Grace Raleigh Sermons

Well, good morning, everybody. So good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. I've got to tell you, I'm really touched by your attendance this morning. Really and truly. Normally I make a joke on holiday weekends about people coming. And this morning I woke up and I got my email. I had a Duke alert that there's going to be some power outages. Shane, you work for Duke. Fix that. Make sure 9-2-2-1 Kirk Hill is not affected. And I was like, man, it's a holiday weekend, and we have a tropical storm bearing down on us. No one is coming. And look, here you are. This is really, really touching and great, and that was really good worship. If you saw Gibby and I talking as I was setting up, I was laughing at him for messing up in the last song and just crying out Jesus in the middle of a line. Thank you, Kristen. You saw it too. And he said, no, no, I didn't mess up. I was just excited about Jesus. And I don't believe him. But I also do know that he is excited about Jesus. I'm also excited to have the princes here with us this morning. They're here with us for a few weeks. Sarah, you're hosting for us when? Next week? Perfect. And she's going to give us an update and tell us everything. So come back then. Well, I'm so happy to have you guys in town. And we are so happy to be the church that you are part of. We talk a lot about building God's kingdom. And you guys are in South Africa building God's kingdom, and it's a part of our heart that's out there, and so we're glad that you guys are with us this morning. So thanks for joining us. If you don't know them, who cares? It's not a big deal, but we're glad to have them, and you should say hey to them after the service and get to know them a little bit, but they're going to be here with us for the next three weeks. Yes. Perfect. So it's a, it's a big morning and I'm happy to have you here as we continue in our series. And if you're watching online or you're catching up later, thanks so much for doing that. That means a lot to us as you enjoy this weekend, doing whatever it is you're doing. We're in our series in Moses and this series, if I'm just being honest, has been a little bit different for me as a pastor and as someone who has to write sermons every week. You guys make me do this. Typically, when I choose a series, I kind of choose a series, and if you're in the meetings with us with staff, we'll have a series idea, and I'll go, that's a great idea, but then I immediately go, what are the sermons? How do we make this compelling? And the way I think about it is, will that preach? Can I make a sermon out of that? But for this series, it's been a little bit different of an experience, because in this series, I'm telling the story, we are telling the story and going through the story of the life of Moses. And we're telling the story really of the Genesis of the nation of Israel. And so it's really less about will that preach? And it's more about what are the essential elements of the story? I heard somebody say one time, this just comes to mind, the radio sports talk guy, that people should go in the Hall of Fame if you can't tell the story of that sport without their name. Then no matter what they did, they should go into the Hall of Fame. Thank you, Zach, for affirming that. And so this kind of works like that. What are the things, if we're going to walk through the life of Moses together and tell the story of the origin of the Hebrew people together and their exodus from Egypt and their intro into the promised land, what are the elements of that story that we just absolutely cannot pass over? That was Freudian there, the Passover. Look at me. What are the elements that we cannot skip that we must include? And one of those elements is the provision by God in the desert of manna. And a little subtext in that story is the provision of quail. You cannot tell the story of Moses. You cannot tell the story of the birth of the nation of Israel without talking about the provision of manna in the desert by God. You have to tell that part of the story. And so this really isn't about does that preacher, does it not? This is about, we have to tell this part of the story. And then what I'm encumbered with rather than does this preach, is this inspiring? What I'm encumbered with is why does this matter to us now? That's wonderful. It's good to learn about our God. And at a baseline, if all we do is look at the stories and learn about our God and his character and who he is, that's enough. And that's a good exercise and it's time well spent on a Sunday morning. But I think we should press further and say, but what do we learn from it that matters to us now? How does that impact me today? So we're going to look at this story of God's provision, but we're going to be asking the question, how does this impact me today? And we're going to do that by looking at two big questions that really, for me, as I read the story, jump off the page and make me go, why is that the case? And I think if we answer those questions and we can find a way that this really impacts us and should matter to us today and our daily lives as we interact with and hopefully pursue God. So I'm going to point to some scripture in a minute. And actually, this morning is the first time this has happened. I bought this Bible. This is called the pastor's Bible. It's got three tassels that hang out of it, which is an obnoxious amount of tassels. And who would ever need three tassels? But now I have exactly three passages from three different books, and I'm using all three tassels, and I'm so excited. So I've used the first one. That one's out of the way. We're in the book of John. That's where we're going to turn first. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. But before I start jumping around to the passages, I just want to make sure that we know what's happening. Moses is moving the Hebrew people through the desert. They've escaped Pharaoh. Pharaoh's army has been destroyed in the Red Sea with the Sea of Reeds. And now they're wandering through the desert being've escaped Pharaoh Pharaoh's armies been destroyed in the Red Sea with the Sea of Reeds and now they're wandering through the desert being led by God a pillar of cloud by day a pillar of fire by night they're following the pillar they're walking towards God if you look at the way that they're supposed to be arranged this tribe next to this tribe in this direction and yada yada yada they were actually marching through the as one enormous cross, which is pretty cool with Jesus in the center of it as the bronze serpent. So, and we'll get to that story. But there comes up the question of numbers and I think it's relevant this morning. There are different scholars say different things. No one's sure. There's a figure in the Bible where it said there were 600,000 men. And so then you extrapolate that out to women and children. And so some scholars say that there was as little as 300,000 people moving through the desert. Other scholars say there was as much as 2.5 million people walking through the desert. So that's a large delta of difference. But regardless of where you would land on that, and I don't expect anyone to go home and really drill down on the number of Hebrew people in the desert, but if you were to, what you would arrive at is there was a lot. There's a lot. And those are mouths to feed. And some of you know that I like history. I like to study empires. I like to read biographies. Last year, I read a biography on Napoleon Bonaparte, who was, by the way, my least favorite general I've ever studied in my entire life. I can't stand that guy. But he's famous for saying, an army marches on its stomach, meaning the secret to war is supplying your army with what they need. And if you've studied history and you've studied war and you've studied people moving across continents, what you know is they are only as good as their supply chain. They can only fight as hard as they have fresh shoes and fresh socks and fresh food coming to them. And if you disrupt that supply chain, you disrupt the army. By the way, this is what made the Mongols so incredible is they didn't need a supply chain. They just ate everything that they saw, and they were the most fascinating force in the history of history, just for the record. Sorry, I couldn't help myself. But an army marches on its stomach, meaning throughout history. One of the biggest challenges of moving a large group of people transcontinentally is sustaining them. And this is the challenge that Moses was facing. He's got between 500 and 2.5 million people that he's responsible for, and they have to be fed. And they grumble. This is hard to do. It's hard to sustain ourselves in the desert. I would assume that each family left Egypt with some amount of sheep or cattle or something to sustain them. But eventually those resources start to dwindle. And so they grumble that they're not being supplied for, they're not being cared for. And this is a sufficient gripe, right? Moms and dads, you're in the desert, wandering, following a pillar. Moses says we just go that way. In your head, you're thinking, we should be there there by now and you're not. What's going on? You're worried about your kids because you can't feed them every day. You're worried about your mother-in-law because you can't feed her every day and frankly she's cranky when she's hungry. So it'd be really nice if we could take care of her. Some of you are sitting next to your mother-in-laws. Don't laugh at that joke. I just saw somebody turn their head. Sorry. This is a reasonable gripe. We're hungry. We can't feed each other. And so God says, okay, I'm going to provide you with something. In the morning, you're going to wake up and there there's going to be this white, flaky substance on the ground. Gather it up, and that will be all that you need. But only gather what you need for that day, which we're going to come back to that idea, because I think that's interesting. Only gather what you need for that day, and every day I will provide for you. And they called that substance, it was like a doughy bread, but it was flaky. And they called that substance manna, which to my knowledge means, literally, what is it? It's like the terrible mascot for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Izzy. I've never been more disappointed in my life. As a kid growing up in Atlanta, I was so excited that the Olympics were coming to my city. It was such a big deal. And by the way, Andre Agassi and Brooke Shield stayed at my friend's house in their basement because they were a host home for the Olympics, which was really cool. I'll tell you about that sometime. But the mascot, when they revealed it, sorry, I know it's stupid. The mascot was named Izzy, which means what is it? And it's like, the mascot's Manna? This is dumb. What a stupid mascot. But that's what they named the bread because they didn't know what it was. So they called it what is it? And that became the name Manna. That was God's provision. And then at one point or another, after God was providing the Manna, they would go out and they would gather it. And we'll see in a little bit that some of them gathered more than they should. And they incurred the anger of Moses and God. And then at some point or another, they said the reasonable thing, the thing that we would say, God, it's so nice that you're providing this for us. I'd like some steak. Like, I'd like some meat, some protein. I'd settle for fish. I'll go to Long John Silver's if you'll just make it available, like anything, God, besides just this bread, just this daily bread, right? And so they said they wanted some protein. And so God responded and he sent them some quail. But it turned out that that was kind of a bad ask. And we're going to see that part in the narrative. I'm going to pull that out. But for a portion, God provided some quail. And then they decided they didn't want quail anymore. God got his way, and then they were back on manna, and that's what sustained them through the desert. And the import of this gesture and this provision echoes throughout Scripture, which is why we cannot tell the story of Moses without talking about the manna that was provided. The biggest reason is this. The manna was a picture of Jesus. The manna was a picture of Jesus. Many of you know this. And so I'd like to remind you of this and pull your mind back to it. Some of you may not. But the manna was a very intentional picture of Jesus. And this is one of the things that marvels me about our God and his sovereignty. We know that God sees into the future. We know that God knows all things. We know that God is sovereign, that God plans. And I say often, sometimes things happen in our life, we can't see what's down the road, but God can and he knows and he's guiding us down this path. And I think even as we acknowledge that truth, that sometimes in our limited brains and in our limited ways of thinking, we think to ourselves, yeah, God sees six weeks down the road or six months down the road, or maybe six years down the road. But in this one, he's seeing 6,000 years down the road. And we don't think about God thinking like that, but he was because he knew that this manna was an intentional picture that he was painting of his son. It's an illustration of what Jesus is. And just so you know, that idea isn't something that scholars came up with. There wasn't theologians reading the Old Testament and then reading the New Testament and going, goodness, this seems really similar. I think those two things are connected. No, these are the words of Jesus himself. And we find them in John chapter six. Sir, they said, always give us this bread. Then Jesus declared, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. Direct correlation. Jesus is talking to a Hebrew people who are entrenched in their culture and know it well. And so when he says, my father sent you bread from heaven to sustain life because of their natural culture, national culture and institutions, they immediately go back to the time of Moses. We as Americans just got done celebrating the 4th of July. In my house, in my kitchen, we had some friends over and I insisted. I put Lee Greenwood, I'm proud to be an American, on the Alexa as loud as it would go and I made everyone hold their hand over their heart and sing every word that they knew to the song. And it was super fun. And when we think about America, we have some things on the 4th of July that we all celebrate, whatever it means to us. The reality of it is this is the great experiment. This is the great democratic experiment. It's the greatest country to ever exist on the planet. It's the most powerful military to ever exist on the planet. And it's the most wonderful and the most free place to ever exist on the planet. And we ought to be grateful for it no matter what we think about our current state, yes or no. This is a great place to be. And so when we celebrate the 4th of July, we draw upon the history of where we