worship. You love Jesus, and you’re looking forward to heaven. So let me make you an offer, and I want to put this, put this just specifically in language that college students can understand. Here’s my offer to you, choose a minor prophet to date this semester, and what I mean is pick one of the 12 and decide for this semester you’re going to develop a relationship with that prophet.
This semester, go to the go to the chapel, preaching schedule, and figure out when that prophet is going to be the focus of that day, and make sure you’re here, no book in hand ready to go look up who’s going to be preaching that sermon. If it’s one of the professors, see if you can find an hour with the professor sometime before then and sit down and interview the professor about this prophet. You’ve got one of the greatest research libraries across the street in the world. Walk over there and get you a book on that prophet. You make it your devotional reading plan for the semester. Don’t just read through it quickly, but pray through it, phrase by phrase, block by block, memorize key passages of the Scripture. Have a dating relationship with one of the Minor Prophets this semester, and if you don’t know who to pick, surprise, let me just suggest you take Amos, and I’ll tell you why, because Amos is the first minor prophet that I dated. I was a seminary student.
I graduated in 93 so you know, long time ago, and my college roommate was getting married, and I was a groomsman in his wedding getting married in Oklahoma City, and so I was getting ready to drive up to Oklahoma City for the long weekend for the wedding, and my grandmother had mailed me a cassette tape sermon series that tells you how old we’re talking the winter Bible studies. So, a long time ago, churches would do winter Bible studies. People over here, nodding their head, people over here, like, what are you talking about? Where for like, in January, there would be a week-long Bible study series at the church. They’d focus on a book, and sometimes you’d have guest speakers come and my grandmother, the First Baptist Church Snyder.
And I don’t know how they swung this, but they had boo Heflin came out to First Baptist Church of Snyder, and he did the winter Bible study on Amos, and she had sent the cassette tape series of that winter Bible study to me in the mail. And so, I’m driving up to Oklahoma City. I’m sure I wasn’t intent in listening to the whole thing on unclean I was exactly what I wanted to do in the long drive. But It’s grandma, so you got to at least listen to one. And so, I listened to one, and Boo Heflin made Amos come alive. Suddenly it was it was hearing the voice of the Lord. It was a description of righteousness and what God wants from his people, about what it was like to be pleasing worship in his presence, about seeing Jesus and thinking about the eternal kingdom of God. And to be honest with you, it was like the gateway drug to the rest of the Minor Prophets.
It was like this is a whole new section of Scripture that is open to me to hear the voice of the Lord. And that has been my prayer all week, as I’ve come here, that the Lord somehow would do through me. What the Lord did through boo Heflin, for me is that for someone, particularly one of our college students today, that you’ll give yourself to one minor prophet this semester, and God, through that, is gonna break open to you this section of Scripture that everyone else is ignoring around you, and you’re gonna hear God speak to you in very powerful ways later on in the book of Amos, one of God’s criticisms of the people was God sent them prophets to speak, and the people said to the prophets, do not prophesy. Do not prop we don’t want to hear it. Now we would never say that verbally and out loud, don’t prophesy, but we say that through our neglect, we neglect this portion of Scripture, and essentially, what we are saying to the prophets is we’re not interested in hearing you talk. So, my question to you today is, what will you do with the rest of this semester? You’ve got an incredible gold mine of an opportunity. You’re going to have scholars who come before you, and each one of these books is. The way they’re difficult to understand is going to help us to understand.
How do you read Amos? How do you read Malachi? How do you read Haggai? How do you read Habakkuk? What’s the challenges to understanding this? How do we see Christ in this? You’re going to have scholars come before you and open that up and unpack that. You have this fantastic opportunity, and you are either going to say to the prophets, we’re not interested in hearing you speak, or you’re going to say more like Samuel speak, Lord, for Your servant is listening. So, Father God, we thank you for this beautiful section of Scripture, these prophets, and yes, there’s a lot of warning about impending judgment, but the judgment is coming because your heart has been violated. And for those of us who love you, for those of us who want to walk in your ways, for those of us who want our lives to resonate your heart, for those of us who want to please you with the way we live, with the way we interact with our neighbors, with the way we handle your word, with the way we handle worship with everything. This passage of Scripture is so much more than just warning labels. It’s the raw heart of God exposed.
So Father, we ask your blessings upon the next 12 weeks in chapel, I pray that through the preachers and professors who will come and unlock these books one at a time that you would you would shout to the prophets that we would not be those that say to the prophets, don’t prophesy, but we would be those who would say to the prophets, speak. We would love to hear the words of God. Would you speak to us so, Father, we ask that you would do great things this semester and this group of believers to your glory and to our good. And it’s in Christ’s name that we pray amen.
