At Gateway Austin, we continued our new series “Hello, My Name Is….”
Your view of God shapes everything—how you pray, how you lead, how you suffer, how you love. What we believe about God will determine the kind of world we imagine we’re living in.
But what if our view of God is all wrong?
When Moses asked to see God’s glory, God did not first display raw power. He proclaimed His name and revealed His character: compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin – yet not leaving the guilty unpunished.
This six-week journey shows what we can learn about God from His interaction with kings, poets, prophets, and people just like you and me. When we know who God really is, we can know Him more and make Him known.
Digging Deeper:
Message Video from Gateway South Austin:
Message Audio from Gateway South Austin:
Message Notes by Carlos Ortiz, Jr.:
Have you ever looked at a season of your life and thought, “How do I get back what I lost?”
Maybe it was time. Maybe it was an opportunity. Maybe it was a relationship. Maybe it was years spent running in the wrong direction. Perhaps you look back and realize that circumstances, sin, suffering, poor decisions, or simply the brokenness of life have taken something from you that you can never recover on your own.
That is the world into which the prophet Joel speaks. Let’s start in Joel 1:1-7
Hear this, you elders; listen, all who live in the land.
Has anything like this ever happened in your days or in the days of your ancestors?
3 Tell it to your children, and let your children tell it to their children,
and their children to the next generation.
4 What the locust swarm has left the great locusts have eaten;
what the great locusts have left the young locusts have eaten;
what the young locusts have left other locusts[a] have eaten.
5 Wake up, you drunkards, and weep! Wail, all you drinkers of wine;
wail because of the new wine, for it has been snatched from your lips.
6 A nation has invaded my land, a mighty army without number;
it has the teeth of a lion, the fangs of a lioness.
7 It has laid waste my vines and ruined my fig trees. It has stripped off their bark and thrown it away, leaving their branches white.
Even with all of this damage, and more as you read the rest of chapter one and into chapter 2. We read how Joel is being used to speak passionately to God’s people…now let’s pick up in Joel 2:12-14:
“Even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning.
13 Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity.
14 Who knows? He may turn and relent and leave behind a blessing—
grain offerings and drink offerings for the Lord your God.
And now we get a response from God about the intentions planned out in Joel 2:25-29
“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten—the great locust and the young locust, the other locusts and the locust swarm— my great army that I sent among you.
26 You will have plenty to eat, until you are full, and you will praise the name of the Lord your God, who has worked wonders for you; never again will my people be shamed.
27 Then you will know that I am in Israel, that I am the Lord your God, and that there is no other; never again will my people be shamed.
28 “And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. 29 Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days.
Joel is a short book, but its message is enormous. The people of Judah have experienced a devastating locust plague. Swarms of locusts have descended upon the land and consumed the crops. The fields have been stripped bare. The vineyards have been destroyed. The grain has disappeared. The agricultural economy has collapsed, and even worship has been disrupted because there is no longer enough produce for offerings.
I know we sometimes read certain stories in the Bible and they literally fit the definition of “Biblical Proportions.” But this is not an exaggeration or hyperbole. These kinds of things have even happened in modern times. In 1875, “Albert’s Swarm” hit the United States. It was a swarm of locusts that darkened the skies over the plain states, and extended from Canada to Texas. It was estimated that trillions of locusts devastated our country’s agriculture that year.
In Joel’s time, this was more than an inconvenience. For an agricultural society, this is an existential crisis. The people have lost their livelihood. Their food supply is threatened. Their economy is wounded. Their worship has been interrupted. And behind the immediate disaster, Joel sees something even deeper: The devastation should awaken the people to the seriousness of their relationship with God.
Joel calls them to return. But notice how God tells them to return. Not with empty religious performance. Not simply by going through the motions. Not by pretending everything is fine.
God says, in essence, “Return to me with all your heart.”
The language is deeply personal. God wants their hearts, not merely their rituals. He calls them to repentance because He is not merely interested in changing their circumstances; He wants to restore their relationship with Him. God knows that there is a day coming. We read it here, “The Day of the Lord”
This reference has some really deep meaning and weight to it. Many theologians over the years have written much and interpreted this phrase in a myriad of ways, but the essence of them all is this:
The Day of the Lord (has three big components)
God Judges Evil ——-> Immediate Crisis
God Defeats Enemies ——-> Future Judgement
God Brings Renewal ———> Restoration and Hope
It’s important to note that in our limited understanding we want a justice that maybe addresses one or two of these things. We want justice to be executed to satisfy us, but God’s character includes all three of these. He will judge and defeat, but God does so in order to bring renewal.
God’s nature is that of restoration.
Joel gives us one of the most beautiful pictures of God’s character in the Old Testament.
God is described as gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness. He is the God who does not delight in destruction. He is the God who invites His people home.
Our anchor passage for this series in found in Exodus when God reveals God’s own nature to Moses:
“God passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, ‘The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, 7 maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished…’” – Exodus 34:6–7
This is why the title of this week’s message is Restoration, or more accurately, The God Who Restores
Because the God we meet in Joel is not merely the God who forgives your past. He is the God who can redeem what was broken, restore what was lost, and bring fruitfulness out of seasons that seemed completely wasted.