are. In the same way, when Jesus says, you remember God providing in the desert, they draw upon where they had been and where they were. And they immediately understand and go back to God's provision in the desert of manna. It's a direct correlation. And Jesus says, my father gave you bread daily to sustain your life, to give you life. And now he gives you me. I am the bread of life. And the picture is very clear. We are told that when we do not know God, when we are separated from him, that we will surely die. This is the penalty in the Garden of Eden. And so Jesus comes that we might have life and have it to the full. He comes that life might be restored. And so he says, my father sent me to restore our life. Right? He sent me to restore your life and to give you life. He is acquainting himself with the manna and he is saying, I am the bread of life. This is all throughout scripture. So we know that the manna is a picture of Christ. And it's well and good and appropriate that at the end of this sermon today, towards the end of the service, we're going to take communion together. And when we take communion together, we're going to break the bread. And Jesus at the Passover, before he's arrested, takes the bread and he breaks it and he says, this is my body that's broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me. That is not just a quaint illustration of what's about to happen to him. It is an intentional connection to what the Hebrew person understands as the sustenance of God in the desert providing life for them. It is a picture of God's provision. So the first thing we see and know about the manna that matters to us very much is that it's a picture of Jesus and God's provision and how he cares for us. We must lock that in. With that being true, there are two questions for me that jump out of the narrative that I think if we can examine them and maybe wrestle them to the ground, at least that's what I tried to do this week as I prepared, that it can illustrate and illuminate for us how this story matters to us today. The first to me is the question of stockpiling. God put a very specific provision in there. You are not allowed to stockpile the goods. You cannot keep more than one day's provision. As a matter of fact, this is what it says in Exodus 16, 19. So I, so I can orient us towards this thought. In Exodus chapter 16, verse 19, after God has said only take enough for the day, then Moses said to them, no one is to keep any of it until morning. However, some of them paid no attention to Moses. They kept part of me or not, but my largest pet peeve in life is any form of inefficiency. My second largest pet peeve in life, just for the record, is when you impose your noise on me. I don't want to hear your phone in a public place. But I loathe any form of inefficiency. And so this directive to only gather what you need for today goes against what I believe wholeheartedly about efficiency. Doesn't it make more sense? Carter, I know you agree with me on thinking. I know you agree with us. Doesn't it make more sense on Monday for you and the able-bodied people in your family to go gather as much as you can for the rest of the week so you don't have to do it every day and you know that it's there and you have the sense of security that it's there. And it's not like there wasn't enough. We're not talking about being selfish because we're told there in scripture that whatever was left over fades away, that when the sun comes out, it melts it away. So there's more than enough every day, which means if your family wants to go out and get enough on Monday to last until Wednesday, or maybe even Friday, you can do that. And isn't this how we handle our daily sustenance anyways? When you go grocery shopping, do you shop for one day like a lunatic? Or do you shop for the whole week? You shop for the whole week. Of course you do. And if you're really crazy, you shop for the month at Costco, which we went to Costco the other night and it was closed because the power was out. And I've never been so disappointed in my life because we were at Costco without kids and I was so excited to go. We ended up wandering around the mall aimlessly. But this makes sense to us. This is how we think. We don't think about daily, I'm just going to go to Sprouts and get what I need for one day. That's what crazy people do. You shop for the week so you don't have to do it anymore. So it makes the most sense to stockpile it for the week, right? But God said don't do that. And I don't understand why. Because besides the practicality of it, it would also give you the sense of, okay, food has been sparse. It's been difficult to feed my children as a father, as a wife, as a patriarch of the family. I'd like to know my family's provided for it. It makes me feel good to know that we have five days rations. And there's even a provision, if you read the text, of an amount that you can gather for each eating person in your home. So there's a provision for that that God lays out. And when I read this story, I kind of wonder, like, what's the big deal? Why can't you stockpile manna? And the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it's because of this. Because you cannot stockpile Jesus. You cannot store up enough Jesus. If manna is a picture of who Jesus is, and it was always to be intended not just to feed this small group of people relatively for 40 years, but to echo throughout the centuries as to God's provision and what it is, then it's important to know and understand that you cannot stockpile Christ. You cannot gather enough of him on a Monday to sustain you on a Wednesday. You can't go to Christmas and Easter services only and expect that amount of Jesus to sustain you throughout the year. Which right now I'm talking to a group of people who have come to church on a holiday weekend with a tropical storm looming. So you get this. So if you're listening online, this is for you, pal. But in Christianity, I think we do this a little bit. We come to church on Sunday. I get my fill of Jesus. My kids get their fill of Jesus, and we're good. And then I'm going to go throughout the rest of my week and do whatever it is I need to do. And the next Sunday I'll get my fill of Jesus. But that's not how Jesus works. That's not how manna worked. And if you think about it practically, that's not how diets work. If you say you're going on a diet and on Monday you manage against all odds to eat salads with some sort of vinaigrette dressing that's not even good. And then the rest of the week you eat Reuben's and fried foods, which I'm not speaking from experience there, I'm just saying hypothetically. That's not a diet. You can't eat healthy enough on Monday to be healthy on Friday if you don't do it again. And I think the picture that God is painting here with the daily provision and sustenance of Christ is we cannot get enough Jesus on Monday to make us healthy on Wednesday. We should still wake up craving him. This is why at Grace we say one of our five traits is we are people of devotion. And I say often, and I have not said it often enough lately, but this is why I say it, that the single greatest habit that anyone can develop in their life, and I'm completely convinced of this, is to wake up every day and spend time in God's presence through his word and through prayer. There is not a single greater habit that anyone can develop than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. It's the most important thing. Every day when I get into my office, most days I fail sometimes, but most days the very first thing I do when I get into my office is I get in my office and I shut the door and I read my Bible and I spend time praying over that day. I try to do that every day. We have to do that. We need to get, we need to think of it. Think of a daily devotion in this context of this story as gathering our Jesus every day. Every day we spend time in prayer. Every day we spend time in God's word. Every day we spend time worshiping. And that looks different at different seasons. Sometimes that means you go on a hike, you just walk, or you go on a run and you take your earbuds out and you don't listen to any noise and you just talk to God and you allow God to talk to you and you experience him that day. I'm not saying it has to be formulated every day, but every day we need to be in the habit like the Israelites. This is what the picture is for. It's not to sustain them. It's to remind us for generations of what we should do. We should wake up and gather Jesus. And it's not lost on me that this happened in the morning. Because when the sun gets hot, it melted away. I've always told you, you have your quiet time and your devotional time whenever it works for you. Morning, afternoon, evening, just do it. But that's a little bit insincere because I can't back this up with paperwork, but I kind of think you should do it in the morning anyways. I don't care if you're a night person. Just saying. We should wake up every day and gather Jesus. And we should understand we can't gather enough Jesus on Monday to make that enough on Wednesday. It has to be a daily practice. And so what God's provision reminds us of and what his prohibition reminds us of is we cannot gather enough Jesus to stockpile him for the week. As believers, we must pursue him every day. We must wake up daily and gather Jesus. It's vitally important. The other question that comes up to me in this story, this one's a little bit trickier. It's the provision of the quail. At one point, though God is providing daily, the Hebrew people say, hey, we'd like some variety. Can we get a little bit of a buffet situation going on? Maybe I'd like some Chinese. Like they just want something else besides this manna, this nutrition brick that they get every day. And so God gives into them and he says, okay. And in Exodus, we're told that God provided quail for a little while, but in numbers, we actually get an insight into this portion of the story that provides a lot more color and it becomes very interesting. And it makes me ask some questions. Numbers chapter 11 verses 18 through 20. This is after they've requested the quail. Tell the people, consecrate yourselves in preparation for tomorrow when you will eat meat. The Lord heard when you wailed. If only we had meat to eat, we were better off in Egypt. Now the Lord will give you meat and you will eat it. You will not eat it. This is the funny part. This is crazy. You will not eat it for just one day or two days or five, 10 or 20 days, but for a whole month until it comes out of your nostrils and you loathe it. Gracious God, because you have rejected the Lord who is among you and have willed before him, saying, Why did we ever leave Egypt? I got to be honest. When you read that, it really reads like a vindictive elementary school kid, right? Who's just mad. You want quail? I'll give you quail until it comes out of your stinking nose, you son of a gun. You whiny little cuss. It's just funny, man. And so when I read it, I'm like, what gives, God? Why are you doing that? It seems like a pretty reasonable request. Maybe nutrition bricks get old. And they'd like to eat some meat. That seems fine to me. But it angered God. And he said, I'll give it to you until you're so sick of it that it comes out of your nose and you loathe it. Why did he do this? Well, the answer is right there in the text. If you have implicit rejection of his provision already. It was an implicit rejection of his miraculous provision. They had become used to it. They had grown to expect it. When Jesus first arrived in their life, when they first experienced God's provision, it was a miracle and they were blown away by it. Look at this. Look at all that we have every day. Oh my gosh, look, I don't have to struggle for my family anymore. I don't have to worry about my kids anymore. It just shows up every day. And I don't even have to worry about gathering enough for tomorrow because I know that it's going to be there tomorrow because God's blessings renew daily. I know that this is going to be great. Look at this, look at this, look at this. And then eventually they get tired of it and they're like, yeah, we need some more of God. And they fall into the terrible habit that we do. We have a terrible habit of asking for Jesus and. Don't we? We have a terrible habit of making Jesus not enough. God has miraculously provided for our salvation and for our peace. And his mercies are new every morning. He gives us our daily bread that we can eat of and hunger no more. He makes us a path to righteousness for his name's sake. He makes it so that this life can be viewed as a wisp or a vapor. And that the tragedies that we endure are called by Paul momentary difficulties. God renders those things true by giving us his son, the bread of life. He gives us a hope for a future where all the wrong things will be made right and all the sad things will be untrue. He's provided us everything that we need. He gives us his peace in all situations so that his servant Paul wrote, I have learned what it is to live in little and I have learned what it is to live in much. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. He has given us peace in every situation. He has defeated sin and shame and death so that we do not need to fear those things anymore. He has given us all that we need, and yet we get Jesus. And we say, but can I also have some quail? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also be comfortable? Can I have you, Jesus, and also go on nice vacations? Can I have you, Jesus, and also drive a car that I'm proud of that signals success to the people who see me? Can I have you, Jesus, and also can you make sure that no one in my family ever gets sick? Can I have you, Jesus, and also can you make sure that I never get sick? Can I have you, Jesus, and can you make sure that my marriage is perfect and that it never struggles and that I never have any problems? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also have a spouse? