It’s the middle of the night in Boston, April 18, 1775.
The city is quiet, but not peaceful. Something big is coming.
The British army is getting ready to move. They’ve been watching, planning, preparing to crush the growing rebellion. If they can strike fast—if they can catch the leaders of the colonies off guard—it’s over.
The Patriots need a signal.
Everyone’s heard of Paul Revere. He’s the guy who rode a horse through the dark shouting, “The British are coming!” But that wasn’t the plan. That was the backup.
The plan was a signal. One light if the British came by land. Two if they came by sea.
But someone had to hang those lanterns.
Someone had to climb the church tower in the middle of the night, slip past British guards, and quietly place the signal in the window for the Patriots across the river to see.
That job went to a young man, church helper named Robert Newman.
He wasn’t famous. He wasn’t rich. He wasn’t the loudest guy in the room. But he had something important: a key.
Robert was the caretaker of the Old North Church—the guy who took care of the building. Cleaned it. Locked it up. Rang the bells. He knew the layout. He knew the stairwells. And he had access when others didn’t.
That night, he unlocked the church. Snuck inside. Climbed up into the bell tower. Alone.
And up there, in the dark, he lit two lanterns and placed them in the window just long enough for someone on the far side of the river to see the flash. Two lanterns—the British are coming by sea.
And then he climbed back down, locked the church, and walked away.
No speeches. No credit. No one even knew he did it until years later.
He could’ve said, “I’m too young.”
He could’ve said, “This is someone else’s job.”
He could’ve been afraid. Could’ve made excuses. Could’ve stayed safe.
But he didn’t.
He knew what needed to be done. He had the key. And when the time came, he did the job.
That’s faithfulness. Not loud. Not flashy. But steady. Clear. Brave.
And that’s where we’re going this morning.
Because there was another young man, long before Robert Newman, who found himself surrounded by darkness. A nation that had forgotten God. Leaders who bowed to idols. A temple falling apart. No Scripture being read. No one living with conviction.
And someone handed him a crown.
His name was Josiah.
And he didn’t wait to grow up to lead.
He didn’t wait to be told what to do.
He saw what was broken—and he moved.
Josiah’s World
If you think your family has issues… wait until you hear about Josiah’s.
Josiah became king of Judah when he was just eight years old. Picture that. You’re in second or third grade, and someone puts a crown on your head and says, “Congratulations, you’re now responsible for an entire nation.”
Not just a nation. A mess.
Josiah didn’t step into a strong kingdom with a godly legacy. He stepped into a disaster zone.
His grandfather, Manasseh, was one of the worst kings Judah ever had. Scripture says he did more evil than the nations the Lord destroyed. That’s not a figure of speech. That’s God saying, “The people I drove out of this land? Manasseh was worse than all of them.”
He worshiped Baal. He built altars to false gods inside the temple. He practiced witchcraft and sorcery. He consulted mediums. And the most horrifying? He sacrificed his own son in fire. That’s the household Josiah came from.
Then there was Amon, Josiah’s dad. Amon followed in Manasseh’s footsteps but didn’t even last two years on the throne. His own servants assassinated him in the palace. That’s how broken things had become—his own people didn’t even want him in charge.
That’s the world Josiah inherits.
A crumbling kingdom. A temple full of idols. A people who had forgotten how to worship the one true God. The Scriptures had been lost—literally. Nobody was reading God’s Word because nobody knew where it was. There were shrines to false gods on every hilltop, and generations of people who had never heard the truth.
And Josiah? He’s eight.
No one’s expecting greatness from a kid. They’re probably thinking, “Keep him safe, let the advisors run things. Maybe we can survive a few years and hope for something better.”
But even in that darkness… something starts to grow.
God has a way of doing that. Taking the most unlikely soil and planting a seed. Taking someone young, someone overlooked, someone with no spiritual role models… and lighting a fire inside of them anyway.
Josiah didn’t ask for this. But God put him in it.
And even in the mess, even in the middle of idolatry and bloodshed and failure, something inside Josiah began to turn toward God.
He Started to Seek
So Josiah grows up in this broken world—surrounded by ruins, raised in a palace soaked in idolatry and fear. But somewhere between eight and sixteen years old, he makes a decision that doesn’t make any sense unless God was already working in his heart.
Second Chronicles 34:3 says, “In the eighth year of his reign, while he was still young, he began to seek the God of his father David.”
