Why does your spiritual life feel stuck right now? You know you are supposed to love God with everything you've got, but it feels more like an obligation than a fire. You sing the songs. You show up. You try to want it. And still, something feels distant.

In this sermon, Dr. Mark Harris opens our brand new series Counterfeit Kings by walking us through the only person in the entire Bible of whom it is said that he loved the Lord with all his heart and all his soul and all his very. The Hebrew Shema in Deuteronomy 6:4 to 5 is the most famous text in all of Jewish life, repeated every morning, every night, taught to children before anything else. Jesus said this command is the foundation of every other one. And yet only one person in the whole biblical narrative is named as having fully obeyed it.

That person is King Josiah, and the wild part is that Josiah came from one of the most disastrous family lines in Scripture (2 Kings 22 and 23, 2 Chronicles 34 and 35). His grandfather Manasseh was the most wicked king in Judah's history. His father Ammon followed the same path and was assassinated in the palace when Josiah was eight years old. The Bible had been hidden or destroyed. Idol worship, child sacrifice, and every false god imaginable were woven into daily life. And yet at 16, this kid made a decision in his heart to seek God. By 20 he was destroying altars Solomon himself had built 300 years earlier. And a few years later, he found the lost Book of the Law inside the temple and tore his clothes when he realized how far his people had drifted.

Dr. Mark Harris pulls four characteristics out of Josiah's story for anyone wanting to love God for real and not for show. Need him. Weed the garden of whatever competes with him in your music, your screens, your scrolling, your habits. Feed your soul on his actual word, not just other people's sermons. And lead others toward him because you cannot help it.

Dr. Mark Harris closes by tracing the line that finally lands at Jesus. Twenty five years after Josiah died, the Babylonians destroyed the temple and the palace, and Davidic kingship looked over forever. Six hundred years later, Matthew 1 opens with: the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David. The promise did not die. The true King came, not to defeat a foreign empire, but to defeat hell itself for everyone chained to it who did not even know it.

If you are tired of going through the motions, this teaching gives you a path back to wholehearted faith.