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also have a child? Can I have you, Jesus, and also these other things that I want? Don't we have a terrible habit of craving Jesus and? There have been times in my life when I've been worried about how things were going to go. Where I've been worried that I wasn't going to be the servant that this church needed. And I've thought, maybe I'll lose my job. Maybe I'll need to quit. Maybe they need someone else. Maybe I'm not serving it well. There's been times over the years, for good reasons or bad, that I feared that I would lose everything. And do you know what brings me back to peace in those thoughts? To think, well, I could lose my job. I could lose my house. I'll still have my family. I'll still see my kids every day. Nothing can take their love away from me. Nothing can take my family away from me. My wife and my children. I'll have that. And at the bedrock, no matter what happens, I'll have them. And I'll have their love. And I have some friendships in my life that I know that no matter what happens, that can't be taken from me. And I'm sure that some of you have been there too. If you haven't been there yet, it's just because you're young. You will. But the provision of the quail and the anger of God, I think, reminds us that this is how we ought to think about the provision of Christ. No matter what happens in my life, I have Jesus. No matter what sickness befalls me, what tragedy befalls me, no matter what situations happen in life, no matter what I have or I don't have, whether I live in affluence or I live in poverty, no matter what happens at the end of the day, I have Jesus, and he is enough. And I don't think in our Christian lives we readily enough default to that foundation of love and provision. This is why God gets angry at the request for quail, because it's an implicit rejection and entitlement to what he's already provided us. And so here's what I want to press on us this morning. That when we see this in the Bible, when we encounter manna through Bible lessons or podcasts or sermons or whatever it is we listen to, when we encounter this idea, what I would love to press upon you is this, that the manna in the desert and the provision of the quail should remind us of this. Let's daily gather Jesus and let him be enough. Like the Hebrew people, let's daily go out and gather Jesus in the morning. I need him today. I'm going to spend time with him today. I'm going to appreciate God's provision today. I'm going to reflect on what that means for me today, both today and in eternity. And then let's let that be enough. Come what may, no matter what else happens, I've learned to be at peace with plenty, and I've learned to be at peace with little, but I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Let's let God's provision each day of Jesus be enough. Let me pray for you, and then we're going to take communion and celebrate that provision. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for how you've provided for us. Thank you for your son Jesus. For who he is and for what he means and how he's our daily bread. Thank you that we can eat of him and not be hungry again. God, I pray that we would be people who are people of devotion who daily pursue you and who daily pursue him. Let us diligently, as your children in the desert did, go out and gather him every morning and be nourished by his love and by his peace and by his forgiveness and by his mercy and by his grace and by his humility. Let us be people who pursue him. And God, I pray that he would be enough. There's so many other things that we want, God, and sometimes they're good and sometimes they're not, but they're nothing compared to him. We consider all things rubbish compared to the surpassing goodness of knowing Jesus. I pray that that would be true of us as we gather him and as we pursue you. I pray that you would also help us to remember that he is enough, that your miraculous provision is enough. Please let us never grow entitled to what that is, but to always marvel at your goodness and at the miracle of your provision. In Jesus' name, in the name of the daily bread, we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thank you so much for joining us. If you're watching online, thank you for doing so. If you're catching up later, that's fantastic. Thank you for doing that. If I seem just a little bit distracted this morning in the transport of my paper, it got a crease in it. And when I was a teacher, if you handed in a piece of paper to me that had a crease in it, I handed it back to you and made you rewrite it because it doesn't stack well and I don't like it. So now every time I look at it, I'm like, this sucks. So, you know, forgive me that. This morning we are in some part of our series in the life of Moses, and we've arrived at a very famous story where Moses parts the Red Sea. And this is a story that's so famous that even if you're not a church person, you have become at some point aware of it. And as I was prepping for this sermon, I was reminded, when I was a kid, I really enjoyed Farside. And there's this one Farside cartoon. Thank you, Tom, for your support. Everyone else, you're mean. And you have no sense of humor because Farside is great. And I remember this particular cartoon of Moses as a kid. And I know it says Moses as a kid at the bottom. I know you can't see that very well, but that's him parting his glass of milk at breakfast just for practice, right? So we know this story. We know what it is. We've heard it before. I think the question for us in 2025 in the United States is, does this story about how God rescued his children in ancient Egypt apply to us today? And are there things that we can pull from it that we can apply to our lives? Or is it just a story about what God did? And we should marvel at that. And honestly, sometimes that should be the answer. We should just read a story and think about it and consume it and allow ourselves to just marvel at who our God is in that story. But as I looked at it, I did think, because I put this in the series plan because you can't tell the story of Moses and not tell the story of the parting of the Red Sea. So I knew that we needed to do it. But it's very rare that when I put a sermon on the calendar or in the series that I don't know kind of where I want to go with it. But for this one, I had to sit down with the text and just read it and go, what do we talk about here, God? What do we preach? What do we do? How do we direct? And as I read it, something became clear to me. And so I want to share that with you this morning. But to do that, what I'd like to do is just dive right into the story. So this story is found in Exodus chapter 14. I'm going to read the first four verses to kind of set it up. And then we're going to talk about it a little bit. So Exodus chapter 14 verses 1 through 4. So the Israelites did this. These instructions are essentially what I'd like you to do. Moses, take your people that are fleeing from the most powerful nation on the planet and move them back and forth across the desert in a nonsensical way. And then I would like for the conclusion of that meandering journey to be at the shore of the Red Sea so that Pharaoh will look at you and go, they don't know what they're doing. They're lost in the desert. Let's go get them. And when he decides to do that, you're going to be pinned against the sea. And then I'm going to do something to make my name great. And we're going to come back to that later. But what strikes me is these instructions are directed by God from God. They're very intentional. And he has a plan. And they make no sense. Right? Can you imagine being one of the tribal elders that Moses comes back to? And he's like, listen, I heard from God. Here's what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to go a few miles that way, and then a few miles that way, and then we're supposed to encamp a few miles that way, pinned against the coast of the Red Sea. And when we do that, Pharaoh's army is going to pursue us. If you were an elder in that situation, if you were an advisor in that situation, you would say, I think, I know I would, hey Moses, that doesn't make a lot of sense, man. Maybe that's not the best plan. Like, okay, meander around, let's do this a little bit, but is there a place to stop where we've got an escape route? Is there a place to stop where we can bail out, there's an exit hatch? Maybe the best thing to do, and I know that this is a wild idea, Moses, but maybe the best thing to do is just continue to move north away from Egypt and not meander in the desert and let Pharaoh watch us. Maybe that's the best idea. Moses, this doesn't make any sense. Isn't that the counsel that you would offer? As that came down the pipe, I know from talking with some of you in Bible study and socially, that sometimes there's decisions that are made three levels above you, and when they get to you, you're like, that is dumb. That doesn't make any sense. Why are we doing this? Wouldn't you feel that way if you were one of the Hebrew people and you're told we're going to be meandering here and here and here and then we're going to pin ourselves against the sea and we're going to let Pharaoh see us? That sounds like a terrible plan. But it's a God-directed plan. And so one of the first things that jumps out to me in this story is sometimes God tells us to do things that don't make sense. There are times in life when God will direct us to do things that don't make any sense. And this is a theme that's been coming up lately in our sermons and in what we've been talking about as a church. And I can't help but think that the Holy Spirit is pressing on some of us to do something that might not make sense on its face. That the Holy Spirit is pressing us to make a decision and to take a step that on its face doesn't make sense. On its face, if you were to tell the advisors and the people around you what you wanted to do, they would go, I'm not sure that's the wisest course of action. Maybe it's to quit your job and to pursue a different field. Maybe it's to stay in your job when all you want is to get out of your job. Maybe it's to end a relationship that's tenuous and hurtful, but you're scared to do it because you need it. Maybe it's an impetus to stay in a relationship that you think has a dead end and isn't going anywhere. But you just feel this press from God to stay in it. Maybe it's to quit something or to start something. But I do know that from time to time, the Lord will press on our hearts through the Holy Spirit for us to do things that might not make sense. I remember years ago in 2016 when I was looking for a job and becoming a senior pastor, moving on from being a staff pastor at my old church, Greystone, that my pastor preached a sermon on Abraham. And he pointed out that God spoke to Abraham when he lived in Ur in the Sumerian dynasty in the Middle East, probably modern day Iran. And he told him where Iraq, and he said, I want you, he woke him up and he said, I want you to get your things together, get your house together, get your wife, get your servants, get all your possessions. I want you to go to a place where I will show you. Not a specific place. Abraham didn't get to watch a YouTube video about the land of milk and honey to decide if he wanted to go there on vacation. He just had to go into the unknown. Just go that way and I'll let you know when you get there. And his point was sometimes God asks us to do things that don't make sense. And I was very convicted in that sermon because I was listening to that sermon and I'm thinking, we need to sell our house. We need to sell our house. I don't have a job yet. I don't know where we're moving. It doesn't make a lot of sense because we don't have a good place to go, but I know that we need to sell our house. And so I went home and I thought about it and I prayed about it. And that afternoon I went to Jen and I was like, hey, you're not going to like this. And I know that we don't have a place to move, but I think we need to sell our house. And she said, me too. What? She said, that's all I was thinking the whole sermon. We need to sell our house. And so we did. And for the next seven months, we lived with her parents and my parents. And then when I got hired by Grace, things were a little bit rushed. And I had two weeks from when I had my last Sunday at Greystone to when I preached my first Sunday at Grace. Two weeks. That is not enough time to sell a house. That is not enough time to get my affairs in order. But God pressed on us to do something that made no sense. And so we just felt like we were supposed to walk towards the sea. And we did. I have some good friends from that season of life, Heath and Ashley. And the sea that they walked towards was a lot scarier than ours. Heath was a staff pastor with me at Greystone. And I remember how he was and is a very dear friend of mine. If for no other reason than in 2013, he took me to the Masters. And I'll be forever grateful for that. I'll pretend to like him in hopes of further Masters visits after that. But I remember having a conversation with Heath when we were talking about spiritual gifts. And he said, what do you think my spiritual gifts are? And I said, honestly, I don't know. Maybe all of them. You're good at everything you do. He's so humble. He's so sweet. You would like him way more than you like me. Heath is great. And everything that he did just seemed to flourish. And by the time that both of us had matured in staff, he was a campus pastor in a city called Monroe, which was, you know, 35 minutes down the road from our main campus. And it was this quaint little southern town, a little bit like Wake Forest, but just better because Wake Forest stinks a little bit. And he bought this house downtown that was built in like the 1800s. And his wife, Ashley, is very eclectic and wonderful. And we love her. And we're actually going to see them in a few weeks when we go down to Florida. And it was just this perfect house for them. And they had two little girls. And it was just this really great thing. And they fixed up the house. And the house had appreciated in value really greatly. And they had set up this very nice life for themselves. And he's the campus pastor at a campus that's flourishing. And they just felt this press from the Holy Spirit, this direction like we see from God in verses one through four. Hey, I think I want you to go to seminary. And he felt this conviction that he needed to go to seminary. He had never been. He graduated from UGA with a degree in business and then got involved in church world and had never been to seminary. And so he felt like he needed to go. And he shared it with Ashley. And Ashley is one of these people. She was either convicted by the Holy Spirit or just so wild and free in her spirit that she was just like, yeah, let's do that. She's very adventurous. So he told Ashley, and they said, yeah, let's go to seminary. And so they sold everything they had, and they moved to Pasadena, California to go to Fuller Theological Seminary. And they lived in a student apartment. And if you've been to college and you've seen student apartments, those are a little bit less good than your own house in a small city, right? It was small, it was constricted, it was confined. Their little girls are meeting new people, going to a new school, a new environment. They really felt like God asked them, give up your comfortable life, move across the country, and I'll show you what I want you to do there. And so that's what they did. And when Heath told me this was his plan, I said, I don't think you need to do that. You're very successful in ministry. You're very good at what you do. But if this is what God's convicting you to do, then I think you should go. But it didn't make any sense to me. And I got off the phone with Heath and I looked at Jen and I was like, this doesn't make any sense. And she was like, that's weird. And I was like, I know. But they