So how does this impact how we see and understand God?
Yahweh Alone Restores
Joel‘s name is significant. His name means “Yahweh is God.” ( Jo – Yahweh / El – God)
Before Joel tells us what God will do, his very name tells us who God is.
That matters because Israel lived in a world filled with competing gods and competing explanations for life. The nations around them had their own deities, their own rituals, and their own ways of explaining prosperity, disaster, fertility, and the future.
But Joel’s message is clear: there is only one true God, and if there is only one God, there is only one ultimate source of restoration.
The locusts could destroy crops, but they could not restore them. Human beings could work the fields, but they could not command the rain. Religious rituals could not manufacture God’s blessing. False gods could not heal what was broken.
Only Yahweh could restore.
That is an important word for us because we are constantly tempted to look for restoration everywhere except in God. Some of these things are not necessarily evil, but they cannot complete the work of restoration.
That does not mean God always gives us back the exact thing we lost. Restoration is not necessarily God rewinding the clock nor erasing the consequences, but it does mean he restores to get us back on track to his original design. That is why King David wrote this in Psalm 51:10-12 after he was confronted for his adultery with Bathsheba and arranging for the murder of her husband Uriah. David fully repents. He turns to God asking for forgiveness and for an opportunity to start afresh. He writes:.
Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
11 Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me.
12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me. -Psalm 51:10-12
David and Joel are on the same page here. “God, my job is to align with you.” So, when God restores us, or a situation, it is done according to God’s plan, will, and intent…we then work to be aligned to it.
The God of Joel is not merely a God who repairs objects. God ultimately seeks to restore people.
Restoration Goes Beyond Damage Control
Imagine if God had simply said to Judah, “The locusts are gone. Good luck.”
That would have been relief, but it wouldn’t have been restoration, because there is a difference between stopping destruction and redeeming what destruction has taken.
God doesn’t merely promise to end the crisis. He promises to restore the years.
That phrase is remarkable because years cannot literally be put back on a calendar. Yet God says that He can redeem what those years represent. If this is truly God’s character, and scripture although not written to us, is for us to understand God better…than could it possibly mean that:
Your past does not have the final word over your future, or over the years you’ve wasted. Maybe you’ve made decisions you wish you could undo, seasons filled with anger, addiction, fear, distractions and sheer running away from the person you were made to be in Jesus.
The gospel, the good news of Jesus, does not tell you to pretend those years didn’t happen, or to speak of those times as though they were beautiful. No they were, or currently are, destructive, but that doesn’t mean that in God those years determine the final word.
God can take a broken story and write redemption into it.
A Love That Reaches Generations
Joel’s message also reminds us that God’s faithfulness is bigger than one moment and bigger than one generation. God’s covenant love moves forward. When God restores people, the blessing doesn’t stop with the person standing in front of Him.
Your obedience today can become someone else’s inheritance tomorrow. A parent who chooses faithfulness may give a child a spiritual foundation. A person who breaks a destructive family pattern may change the trajectory of generations. Someone who learns to forgive may prevent bitterness from being passed down. Someone who follows Christ faithfully through suffering may teach an entire family what resilient faith looks like.
Tell it to your children, and let your children tell it to their children,
and their children to the next generation. – Joel 1:3
We underestimate the generational power of ordinary obedience.
Ordinary obedience could be for those of us who came this morning because it felt like the right thing to do, or some of us attend every Sunday morning to Gateway because of the power of ordinary obedience.
You may never know how many lives are affected by the decision you make today to obey God daily…to fully surrender to the ways and rhythms of Jesus.
God restores people so that restored people can become agents of restoration. He comforts us so that we can comfort others. He forgives us so that we can become people who forgive. He rescues us so that we can tell others there is a Rescuer. The love of God doesn’t terminate on us.
It flows through us.
And this is what makes the phrase “abounding in love and faithfulness” so powerful. God’s love is not scarce. It is not rationed. God isn’t sitting in heaven deciding whether you have finally accumulated enough good behavior to deserve another chance.
And when we encounter that kind of God, it changes the legacy we leave behind for the next generation.
Promise Fulfilled at Pentecost
Joel’s promise becomes even more astonishing when we reach the New Testament.
In Acts 2, Peter stands before the crowd in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost and explains what is happening through the words of Joel.
The Spirit of God is being poured out. People from different nations are hearing the good news. The presence of God is no longer pictured merely as something associated with one geographic location or one particular people. The promise is expanding.
The restoration God announced through Joel finds a deeper and broader fulfillment through Jesus Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
This is one of the most beautiful movements in Scripture. Joel sees devastation and promises restoration, but there’s a future hope as Jesus comes announcing the kingdom of God. He then dies for our sin and rises from the grave.
Then the Spirit is poured out, and suddenly restoration isn’t merely about fields producing crops.