Let that land.
He was sixteen. A teenager. And without anyone pushing him, without a godly father to follow, without spiritual heroes around him—he began to seek God.
No fanfare. No throne-room declaration. No army behind him. Just a personal, quiet hunger to know the Lord.
This wasn’t about checking boxes or doing religion to look good. Josiah didn’t start with rules—he started with relationship. He began to seek. That word matters. Seeking means you’re looking for someone you haven’t fully found yet. It’s not passive. It’s not, “If God wants me, He’ll show up.” No—this is pursuit. It’s choosing to go after God even when the world around you isn’t.
And notice—nothing’s changed yet on the outside. The idols are still there. The temple’s still a wreck. The people still don’t care. But something’s happening inside Josiah. The foundation is forming.
That’s how it usually starts.
Most of the time, before God uses someone to change the world around them, He does deep work inside them. And that begins, not with a big moment, but with a simple decision: I want to know God. I want more than what I’ve seen.
Some of you are in that same place right now. You haven’t made a huge move yet. You’re not leading worship or preaching sermons. But something inside you is stirring. You’re starting to want more. You’re starting to ask better questions. You’re beginning to seek.
That matters.
That’s the beginning of something real.
Josiah didn’t wait until he had it all figured out. He didn’t wait until he had power or popularity or permission. He just started looking for the Lord—and that choice, quiet as it was, would change everything.
He Tore Down the Idols
Four years go by.
Josiah is now twenty years old. He’s still young, but he’s no longer just seeking God in private. Something has shifted.
The Bible says, in 2 Chronicles 34:3–7, that in his twelfth year as king, “he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem of high places, Asherah poles, carved idols, and cast images.”
This is the moment everything goes public.
Josiah doesn’t start a campaign or post a thread about it. He doesn’t write a law and wait for people to follow it. He leads from the front. He personally travels throughout the land—town by town, hill by hill—and tears the idols down.
He breaks the altars. Grinds the carved images into dust. Cuts down the poles. Burns the bones of the false priests on their own shrines. And he doesn’t stop at the border of Judah. He pushes into the old territory of Israel too—places where kings had long given up on faithfulness. Josiah brings reform where everyone else had settled for defeat.
This wasn’t cosmetic. This wasn’t political. This was gutsy, spiritual obedience.
And let’s be honest—it probably wasn’t popular. There were people who had grown up with these idols. Families who said, “That’s just the way things are.” But Josiah wasn’t interested in keeping the peace with sin. He wanted God to be honored again. Even if it meant making people uncomfortable.
Because when you really start following God, you stop making room for the things that don’t belong. You stop negotiating with lies. You stop treating idols like decorations and start treating them like poison.
And here’s what’s crazy: Josiah did all this before he had access to God’s written Word.
He didn’t even have a full Bible yet. He didn’t know all the laws. But based on the little he did know—based on the legacy of David, based on what he had learned while seeking the Lord—he acted.
He didn’t wait to feel “ready.” He didn’t wait for perfect understanding. He obeyed what he knew.
And that’s a challenge for us.
Some of us know way more than Josiah did. We’ve got Bibles on every shelf. Sermons every Sunday. A whole summer full of devotions. But we’re still sitting back, holding on to stuff God told us to tear down.
Josiah didn’t play games. When he saw something that didn’t belong in the land, he didn’t tolerate it. He removed it.
Not someday. That day.
He Found the Word
Josiah is twenty-six now. He’s been king for eighteen years.
He’s already sought God. He’s already cleared out the idols. But he knows the temple still isn’t what it should be. So he sends his officials to repair it. Clean it out. Restore it to what it was supposed to be.
And while they’re working—deep in the rubble, buried under dust and junk—the high priest Hilkiah finds something.
A scroll.
Not just any scroll. The Book of the Law of the Lord.
The actual written words of God, given to Moses. The covenant. The commands. The heart of what it meant to be God’s people.
And they had lost it.
Think about that. An entire generation of people—kings, priests, families—living their lives without even knowing what God had said. They weren’t disobeying the law; they didn’t even have it anymore.
So they bring the scroll to Josiah. And someone starts reading it out loud.
And everything stops.
Josiah listens. Line by line. Law after law. Chapter after chapter. And he realizes—
We haven’t been following this.
We’ve done so much wrong. We’ve failed God. We’ve broken the covenant. Judgment is coming—and we deserve it.