felt convicted and so they did and so they walked towards the sea. Sometimes in life, God asks us to do things that don't make any sense. But let me show you what happens when we follow through in obedience. First, we tend to come to a point of conflict. Exodus chapter 14, verses 10 and 11. As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up and there were the Egyptians marching after them. They were terrified and cried out to the Lord. They said to Moses, was it because there was no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Which I have to admit, until I dove into this story and was reading through to figure out what to preach and how to preach, I was unaware. This verse had never stuck out to me before, but it's one of the great sarcastic lines in the Bible. What have you done to us? Are there not enough graves in Egypt that you would bring us here to die? And then if you continue to read and you follow the discourse, some of them say, didn't we tell you in Egypt that we didn't want to do this? Didn't we tell you that we thought this was a bad idea? We were oppressed there, but we were alive. And now we're about to be mowed down by the army of Egypt. Because now what's happening when they say this, they're pinned against the Red Sea. They're shoreline and shoreline and nowhere to go. And in the distance is the armies of Pharaoh. And one detail that I think is interesting, because I'm silly, I just have to point this out. It says in the text that Pharaoh chose 600 of his best chariot men to go and to pursue the Israelites, which is great. But how do you determine the top 600 of anything? Like who was 601? You know? And was that guy like, I mean, come on, I'm at least 585. If not 590, this is bull. 601 has to be sour about it, right? It just seems like a really specific number. Anyways, I'm sorry. So they're pursuing the Israelites. And the Israelites say, why are we here? We told you this didn't make sense. They're raining down on us. We would have been better off if we did the other thing. This was a stupid decision. And so they come to this point of desperation where now they've done what they were supposed to do. And the only thing that can rescue them from their peril is an act of God. It's this point of desperation. And it reminds us that the reality is sometimes God asks us to do something, and we take that step of faith, and it opens up and it works out wonderfully. But most of the time, God asks us to do something, and we take a step of faith, and there is a process. There are things to wait on. We don't understand it fully. God told David, you're going to be the king of Israel, and then he waited 20 years. God called Moses to be the leader, and then he waited 40 years. God called Paul to be his witness to the Gentiles, and then he waited seven years. God called Peter, and Peter was a moron for three years, and then got it together and ministered well. Sometimes when we take a step of obedience, it works out right away, but most of the time time it's a process. And within that process, we will often reach a point of peril and desperation where we go, God, if you don't act, I don't know what to do. And it will cause us to question everything about the decision that we made. We will agree with the Egyptians. I was better off in the previous situation. I was better off with the previous resolution, with the previous decision, with the previous direction of guidance. I was better off then than I am now. Why did I do this? I regret quitting the job. That was a bad decision. I wish I could have it back. I regret starting this company. It was a bad decision. I wish I could have it back. I regret, I regret ending that relationship. I regret staying in this relationship. This is so hard. I regret moving to this school or to this place or to, or to go to this thing or to start this or to stop that. I regret it. It was wrong. And I wish I could have that previous life back. I wish I had a redo, God, because maybe I got it wrong. But when we follow God towards the sea, there is almost an inevitable moment where we will reach a point of desperation like the Israelites did and say, maybe I would have been better off if I had never done this. But it's at that point of tension that we reach the denouement, the climax of the story, the resolution of the event. In verses 26 through 28. It's at this point that chariotman 601 was 601 was like, thank goodness for that. God had a plan. He told Moses, raise your arms, close the sea. And he defeated this army of Egypt. And though I can't peer into the mind of God, I cannot know the mind of God. It makes sense to me that what God may have known, I'll just proffer this to you. You accept it or don't based on what you think. But I think it's possible that what God may have known is that Pharaoh is not going to just let you go. If you just scurry north, at some point or another, he will decide that he wants you back. And his army of trained soldiers and men on chariots and horses is faster than your entire three and four generations of families shuffling through the desert. It's faster than you. And if he wants to come get you, he will get you. And he will at some point, whether it's on the banks of the Red Sea, in the desert congruent to the Red Sea, or on the shores of the Jordan River, or even if he has to come back to Israel and reconquer you and bring you down. He will get you. I think this may be something that God knew. And so he knew that the Egyptian army needed to be conquered. And he knew that the Israelites didn't have the tools and the armies to do it. So he knew that he was going to need to step in. So what did he do? He told them, I want you to make yourself bait for Pharaoh. And I want you to put yourself in a completely vulnerable situation so that he will attack you. And when he does, look back at verse 4. Why did he do this? But I will gain glory for myself through Pharaoh and his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord. Sometimes God uses the nonsensical to spread his name. Sometimes he directs us towards nonsense, towards things that don't make sense, towards things that our friends would not advise us towards except for the will of God. And he uses it to spread his name. I remember having a conversation with Heath. They moved out to Pasadena. They lived in this small apartment. They were struggling, but they were good. They took all the equity that they gained from their home in Monroe, and they used it to live for those two years that he needed to do seminary to complete his degree and then towards the end of his seminary education I spoke with him and I was like what do you what are you gonna do because he had been a staff pastor and he didn't know what he wanted to do after seminary he just noted he wanted to be trained and he was listening to God go to this place and I will show you right then right? And so one day he calls me and he was like, hey, I think I know what I want to do. And I was like, great. What are you going to do? And this is what he said, because you're not going to believe. He said, I want to buy a laundromat. What? Why? He was like, I've been exposed to this really cool model of ministry where you own and operate a laundromat and you make it a point to spend your days there and you interact with the customers and you get to know them and you hear their stories. Because people who use laundromats are typically not affluent people. They've typically struggled. And they may be living a life where not very many people care about them. And so I want to show them care. I want to show them that Jesus loves them. I want to show them that they're seen. And I want to build community there. And I think Ashley and I can do this. And there's actually a model of ministry where they're building communities through laundromats and people are coming to Jesus as a result of it. And he said, that's what I want to do. And I said, Heath, that's stupid. That's a bad plan, man. I did. That's what I told him. But I laughed and he laughed and he said, I know. And I said, but if the Lord is directing you to do this, do it. Walk towards the sea. Go ahead. And so he did. And they, they moved, they, he graduated from seminary and they, they, they kind of looked all over the country and they settled on a suburb of Phoenix. And in the suburb of Phoenix, they began to save money for a laundromat, and Heath got another job with another missions organization where he's able to support people who spread Jesus' name throughout the world. And it's a good fit for him. And Ashley got a job as a teacher. And they have a daughter, Lucy, who's Lily's age. And Lucy and Lily have become pen pals. They write each other notes, and they send them to each other. And I should have grabbed one this morning. Jen's not home this weekend, so I didn't know where to find it. And I didn't want to bug her on a Sunday morning. But they are the sweetest little letters they write back and forth to each other. Lucy is the sweetest girl, but for whatever reason, she was having a really hard time at school. She was really getting bullied, really being ostracized, and it was a really hard time for them. And for them, I would point to that as a point of desperation. God, did you send us to seminary and then to Phoenix just to watch our daughter struggle? Wouldn't we have been better in our comfortable life, by the way, doing your ministry in Monroe? Wouldn't that have been better for us? But I believe that that was their point of desperation. And so from that, they've now moved to Tampa and they are thriving there and their story continues. And I do believe that God has walked them to the sea to make his name greater, but I don't know how their story ends. And we may not for a while. But I do know of another story of someone who had the faith to walk towards the sea. I want to introduce you to a hero of our faith, a man named George Mueller. He was born in 1805 in Germany. Here's a picture of him right there. He did not look like that when he was born. He's approximately eight years old in that photo. And he's got one of the cool German U's in his name, which is really neat. I'm jealous of that. But he was born in Germany in 1805. He immigrated to England later in life. And he was attending a church that had an attendance of 18, is what you read, which feels like a small group. But he went to a church of 18. And there he came to know that he already knew the Lord, but he became convicted because the pastor of that church and his wife decided that they were going to embark on a life of faith ministry where they were going to leave their job and go be missionaries and just rely on support from other people. But they were never going to ask for that support. They were just going to pray for it, which is a terrible idea. But they did it and they succeeded. They walked towards the sea. And so George was a pastor, and he went through some hard times with his children where they had a stillborn, and then he had a son, and that son passed away early in life. And that tremendous tragedy, there's nothing sadder than losing children. But it gave him a heart for orphans. It gave him a heart and it says for true orphans with no father and no mother. And so he decided to open an orphanage and then he decided to open multiple orphanages. But his thing was, oh, here's another thing about Mueller that's really interesting that I'm a little bit frustrated about. When he took over the church, you would rent pews. So your family would pay high dollar to sit where Tom and Linda are. This is an expensive pew right here. You guys in the back, you're barely doing anything. Who cares about you? But these are the important seats, right? You would rent a pew, and then that's how the church funded itself. But he looked at that and he said, this isn't right. It's ostracizing the poor people in the down and out. I don't like this anymore. So he eliminated pew rental, which was their source of income to run the church and for him to get paid. And he installed free will gifts, what we call offerings. He was one of the first pastors to invent offerings. And I'm kind of frustrated by it because that makes my life harder. It would be easier to charge you per sermon than it is to ask you to just give what you want. All right. So like when I get to heaven, me and George, I got a joke for him, man. Thanks a lot, buddy. But he just had this giving heart. He said, no, at church, we're not going to ask for people's money. We're going to do freewill offerings. And when he started his orphanages, he said, I'm not going to go around and collect support. I'm not going to charge families. I'm not going to apply for government support. All I'm going to do is pray. When we need something, I'm going to get on my knees and I'm going to pray that we would get it. That's all that he did. And he never went around asking for support. He never went around passing the hat. And now what we know about nonprofits is that that's exactly how you support the nonprofits. As you go around, as a missionary, you come up to the church, you stand up here, you tell your story. If you want to give, you can give. You have galas and you have banquets and you have functions and you have dinners at people's houses where you can share your story and you try to gain supporters. And then you and then we have this whole mechanism for philanthropy where emails go out and we're just keeping you up to date. And like, we know all of that stuff. And listen, I'm not impugning any of those systems or any of the people who have participated in those to support their ministry. I think that's a good thing. I have participated in those. I will continue to participate in those. But George Mueller said, that's not what I feel led to do. I'm just going to pray. And there are stories of him working in an orphanage and looking at the food resources and realizing at the end of this week, we do not have enough food to feed the children next week, and we do not have the money to buy new food. And so he would get down on his knees on the banks of the Red Sea with the army bearing down on him. And instead of fleeing, he would pray. He would pray for food. Father, I know you love these children. I know you care for them. I know you directed my steps here. Would you please provide for them? And every time God God provided. The man never walked around passing a hat. He is a legend in Christian circles. He's got a biography that is absolutely worth reading. And by the end of his life, by the end of his life, I have read that he cared for over 18,000 orphans without ever asking for a penny, without ever doing a single campaign. Through simply prayer, he allowed Jesus to wrap his arms, I'm getting emotional thinking about it, around 18,000 children with no parents. By the end of his life, I have read that he gave away the modern day equivalent of $129 million to ministries outside of his orphanages because he decided, I do not need a surplus to operate. I will pray and God will provide. That