It is about dead hearts coming alive, and sinners becoming sons and daughters. It is about people from every nation being brought into the family of God. It is about the presence of God dwelling with His people.
Joel’s promise becomes global.
The God who restores Israel is revealed as the God who is restoring people from every nation through Christ. That’s the Good News! That is the Gospel!
This is where we have to make the gospel explicit.
Restoration is not something we accomplish by becoming good enough.
It is not karma. It is not, “If you behave well enough, God will eventually give you back everything you deserve.”
The gospel is almost the opposite. We do not get what we deserve. Jesus takes what we deserve, and He gives us what we could never earn.
- We bring sin, while God brings forgiveness.
- We bring brokenness, while God brings redemption.
- We bring death, God brings life.
- We bring our wasted years, but God brings grace.
The cross is the ultimate picture of restoration because God takes the greatest human tragedy—the crucifixion of His innocent Son—and brings the greatest victory out of it.
The resurrection tells us that God can bring life out of death. So if God can bring resurrection out of a tomb, He can certainly bring redemption out of your broken story.
New Testament expands this theme even further when Paul writes in Romans 8 about creation itself waiting for liberation and restoration.The gospel is not God’s plan to save individual souls from earth so that they can escape somewhere else.
God’s ultimate story is restoration. Creation itself will be renewed.What sin fractured, God will ultimately make new. That means Joel points us toward something bigger than a better harvest.
It points toward the God who is making all things new. The arc of Scripture moves from creation to fall, from fall to redemption, and ultimately toward new creation.
And at the center of that story is Jesus. Jesus is God’s definitive answer to brokenness. He is restoration personified. So what then is our response? We’ve had a theme in the series so far that scripture is defining God for us, and we subsequently have a response. What is our response to a God who is willing, waiting and wanting to restore?
Let’s start with what we don’t do: We don’t hide from God, or pretend with God. We also don’t try to do a pre-cleaning in our own strength. You know, the whole “ok God…I’m giving up my vices so now you can do your part.” Nope!!
We present God with the broken pieces, with the regrets. with the years you and I wish we could recover. We come with the questions, with the grief, with the consequences.
The God of Joel says, “Return to me.” In Christ, your identity is not “the person who failed.” Listen my brothers and sisters, our job is not to control the future, our job is to faithfully follow God today, and rinse and repeat tomorrow. I know it can seem impossible when we look at life and situations through our own flawed lens.
Joel’s people looked at their fields and saw devastation. God looked at those same fields and saw possibilities. They saw what had been eaten. God saw what could grow again. They saw years they could never recover. God saw years He could redeem.
And that is the invitation of this passage.
What do you see when you look at the brokenness of your past and even present?
Can you imagine what it would look like if we saw what was left, the rubble, through the eyes of our creator?!
Let me give you an example from the world of Kintsugi which is a type of Japanese pottery. Kintsugi literally means “golden joinery.” An artist takes a broken bowl and reassembles it into something some would say is even more beautiful.
I’ll write an ending using the Japanese pottery art of Kintsugi (“golden joinery”) –
There is another type of kintsugi, one called bakohan which actually uses staples to put the bowl back together.
“…such “ugliness” was considered inspirational and Zen-like, as it connoted beauty in broken things. The bowl thus became highly valued due to the large metal staples, which looked like a locust, and the bowl was named ‘bakōhan (“large-locust clamp”).”
– e-museum of the National Institute for Cultural Heritage (Japan)
Isn’t that something? A totally different culture, thousands of miles away, the Japanese artists used the image of locust to describe something being restored.
The God of renewal, the God of restoration, the God of abounding love is ready to take your broken heart, the broken parts of your life, and in His hand, He can bring something even more beautiful out of this next season.
We believe in a God of hope!
Because of painful moments in your past or in your present, perhaps you have found yourself feeling hopeless about your work, a friendship, your relationship with your parents or a brother or sisiter, your marriage or ever being married, your kids or ever having kids, your health, or anything else. You need to hear this. There is hope! Turn to God, ask Him to heal you and guide you towards His restoration. He will guide down a path towards healing which could include talking to someone on the prayer team, one of our 1 to 1 spiritual coaches, participating in Restore or one of our classes like Re-Engage, or joining one of our groups. He may guide you towards counseling. What I know is you do not have to remain hopeless. Put your faith and hope in Jesus and let Him heal you and restore you and those you love.
Any ideas on a transition from this to the close would be helpful.
Now…let’s re-read God’s promise those Joel was speaking to, and let’s hear these words with ears that hear the Father’s heart, and eyes that see through the lens of a God who restores. To do this well…let’s close our eyes, reflect and hear the compassionate God who restores:
Joel 2:25-27 –
“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten—
the great locust and the young locust,
the other locusts and the locust swarm—
my great army that I sent among you.
26 You will have plenty to eat, until you are full,
and you will praise the name of the Lord your God,
who has worked wonders for you;
never again will my people be shamed.
27 Then you will know that I am in Israel,
that I am the Lord your God,
and that there is no other;
never again will my people be shamed.