And Josiah doesn’t argue. He doesn’t point to all the good things he’s done. He doesn’t say, “Well, at least I tried.”
He tears his robes.
That was a sign of grief. Of repentance. Of humility before God.
He’s not ashamed because people caught him doing wrong—he’s broken because God’s Word revealed the truth. Even though he’d already done so much right, he understood it wasn’t enough. He needed more than action. He needed alignment. His heart, his kingdom, his people—everything needed to line up with God’s Word.
This is what separates Josiah from so many other leaders: he lets the Word of God break him.
He doesn’t water it down. He doesn’t explain it away. He doesn’t say, “That was for a different time.”
He listens. He responds. And he immediately calls the prophet to ask what can be done.
Some of us are quick to act when we feel inspired. But when Scripture confronts us—when we read something that challenges our choices—do we let it cut us, or do we dodge?
Josiah let it cut. Because he knew this wasn’t about being a “good king.” It was about being a faithful one.
And that kind of faithfulness always starts with listening to God’s voice—and letting it rearrange everything.
He Obeyed with Everything He Had
Josiah didn’t stop with sorrow.
Once he heard the Word, once he understood the weight of what had been lost—he acted. Fast.
He gathered everyone in Jerusalem. Not just the priests or palace officials. The people. The men. The women. The kids. He brought them all to the temple.
And then he did something that no king before him had done in generations.
He read the whole scroll out loud.
Imagine that moment. The king of the nation standing up in front of the people—no politics, no royal speech—just reading Scripture. Letting the voice of God be the loudest voice in the room.
Then he made a covenant. A promise. Not just for himself, but on behalf of the people.
He stood before the Lord and declared that he would follow God with all his heart, all his soul, and all his strength. Sound familiar? That’s Deuteronomy 6—the command at the very center of Israel’s identity.
Josiah wasn’t content to fix things halfway. He didn’t say, “Well, we’ve already done a lot, that should be enough.” He obeyed the Word fully. Radically. Immediately.
He cleaned out every remaining idol. Any shrine that had somehow survived the first purge? Gone. False priests? Removed. Mediums, fortune tellers, household gods? Cleared out.
And then—he brought back the Passover.
That sacred feast that reminded Israel who they were: the people saved by God, delivered from slavery, marked by the blood of the lamb. That celebration had been neglected for generations. But Josiah reinstituted it, and the people kept the Passover like never before.
Scripture says in 2 Kings 23:25,
“Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the Lord as he did—with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses.”
That’s legacy.
Not because he was perfect. Not because he lived a long, easy life. But because when he heard God’s voice—he obeyed.
Fully. Completely. All in.
He didn’t say, “Maybe later.”
He didn’t say, “This part’s too hard.”
He didn’t delay.
He listened—and then he led.
And that’s what obedience looks like. It’s not just agreeing with God. It’s rearranging your life around His Word—because He’s worthy of more than halfway.
You’re Not Too Young
Let’s be clear: Josiah wasn’t some superhero.
He didn’t grow up in a perfect home. He didn’t have a dad who taught him how to walk with God. He didn’t have the Bible in his hands from the start. He wasn’t raised in a healthy church or surrounded by godly examples.
He just made a decision.
At sixteen, he began to seek God.
At twenty, he tore down the idols.
At twenty-six, he heard God’s Word—and realigned everything to obey it.
He didn’t wait to be older.
He didn’t wait to be perfect.
He didn’t wait until he had more support or more experience or more certainty.
He heard God—and he responded.
And if Josiah could do that then, why not you now?
You don’t need a crown to be a leader.
You don’t need a title to obey.
You don’t need to be loud to be bold.
Maybe your moment won’t look like a throne room. Maybe it’ll look like a bunk at camp. A quiet moment by the lake. A prayer during cabin devos. A verse that finally cuts through the noise and hits you in the chest.
You don’t have to do everything today. But you can do something.
You can seek God.
You can tear down what doesn’t belong.
You can listen to His Word—and actually obey it.
Remember Robert Newman?
He didn’t lead an army. He didn’t give a speech. He didn’t have a platform. But when the moment came, he had a key. He had a choice. And he lit the lantern.
Some of you have that same key.
You’ve been given light.
You’ve heard the truth.
Now it’s your turn.
So what are you going to do with it?
You’re not too young.
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