man walked towards the sea. He did what makes no sense. And as I tell that story of George Mueller, I think our tendency as we hear that is to say, well, that is exceptional. That is a man of tremendous faith. And you're right. But we also then look at ourselves and we say, but that's not me. I don't have that faith. I'm not going to do that. Or maybe you hear the story of my friends Heath and Ashley who sell their house and move across the country and go to seminary and then buy a laundromat in Tampa, which is weird. And you're like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. I don't think that God is calling me to do that. And so I think what we do is we hear stories like that that we consider heroic or courageous at the very least. And we kind of categorize them as for the exceptional, but not for me. And as I thought about that, it just occurred to me that very few of us have the courage to walk towards the sea. Very few have the courage to walk towards the sea. Very few of us have the courage to sell our house, move across the country, and fundamentally change our life for our girls. Which, by the way, Heath's mom openly wept for days when he said he was moving away because their family is very tight-knit and has lived in the same city for four or five generations. Very few of us have the courage to do that. And so when we hear stories like that, I think the typical reaction is to say, well, I don't know that I can relate to that. You're probably right, because statistically speaking, most of us don't have the courage to walk towards the sea. Most of us want that escape route. But if we'll do it, if we'll walk there, there may be a point of desperation. There may be a time when we regret our choice. But God will come through. And he will come through to use you to make his name great. George Mueller did not know that he was going to be written about in history books and that someone would write a biography and that every seminary student would hear about him. He just walked towards the sea. And I don't know what God is pressing on you to do. I don't know what he's pressing on you to start or stop or engage in or follow through with. But here's what I know. I know that for some of you, I know that for everyone in here, God wants you to do something. He wants you to take some step. He's pressing something on you. And I know that for a few of you, that is ringing loud in your ears. And you know exactly what it it is and you wish I'd let up on it. So some of you need to have the courage to walk towards the pond or the creek. Some of you are facing a sea. But I think what we can take from the story of the parting of the Red Sea is that when God tells us to do something nonsensical and walk towards the ocean, that we can do it in faith that he will make it work, that he will provide and that he will do it to make his name great. So this morning, let me encourage you from this story. Have courage, have faith, and walk towards the sea. Let's pray. Father, thank you so much for this story that we read in Exodus, for what you did for your children, for what you still do now. God, I pray that we would take faith and comfort and solace from what you did. God, I know that there are some of us that you have directed to walk towards a pond, and there are some of us that you have directed to walk towards an ocean. But Father, give us the courage and the faith and the fortitude to step forward in that way and to take those steps and to allow you to pin us against an ocean needing you desperately to resolve the situation. God, we thank you for the story and for what we can learn from it. And God, I pray specifically for those that feel compelled by the Holy Spirit to walk towards the sea. Please give them the courage to do that. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thank you, all 26 of you, for joining us this summer Sunday. I'm sure there is a cacophony of folks joining us online, so thank you for doing that, wherever you are, whatever you're doing. Before I just dive in, I feel as a pastor that whenever something happens in our world that enters into the national conscience in such a way that a vast majority of us are thinking about it and processing it, that I should probably pause and address it. And so we know, I think, I hope this isn't breaking news to you. If it is, this is a terrible way to find out. But the United States bombed three nuclear facilities in Iran last night. That's a big deal. And it just makes me want to pause and pray before I just dive into the sermon as if nothing's going on. I have no assessment of what's happening. I have no opinion that I will share with you from here of what's happening. But I do have some prayers. The very first thing I thought of because of my recent experience in Istanbul when I got to sit in a circle with Iranian pastors, the very first thing I thought of was my friends and their safety. And some of them are able to flee to the north and out of cities. But I've been told that many of them have moms and family members that are locked into their apartments in Tehran. How terrifying is that? So the first thing I want to pray for is just for the people that would be impacted by the decisions that are being made by other folks. And then I'd like to pray for those other folks that God would give people in control wisdom and put people around them to have wisdom. So if that's alright with you, I'd like to pray for that and then we do the normal, regularly scheduled programming. Let's pray. Father, you have seen all the wars, and you have seen all the suffering, and your heart has been broken as you watch people suffer who had no hand in the violence that was brought to them. And so, God, we lift up the people on both sides who are being harmed and will be harmed by the escalating violence. We pray, Father, that you would bring peace. We pray that the violence would cease, that people would stop losing loved ones, and that you would bring stability to that region. And to that end, God, we just pray for our leaders. We ask that you would give them wisdom, that you would give them depth of insight, that you would surround them with wise counsel, and that your hand would be on the decisions that are made moving forward. We ask these things with a heavy heart, but we ask them in the name of your son. Amen. Hard right turn. I was invited to a Rick Springfield concert a couple of weeks ago. This is actually sincere, and that's how I wanted to start the sermon before I knew that I would be offering a very sincere prayer about a potential war. Yeah, I was texted by a friend who goes to this church, and let's just call him Keith Cathcart, just for the sake of it. And he legitimately invited me to a Rick Springfield. Is that right, Springfield? Steen. Field? Field. Concert. Hard no. Immediately. No, nay chance. No, no, no. I'm not doing that. I couldn't be. You may as well invite me to volunteer with you at the animal shelter. Okay. And if you know me, you know, that's funny because I don't even like dogs, which is weird. I know that's my problem. Here's the, here's another problem I have. I also don't like music. Okay. I don't. I don't want to go to a concert. If the music lasts longer than our worship set, sometimes Gibby, three songs, too many, too many. I can't stay engaged for that many songs. And if it's louder than, if the music is so loud that I can't talk to my friends, it's like, why are we here? I don't want to be in this place. And then it's Rick Springfield. I thought that was an SNL character. I didn't even know he was real. And I couldn't, I didn't know anything. I was like, what does he even sing? And so I think I asked Jen, I did a quick Google search. I asked Jen, and she told me Jesse's Girl. And I was like, right. I do know that one. I have heard it. I will not sing it for you, but I have heard it. Yeah, thank you, Elaine says. You're welcome, pal. Now I'm tempted to do it just to spite you, you know? I'm not willing to humiliate myself in that way. And it was like, oh, yeah, right. Okay, I think I do know who that guy is. And I think that that's how we think of the 10 plagues. We have a loose awareness that there were plagues. We've heard about them our whole life, most of us. Because if you're coming to church in June, you're like a Christian Christian. You know what I mean? Like you're real Christian. So you've heard of the plagues before. But I bet if I asked you, name all 10, I don't think you could do it. I really don't think you could. I think very few people, Mike Harris just led a study on, I should call you up here and make you do this, Mike. I bet he could get a lot. As I was kind of going through, I'm pretty sure I could get eight of them. But I think as I remind you of what the plagues are, that we're going to go, oh, that's right. There was that one too. And so we'll kind of have that moment together. This morning is unusual for me because I'm not going to open the Bible and read directly from Scripture, which is kind of a cardinal rule that I try to never break. It's just that the plagues are in chapters seven through 11 of Exodus. And there's no one like crucial verse that defines the plagues and what they are. But these plagues that I'm going to list are listed there. And I just didn't want to read you every verse of every plague because that's disengaging. So anyways, that's my personal confession. But here are the 10 plagues, okay? The setting is, most of us know, but in case we don't, the children of Israel are enslaved by Egypt. They're under the thumb of Pharaoh. And God appears to Moses in a burning bush and he says, I want you to go back. I want you to leave my people. I want you to go to Pharaoh. And I want you to tell him to let my people go. I would like for you to go tell Pharaoh to release his economy and workforce. That's what he tells him. And so he goes to Pharaoh and he says, let my people go. And Pharaoh says, I'm not going to do that. And he goes, okay, well then God's going to send plagues on your nation. So he sends these plagues. And I've made this point before a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about it. I don't have, there's no indication of the timeframe of these. I don't know if these were one right after the other, like over the course of a month or a couple of weeks, or if they were protracted out over the course of a year or two or more. I really don't know. And I'm not sure there's an indication of it, but this is what God does to get the attention of Pharaoh. First thing he does is he turns the water into blood. The Nile River, as the account records for us, was turned into blood. After that, there was frogs that swarmed Egypt from the Nile. And I happen to know somebody who is unnaturally and deathly terrified of frogs. This would be the worst possible plague for that person. She would rather get boils all over her body than frogs anywhere. So this would be a particularly terrible plague for some. Then there was a plague of lice, then flies, then there was the death of their cattle, then there was a plague of ash falling from the sky, then a plague of hail, then locusts, then darkness, and then we know the last one, the death of the firstborn. I don't know how many of those you would have gotten, but maybe you just went, oh yeah, those are right. But those were the plagues. And with each plague, God is making a request. Will you let my people go now? And Pharaoh says no. And really at its baseline, the request is, are you going to let me win? Are you going to give me my way? And Pharaoh says, no, I'm going to win. And so he stays stubbornly in his stance and digging his heels in. No, God, you are not going to win. I am going to win. Those are the plagues. But here's what you may not know about the plagues that I didn't learn until probably about 10 years ago. So I grew up my whole life knowing about the plagues and knowing that the point of them was to get Pharaoh humbled and broken so he would let God's people go. The whole point of them was for Pharaoh to finally let God win and for God to claim victory. I knew that, but what I didn't know is this. In the plagues, God was systematically dismantling Egyptian allegiance. In the plagues, God was systematically dismantling Egyptian allegiance. And when I say allegiance, I mean allegiance to their gods. Most of us are probably aware that Egyptians worshipped a pantheon of gods. They had a god for everything. For day and for night and for sun and for moon and for war and for peace and for fertility. That God's for everything. And what we may not know about the plagues is that each plague was a systemic and intentional assault on one of the gods of Egypt. To show the Egyptians and to show Pharaoh, I am more powerful than that God. The water, just for your own edification, the water to blood was an attack on Heket, the goddess of fertility. Frogs from the Nile was an attack on Geb, the god of the earth. Lice was Kepri, the god of creation. Flies was Hathor, goddess of love. Death of the cattle was Isis, the goddess of medicine. Ash was the god of nut, who's the god of the sky. Hail was Seth, the god of storms. Locust, Ra, the sun god. Darkness, Pharaoh, who they viewed as a god. And the firstborn is how you transferred your power to the next generation. It was an assault on that God as well. So in the plagues, God is systematically assaulting their gods and their frame of reference. He's doing it intentionally. Last week, we talked about God as I am and how we said, I am all that you need. I am all the gods, all the time. And here, he's meeting that out, pointing out to them, I'm more powerful than that god. Pharaoh, I'm more powerful than that god. Are you going to let me win now? Pharaoh, I'm more powerful than that god. Are you going to let me win now? This is what the plagues are, and when we realize that, that this was a systemic attack on their gods, it's, to me, a much more powerful story. I do, however, think that as Americans, we have a difficult time relating to that story. Because my assumption and perception of most of you in this room is that in our culture, and particularly in what demographics are represented here, we never really made a choice between this God or that God. I would be willing to bet that very few of you here, if anybody in the room right now, has ever considered, do I want to worship the Christian God, or do I want to worship the Muslim God or do I want to worship the Muslim God or maybe Buddhists or maybe I want to be Hindu and worship thousands of those gods. Maybe I want to embrace Judaism and worship God the Father but not God the Son as he's depicted in Christianity. Most of us here have never chosen between gods. The choice we make in our subculture in America is typically God or no God. Right? We choose the Christian God or we don't believe in God. That's kind of a binary choice for us. So it's difficult to relate to a story where there's a pantheon of gods being worshipped and God is showing that he's superior to those gods. Because if we're here and we believe in the Christian God, we just accept it by default and as fact that he would be superior to what we think are made up gods. Right? It kind of doesn't make any sense to even consider it. And so it's hard to relate to the story because we don't really have a pantheon of gods. We don't think we have a pantheon of gods, but we do. We absolutely do. We don't call them gods because we're intellectually dishonest, but we have pillars of our culture. We have things in the American culture that we worship. We pray to the altar of things that are not God the Father, for sure. We pray to the God of career. We might not ever say it out loud, but we orchestrate our life around it. We worship it. We prioritize it. Do we not? We are defined by our careers. It's a trope, and it's an easy thing to point out, but it's also true. When we meet people, within the first three questions, what do you do? Right? And if they're a stay-at-home mom, what's probably typical, I don't know because I'm not a stay-at-home mom, but what I would think would be the response when they say, well, I don't work, I'm a stay-at-home mom, is that now in that conversation, they feel a little less. And then if they say, I'm the CEO of blank, they feel a little bit more, right? And so we value people based on their careers. And then this is how sick I am about it if I don't keep it in check. When you tell me what you do for work, I go, that's wonderful. What do you want to be doing in five years? I want to know what your career goals are immediately. When I was younger, when I was in my 20s, I woke up early every day and I read books so that I could be what I wanted to be in my 30s. Like we get addicted to this and it drives us. And this, I say this room, we're missing like 75% of the church today. So also people watching later, this room is an accomplished room. This room is a room that does care and has cared deeply about careers. And if we don't watch it, what we find is that we pray at the altar of those and we serve them. So sometimes we get caught up in worshiping the God of careers. Let me tell you another one that I want to spend a little bit of time on because I think it's important and we don't talk about it very much. Sports. Nice 49ers shirt, Tom. Sorry. Tom's an elder. He's a great guy. He's also really funny. We pray at the altar of sports. We allow them to be too much. We do. Years ago, I'm a Falcons fan, which is a curse. It's a curse. I don't like it. I don't want to be a Falcons fan. I don't want to be a Georgia Tech fan. I don't want to. I would like to choose other teams, but that's not how sports works, okay? The Falcons are my team. And a few years ago, I was watching them, and every Sunday, I couldn't have anybody around me, and I couldn't speak during the game. I was insufferable to be around and if they lost it ruined my day and Jen finally told me hey it's pretty immature to allow a sports team to impact how you treat your family maybe you should care less is that fair the facsimile thereof? Okay. And I went, she's right. She always is. I'm sure you've picked up on that. And I realized I needed to detach myself from that. I had a friend who at one point in his life, and this is just sick of behavior. This is terrible. He went to 149 straight UGA games, home and away. 149 straight. That's a wild commitment. And God got a hold of him and convicted him. He was like, yeah, I got to stop. And his goal was to get to 200. He's like, I got to stop. I can't do this anymore. Sometimes we make sports too important. I have another point to make here, but as someone who's done funerals and who sits with families and says, tell me about your dad. It always makes me so sad when one of the top three things that they know about their dad is that he liked this team. That's your legacy? Liking a team? Cool. I hope I do more with my life so that when my kids are asked about me, they don't lead with I I like the Falcons, right? So sometimes we make a God out of sports. Now here's the other way we do it. And this is what I really want to say. The culture around sports and in our culture now has gotten so absurd that families begin to worship it without realizing it. Lily played challenge soccer last season. And what that meant is she, we had two practices a week. The practices lasted an hour and a half for nine-year-olds. I was one of the assistant coaches and I thought it was dumb, but it lasted 90 minutes, 20 minutes there, 20 minutes back. We are wrapping two hours plus twice a week into practice. And then there's games on Saturdays and sometimes on Sundays. And then one weekend there's a tournament and you know who you play in the tournament, the other four teams that you've already played three times during the season, who cares? It's dumb. And it takes so much time and so much energy and so much money to make this happen. And that's the lowest level of it. And the truth is, parents who currently have kids of the age to play sports, let me just say this objectively to you. You do not have to be very good at a sport to get on a team that will take your time and your money. Okay? So your kid making challenge soccer isn't a big deal. And then what happens is the coaches and the leagues tell us that we have to do more, more, more. And now that's ruling our families. It's consuming our time, talent, and treasure. And I have seen over the years at my old church and at this church, I have seen families that handle this very well. And we have some great examples here of families whose kids are highly athletic and they are still highly involved. And they prioritize things that we would encourage them to prioritize. So some families handle it very, very well. I have watched it wipe off the map other families where they're engaged in church. They're raising their kids in church. They're serving in whatever capacity they're serving and kids and kids grow up and then they get of age when they start to play sports. And then dad starts to think maybe they're good at sports. And then we commit more time to sports and they come less and less and they volunteer less and less. And I see them less and less. And then here's, let me tell you what happens is I've had, I've talked to so many parents when I was a student pastor and I would be talking to them about their graduating senior. And I've heard this comment so many times in my life, you know, we regret that we didn't spend more time getting them to church and less time playing sports. I have never heard the contrary. It would be a weird thing to say to a pastor, but I've never heard anyone say, I wish we would have focused more on sports and less on church. Before we know it, we're praying at the altar of sports, and that becomes our God. So we should check that. We pray at the altar of wealth. In America, if you have money, you're good. You're a good person. You've been successful. You've made good decisions. You may not be morally good, but you've won the game, right? And so now wealthy people, better, better looking because they have more money for better haircuts. Poor people, worse, worse looking because they cut their own hair, right? This is how we value people and we pray at the altar of wealth. We pray at the altar of comfort. We don't want to get our feathers ruffled. We don't want to get involved. We don't want to feel uncomfortable. We make our life comfortable. We make our life predictable so that we don't have to feel discomfort when we don't want to. And if there are pain points, instead of leaning into that discomfort and trying to figure out why it's there, we just figure out a way to alleviate it and never have to deal with it. So we pray to the God of comfort. I could go on and on and on. My point is, when we look at the 10 plagues and the systematic assault on these gods, at first glance, I think we find it difficult to relate to, but if we'll stop and be thoughtful about it for a little bit, what we'll realize is, no, no, we do have a pantheon of gods. And many of us in different times and in different seasons for different reasons have prayed to those gods rather than our God. And so it made me think, what would it look like if God assaulted our gods? What would it look like if God were going to systematically dismantle the gods that we have in our pantheon? And I thought of this season of my life where he dismantled one of mine. This god still creeps back up. I've got to keep it in check. But he exposed me to it and he dismantled it. In my early years as a pastor, I would have people say nice things to me. And sometimes they would say, you should be a senior pastor. And so people would speak potential into me. You've got a future here. Actually, the funniest thing that's ever happened, this is just an aside, it's just funny, is I preached one time at my last church when I was the, I spoke about 10 times a year, and one of my buddy's dads was there. And I preached, and we got done, and his dad came up to me. His dad came up to me. We called him, his name was Doug, but he had the largest noggin I've ever seen in my life, and so we called him Doug the Head. That was his name. So Doug the Head comes walking up to me, and he goes, man, that was, buddy, that was good. And I said, thank you so much. I appreciate that. And he goes, no, no, no, I'm telling you, I've been in the radio business for 35 years. And I go, okay, great. And he goes, no, listen, you could do that professionally. And I didn't say this, but I thought like, you know, they pay me. That was professionally. Thanks. But people would say nice things and they would speak potential into me. And I'm very sure that many of you have had people speak potential into you about different things in your life and so I carried that sense of responsibility with that potential and I had this question in my head can I actually do it and then you guys were crazy enough to find out to give give me a chance. And it went. In April of 17, there was 85 people in the room. In February of 17, there's 85 people in the room. April, there's 100. By January or by February of 2020, we had two good services. The second one was averaging about 100 people, so we reached like a critical mass. And we were averaging about 335 people a week. Bunch of kids, bunch of new folks, things are going and blowing. We do a campaign. We have more pledged than we even asked for and way more than we thought we would. And this whole time as we're growing, I'm telling people it's not about the growth. God is blessing us. This is good. This is wonderful. Nothing that we're doing is about making the church bigger, yada, yada, yada, all the things you're supposed to say. But internally, if I can just be honest, I did it. I'm somebody. Look at me go. This is all God and a little bit me. And I was proud. I was. And I can admit that now. And I'll admit now that I still struggle with that, but I fight it a lot harder and I'm a lot more honest with myself about it. Then COVID hit. So in February, two services, 335 people. Next time we had a service, it was July. There was 40 people wearing masks. If you were here during that season and you did worship with a mask on your face, it was the worst. It was terrible. You can't hear anybody. There's 35 people in the room. It was the deadest worship ever. It was awful. And I got depressed. I started seeing a therapist because all my self-worth just went out the window. And what I realized was, through conversations with him, I was worshiping at the God of respect, of approval, of accomplishment. I was worshiping at the God of proving myself to myself and to anyone paying attention. And do you know what God did with COVID? He systematically dismantled my God. Now listen, I do not want to give you the impression that I think that God orchestrated a worldwide pandemic so that he could teach a real lesson to a small church pastor in Raleigh. Okay? It's silly when we think that. But what I am saying is that he used that to dismantle my God and my life and build me back up. And here's what happened as a result of that. And as a result of the therapy and the counseling that I went through as I kind of dug and dug and dug and went, why am I worshiping at this God? What is the deal? And here's what it did. Here's the fundamental change it made in how I pastor. And it's more, this is more disclosure than I want to give, but I think it's helpful. And I think some of you can relate. I used to write sermons with the goal, I wouldn't state this, I would never say this out loud to anybody at the time, but I used to write sermons with the goal of being impressive. I wanted to impress you when I preached. When I got here, that's why I wrote sermons. Anything else I said was fluff. Obviously I wanted to serve God in all the things, but somewhere in there, I want to impress you. That's probably my main motivation. And now, my motivation is I want to help you. That's what I think about. Is this helpful? I don't think about being impressive. Not nearly as much. Sometimes I'll get caught in that trap, but not nearly as much. When God dismantled my God, I left that season of my life and I went, man, leading grace and doing my job is not about being impressive with people. It's not about growing the church. It's not about big numbers. It's about being faithful in the small things. It's about honoring people. It's about being humble and being honest and trying your best to help the people that God entrusts to you. And so what I used to do when I finished a sermon is I go and I sit in that chair. And what I used to do if I had a bad sermon, I would be upset. And the core emotion was, gosh, that was not impressive enough. And now if I sit there, and sometimes I do, and I might after this one go, gosh, that wasn't very good. It's my criticism and my response is that wasn't helpful enough. Do you see the difference? Here's my point, and here's why I'm telling you this. When we let God win, we win. When we let God win, we win. Pharaoh refused to let God win. And when he finally did, everybody won. I had a God in my life that I was not aware of. And God began to dismantle it. And it was hard to let go. But when I let God win, the people around me won. I can guess at some of the gods that we have in this room. At some of the things that you pray to. But I don't know what they are specifically for you. But I can tell you that sometimes in life, something bad happens. Maybe not plague worthy, but something hard. Our kid gets injured and can't play that sport for a while. We get laid off. They let our department go. The big client that we have bails and now we have to scramble to make up those sales. We get in debt. We get sick. Our kid's having a hard time. It's in a difficult season. Our relationship or our marriage is on the rocks and we're not sure how to repair it. I'm not saying that every single one of those things is an assault on a God in your life, but I am saying that you should stop and ask if it is. And take from the plagues, God, are you trying to win something here? Are you trying to show me that I have something positioned in my priorities and in my life that is out of whack? Have I been finding my identity in my career and not in you? Have I been finding my identity in my kids and not in you? In my house and not in you? In my wealth, in my status, in my approval and not in you? So when we see the plagues, when we're reminded of them, let's be reminded that this was a systematic assault on the pantheon of Egyptian gods, and that same God will still assault our gods and dismantle them for our sake. Because when God wins, we win. But here's the thing, and I love to point this out. You will never lose an arguing match with God. If you want to argue with God, you win. Congratulations. God will not force his hand on us. He loves us too much to do that. He will not make us do things. But he will give us points in time to reflect and say, there's something wrong here. But when God's trying to win, he'll keep a steady hand on it. But you have to let him. You win every argument you ever get into with God. But when God wins, we win. Let's pray. Father, thank you for being a God who loves us. Thank you for being a God that doesn't force yourself upon us, but that gently pushes us in different ways at different times towards you. Lord, if we have been worshiping at the altar of things that are not you, I pray that you would reveal that to us. I pray that we would see it. And I pray that you would give us a depth of conviction and courage to confess that and to move away from that, God, and to move towards you. God, this morning, it's clear to me that we have a lot of people traveling, and so I just ask that you would keep them safe and that their trips would be enriching. I pray for grace as we enter into the summer. God, would you keep your hand on us and bless us? And God, would you help us be people who let you win? In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this June Sunday. If you're watching online, thank you for joining us wherever you are and whatever you may be doing with your summer. This is Father's Day. So happy Father's Day to those to whom it applies. I am a dad myself, so I don't have to show any sensitivity about Father's Day. This is what I love about Father's Day is on Mother's Day, I saw on TikTok this week, which means it has to be true, on Mother's Day, that is the single highest call volume day of the year every year in the United States, because obviously people are calling their moms. That is not true of Father's Day. I saw that Father's Day is ranked 20th as far as like online traffic and phone calls and yada, yada, yada. And I saw a comedian say, I can't even think of 18 other holidays besides like Christmas and Mother's Day. And what I really love about Father's Day is on Mother's Day, we go out to eat, we celebrate mom, we fuss over her, we do all the things. And on Father's Day, all the dad wants is just leave me alone for a day. In some seasons of life, for a day, just leave me alone. If you want to silently snuggle with me while I watch the U.S. Open, fine. But don't tell me about your monsters today, okay? This is our day. So happy Father's Day for those to whom it applies and in all sincerity, if today for any reason is a was on the dad, I was on the phone with my dad this morning talking about Father's Day. He just mentioned to me that Moses is his favorite character in the Old Testament, and he's one of mine too. So it's going to be fun to continue to go through his life this summer. Last week, we looked at Moses in the burning bush. And I said, we're going to spend two weeks in this passage because the lessons in this passage are so profound that they're worth it. I honestly think I could spend six weeks in this passage, but I think I would bore a majority of you if I did that. I may risk boring you this morning with just two weeks, but last week we approached this passage with this, and so this is simply a reminder of how we approached last week. We are all meant to build God's kingdom. We are all meant to be kingdom builders. And I said this last week, I spent time on this last week, but I was talking to a friend who is a regular church attender who looked at the, this is in the lobby 15 minutes ago, who looked at all of the traits of grace across the glass doors on the top of it. And he goes, this looks different. What's different? Did something change here? And I said, yeah, in like September. And he's like, well, I mean, I didn't know. And he goes, what are these? I said, these are the traits of grace. And the apex trait is that we would be kingdom builders. So clearly I need to continue to repeat it so we all get it. But we are intended to build God's kingdom, not our own. And that is the conversation that's happening here where God is telling Moses, I want you to go build my kingdom in this way. This is the good work for which I created you. Now you go walk in it. And we talked last week about how we have, we looked at the five excuses of Moses that ended in, oh God, please choose someone else, which is a wonderful excuse that we all have as we seek to build God's kingdom. And as he presses on us, what we need to do to build his kingdom. But this morning, I want us to focus on one of the responses of God, where Moses asks God, what is your name? When I go, and I'll read the verses in a second, when I go, who should I say sent me? And to my recollection, I could be wrong about this, but in my recollection, I can only think of one other time where God the Father is asked a direct question and kind of his feet are held to the fire. Hey, I need to know the answer to this. Where all of humanity leans in and says, yes, God, what's the deal with this? There's instances in the gospel, because Jesus walked among us, where Pharisees or pastors by or disciples would press on Jesus and kind of demand answers from him. But we don't see this happen to God the Father, in my recollection, but one other time in scripture. And the only other time where I see God being questioned directly is in the book of Job. Now, I hesitate to bring this up this morning because I fear that I will create more questions than answers with this particular example, but I think it's worth pointing out. The book of Job, for those who don't know, a very quick synopsis. Job was the most righteous man on the earth. Satan asked God permission to mess with him, and God said, go ahead. He's not going to betray me. This is a loose paraphrase. And so things start happening to Job. He loses his family. He's wrecked with illness. It's so bad that his wife looks at him and offers the wonderful advice of curse God and die, which Jen tells me that all the time. Just twice though. It's just two times. No, but his wife offers this advice, curse God and die. His friends are offering him advice. Surely you're wrong. And he's not wrong. He's righteous and he is not sin. And he goes to God finally in Job chapter 38 after cycles. And if you've read Job, you know, after cycles of bad advice and back and forth. And he finally goes to God and he demands an answer of God. Hey, why am I suffering? And what he's asking is why are bad things happening to a good person? I, I demand an answer from you. And I had a professor in seminary that was to the whole class was on the book of Job. It was one of the best classes I ever took. And I think of Job as like theology 501. It's not 101, 201, 301, 401. It's graduate level theology. You have to develop, and this is why I hesitated to bring it up, a robust and appreciative and in-depth view of God before you can really appreciate the theology and lesson of Job. But I had a professor say that Job went to God to have a man-to-man conversation and found that he was one man short. So when Job goes to God and says, why are these things happening to me? You owe me an answer. God's response is, it's one of the best lines in the Bible. It's in Job chapter 38. You can look it up. Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Which is what I say to Lily when she argues with me. Right? Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? And you can see, you can feel it in the text. Job goes, whoops. I'm sorry. And so God starts to berate him. Where were you when I hung the earth where it goes? Where were you when I created the moon and stars? Where were you when I created the behemoth and the Leviathan? And I told the tides of the earth and the oceans that you will go this far and no further. And he starts to ask him questions. And Job says, and this is another great line, he says, I am sorry, Lord. I have spoken once. I will speak no further. And God's like, yeah, I'm not done. And he goes on for three chapters and it's the equivalent. It's, it's the conversational equivalent of that movie, uh, that came out years ago. I think it was in the nineties. This may be too old of a reference to use anymore in 2025, but a few good men when, when Tom Cruise is playing a a JAG lawyer, and is it Jack Nicholson or Nicholas? Nicholson? I always get it confused. Thank you, Jeffy. I always get it confused. Jack. We'll call him Jack. Jack Nicholson is a colonel, and he's being put on trial. And there's that great moment where he says, what do you want? And Tom Cruise, I want the truth. And Jack Nicholson screams back at him, you can't handle the truth. Right? This is what God is telling Job. It's an elaborate way of saying, until you can understand and answer the questions that I've asked you, you could not possibly understand my explanation for why I'm allowing these things to happen to you. So maybe just be quiet and trust that I am God. It's the only other time in scripture where I see God's feet being held to the fire and someone is demanding an answer. And God's answer is, yeah, I'm not telling you. Another profound time is in Jesus's life when his best friend, Mary of Beth Bethany shows up and says, why did you let this happen? And Jesus' response is, yeah, I'm just going to weep with you, but I'm not going to answer you. Similarly, in this passage, when Moses asks God, what is your name? We find God's response to be insufficient. Intuitively, it feels insufficient. But I want us to look deeper into this name of God and understand its all sufficiency. Because I think that this is probably, as far as building a theology and an understanding of who God is, one of the most, if not the most, important passage in all of Scripture, or at least the Old Testament. So let's look at these two verses in Exodus chapter 3, verses 13 and 14. And then we're going to spend the rest of the day talking about the profundity that is found within these words. Verse 13, Moses said to God, suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you. And they ask me, what is his name? Then what shall I tell them? He's holding his feet to the fire. God says to Moses, this is his answer. I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites. I am has sent me to you. And at first glance, I think we hear that and we go, what are you, Dr. Seuss? This is how you're answering this question? What is your name? When I go to the elders and I tell them that I need to lead the people out of Egypt, I need to do it in your name. What is your name, God? It's the only place in scripture where God has asked his name. God has many names in scripture. We see most often in the Hebrew Elohim, but Elohim is a placeholder for God. It just means God or Lord in the Hebrew language, but that's how he's most often referred to. And we see other names of God that are given to him by us. I jotted down a few. We see El Roy. When Hagar says that he is the God who sees, he's called El Shaddai, which means all sufficient. He is called Jehovah Jireh, which means he is the God who provides. He's called Adonai, which means Lord and Master. Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals. And Jehovah Shalom, the God of peace. When I was growing up, my mom cross-stitched. Raise your hand. Anybody in here ever cross-stitched? Has anybody done that? David McWilliams. I'm expecting all women, David McWilliams, knocking it out of the park. Good job. Good job representing the dudes with cross-stitching. My mom does that. And in the church lobby, in the church where I grew up, she had cross-stitched this big list of more than a dozen names of the names of God. But these names were ascribed to him by us. God does not name himself, except in this passage, where he says, I am. You tell them I am has sent you. And before I get into kind of the points that I want to make this morning, I do want us to pause here in reverence of the holiness of that. And I do think it's important to revere this moment. So I'm not preaching to you or at you right now. I am sharing with you so that we might feel the weight of what is happening here. These words, I am, were so holy that the Hebrew scribes and rabbis refused to give that a word. They wrote initials. In English, it's translated Y-H-W-H, Yahweh. And we sing, who pulled me out of that grave? He did, he did, Yahweh, Yahweh. And we just sing it and we declare it. But they held that name so much more preciously than we do. I don't think, I tried to think of something that would be relevant in our culture for how they held it. And there's nothing because Americans are irreverent by nature. But this name was so holy that they dared not speak it. They would not say out loud Yahweh. That's why he's referred to as Elohim in the Old Testament. Because they dared not say the name Yahweh. It was unspeakable. And when they had to write it in scripture, they would pause. They would be transcribing scripture, copying it from one piece of paper to another, from one scroll to another. And when they got to Yahweh, where they would see that in the text, they would pause and get up and go ceremonially wash their hands and kneel and pray and then sit back down at their desk and write those four characters and then pause and pray again and then continue with their work. We have no parallel for that kind of reverence in our culture. But this is how the Hebrew people held God's name. This is how sacred this moment is. And I just wanted to say that to you so you would feel the weight of what's happening in this passage. Now, as we jump back and we kind of ask the question, how do we process that? How do we process I am? I am who I am. You tell them I am sent you. There's really two things I would point out here. There's certainly more to learn from this name. But I think this name is frustrating because it's insufficient. It feels dodgy. It feels like God is evading the question. And in some ways he is, but when we understand why, we'll be grateful for that. Because it's's wonderfully so but the first thing that I would that I would say about this name that we should learn and that we should know and that we should reflect on is that when God says I am what he means is this I am all that you need all the time I am all that you need all the time. I am all that you need all the time. In the ancient world, cultures developed pantheons of gods. And the context in which we find this, the Egyptians were the major power. They had a pantheon of gods. And next week, as we look at the 10 plagues, we're going to see how those 10 plagues were a direct assault on 10 of the gods of Egypt. There was, there's pantheons of God. If you studied North Norse mythology, there's pantheons of gods and Viking lore. There's pantheons of gods to the, to the, to the Celtics. There's pantheons of gods to the Greeks and to the Romans, every major society, the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mayas, they've all had these pantheons of gods. And the Jewish tradition is the first one to come out and say, no, no, no, we have one God. And he is all that we need. He is Jehovah Jireh. He is all sufficient. He is all the things. And so when God says, I am, he says, I am all that you need all of the time. I am all sufficient. I am El Roy. I am the God who sees. But you are not going to call me El Roy and suspect that I am only the God who sees because I am also El Shaddai and I am all sufficient. But I'm not just going to limit myself to El Shaddai because I am also Adonai, your Lord and master, and you need to follow me. But I'm not just going to call myself that because I'm also Jehovah Rapha and I heal. And you should pray to me in times that you need. But I'm not just Jehovah Rapha or just Adonai, the Lord and Master. I am also Jehovah Shalom, the God of peace. And I give that to you when you need it. I am all that you need all of the time. And this is wonderful. This is wonderful because we don't need the same God in every situation. We need certain things at certain times. And while I'm here, just let me step aside and say this. We also, for my Catholic brothers and sisters, don't need a patron saint of healing. We don't need a patron saint of fertility. We don't need an additional saint to advocate to our God because our God says, I am. I am. You can pray to me. And what I find wonderful about this is sometimes what we need from God is for him to pick us up. Sometimes we are on the map. And we need the God who heals and encourages. And we need him to lift us up. And we need him to breathe life into us. And we need him to help us see hope and joy again. And we need a God to build us up. But sometimes we need a God to tear us down. Sometimes we're killing it. And we get a little full of ourselves. And we think we're somebody. And we need God to bring us down. We need God to send us to the desert for 40 years to humble us, to prepare us for the work. We need the God that sent David into the wilderness for 20 years to humble him before he could lead. We need the God that sent Paul into the wilderness for seven years to humble him before he could preach. And then other time, Moses needs the God to pick him up and to encourage him and to say, I will supply you with all that you need. Sometimes we need God to bring us low. We need the God of humility. Sometimes we need the God of encouragement. Sometimes we need the God who heals. Sometimes we need the God who hurts for our own sake. Sometimes we need the God of wisdom so that we might speak wise words into a moment. And sometimes we need the God of wisdom so that we might shut up and not say dumb words in the moment. God is all that we need all of the time. And here's what I like about this answer. There's this old Seinfeld bit. And, you know, just for the record, I love Seinfeld. He's the best. It's a running joke in my friend group that I may as well be Larry David's spirit animal. There's a lot of similarities there in our views on life. You take that for what it's worth. But there's this old bit where Seinfeld talks about getting on a plane and how the plane will come over the intercom. And he's like, yeah, passengers, this is Gary. This is your captain speaking. We're going to go up to about, we're going to take off in another 15, 20 minutes here. We're going to go up to 30,000 feet. We expect to cruise all the way to New York City. There's a little pocket of clouds and thunderstorms over West Virginia, so we're probably going to just go around that. And then we expect a smooth landing when we get there. And Seinfeld's like, yeah, whatever. I'm going to get on the plane. You take off. You land in New York. I don't need to know all the details. I don't care what you're going to do. Fly directly through the storm. It doesn't matter. Just land me in New York in an hour. That's what I need from you. I don't need to understand all the things. And this passage to me is God going, what, do you want me to explain it all to you? Do you really want Gary, your pilot to be telling you over the intercom, the, the, the, the nitty gritty of what's going to happen through life? Just sit down, get on the plane, buckle your seatbelt. I'll bring you some peanuts in a minute. And then we're going to land in New York when we're supposed to. All right. I am, I got this, whatever you need, I am your God. And so what we see is that what we think of as an insufficient answer in its insufficiency is all sufficient in its lack of clarity is perfectly clear in In what we would perceive as a lack of meaning and an incomplete answer, upon further reflection, what we find is it's fully complete. Because he says, I am. I am all that you need all of the time. And here's the other thing that we see in this answer. And I've made this point before. I made it in FAQs when we talked about doubts. But I think it's such an important point that we need to reflect on it as much as we can. The other thing that this answer means, beyond I am all that you need all the time, is this. I will not be confined to your boxes. You will not name me. I will not limit myself to El Shaddai, to El Roy, to Jehovah Rapha, to Jehovah Nisi. I will not limit myself. Jordan spoke very eloquently about Emmanuel God with us. But that is not all I will be. I will be more than that. I will be all sufficient. And you and I will not be limited to your boxes. And I love this idea. That we are constantly trying to understand God and limit him. We're constantly trying to put him in boxes. And God says, when we hold his feet to the fire, in one instance in Job, when it's like, hey, what's the deal? Why are you letting this happen to me? God says, you can't handle the truth. All right. So just worship me as sovereign God and trust me to get you where you need to go. And in the second case where his feet are at, are held to the fire, he says, yeah, I'm not good. What's your name? And God said, I'm not going to give you that, man. I'm not going to tell you that. I'm not going to let you name me. I'm not going to let you confine me with a title. Because I can't be reduced to a name. And if I give you that, you'll try to put handles on me and confine me to what that is. And that's not who I want to be. And what's remarkable to me is how little Christians acknowledge this. God never intended to be fully understood. Do you know that? God never intended to be fully understood. If you sit down and you read the Bible cover to cover, when I know many of you have, you'll take away a lot of things from that experience. But one of the things a thoughtful reader will take away from that experience is, goodness, it doesn't really seem like God's that interested in being completely understood by us. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about it, but he had all the chances in the world. He wrote the Bible. He could have made it more clear than this. What are we doing with Esther, man? What's that about? He could have made it more clear. He could have made it a systematic theology. In my seminary and in my training, I took a class called, I think it was two or three systematic theologies where there was this very thick book where the author and all of his wisdom and all of his learning tried to write down all of the things about God. This is how we understand who God is. And these are the boxes and this is how they go. And this is how things relate. And when this happens, this is why. And when this happens, this is why. And it's a book intended to give you a full and robust and workable and applicable theology of God. And the reason that you don't understand why things happen is because you haven't read systematic theology. But I have, and I understand, and now I'm the pastor, and I'm going to explain God to you in this perfectly systematic way that holds up in all the seasons of life. Isn't that dumb? Now listen, that's an easy joke. The men and women who write those are very learned and very thoughtful and would probably agree with my sentiment that it is an adequate effort. So I'm not trying to deride those books. I'm just saying it's tilting at windmills to try to write them. God, do you ever think about this? God waited thousands of years to give us the rules. He gives the law to Moses. We'll talk about that in a couple of weeks. He could have given the rules to Adam. All right, Adam, here's the one rule. Don't eat the fruit on that tree. Oh, you did it. Well, shoot. Well, here are the rules. He didn't do that. He could have given the rules to Noah. He destroys the whole world with the flood. Noah and Hamshim and Japheth are left and their wives. And he could have said, okay, you guys kind of screwed it up that last time. So for the reboot, here are the rules. No. Could have given them to Enoch, who was so righteous that he lived and then he was with God. Could have given them to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph. He didn't. He waited thousands of years and he gave them to Moses. If God's goal was to be perfectly understood, wouldn't he have done that sooner? Wouldn't Jesus have spoken in more clarity than intentionally speaking in riddles to thin the herd? Didn't God have every opportunity to present himself to us in a perfectly systematic way that fits inside a book so we can understand him all the time? Yeah. He had every opportunity to do that, but he didn't. So either God's dumb or we're silly for thinking that we can understand him and reduce him to our intellect. And so when God says, you tell them I am sent you, he is saying, yes, I am all that you need for all of the things. But he's also saying, no chance, buddy. I'm not telling you what my name is. I'm not going to let you reduce me to that because you can't possibly understand me. And despite that message being replete throughout scripture, we skip over that and we continue to pursue our systematic theologies to try to understand him. We're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's just for David. Yeah, yeah, that's just for them. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Let me try to understand God. And we can't. And we try really hard to understand God. We try so hard to understand God and what he's done that we have this organization called CERN in France and Switzerland. And it is one of, if not the greatest scientific achievements in our generation. That's right. If you're over 60, I just lumped you into my generation. Okay. So we're all one generation today. It's one of the greatest achievements we've ever seen. It's, it's a Hadron collider that's under the ground on the border of France and Switzerland. It's 27 kilometers long and it has magnets inside of it that are colder than space. I don't know how that works. I just read it on their website. Okay. I'm not making this up. Colder than space. I would assume they mean like the cold parts of space and not like next to the sun. That'd be really easy. And what they do is they speed particles around this cylinder, around this tube, under the ground, and they slam them into each other. And the whole point of it is to try to figure out what happened at creation. They are literally simulating the Big Bang. And they're learning all that they can about the way that particles, and I don't know the right words, protons, neurons, whatever. I didn't pay attention in chemistry. My science teacher in high school was a retired Vietnam vet named Mr. Owens. And if you just sat with your test long enough and went to him and said, I don't understand number 10, he'd go, here you go, baby. And he'd write down the answer. You go, thank you. And then you go back to your seat. And then you just wait a few minutes. Mr. Owens, I don't understand number 11. And you think I'm kidding. There was a constant line of three or four dudes. It was always dudes in line to talk to Mr. Owens about the test. And he'd fill it out for you. You go, okay, thank you. And then you'd get an A. So I don't know the words for the things. I think electrons are involved. But they would slam together. And then they would the reaction. And they do it over and over and over again. And they've learned so many things. But do you know that at the height of human achievement, trying to understand the nature of the universe and what God created and how he created it in our terms, that's not what they say they would be doing. Some of them might be believers. I really don't know, but they've created more questions than answers. They've gone in with a theory, a standard theory, and they've tried to disprove it and they can't, but they don't understand why they can't. They're watching particular particles behave and they assume certain things about those particles. And then their experiments reveal to them that the things that they have assumed are not right, but they cannot explain the behavior of those particles. And so the more they dig into God's universe, the more questions they have about how it works, the less clarity that is brought about. Now, they're better questions. They're learned questions. They're more important questions. And here's what I would say, too, just a careful caveat. I've sat in rooms before where a Christian pastor was deriding atheistic scientists. They don't know what we know. They're not as smart as we are. That's dumb. They are. They're smarter than me. They have more degrees than me. They're very learned. They're paying attention to everything. I'm not questioning their intelligence at all. All I'm pointing out is at the apex of human understanding, as we seek to understand God and who he is, we just develop more questions than answers. And here's what I know for sure, that they't know because they can simulate what happens milliseconds after the big bang, milliseconds after creation. But if you say, okay, so those particles slammed into each other and then universe happened. Yes. Great. Where did the particles come from? We don't know. What activated them in such a way that they would collide with each other? We don't know. Does this point to a God? We don't know. Einstein himself, as he studied the fabric of the universe, concluded there must be some intelligence orchestrating the things happening behind us. We try and we try and we try to understand our God. And he told us in Exodus, stop, you can't. We can know our God. We can know his character. We can know that we can trust him. We can know that he loves us. We can trust that he created us. There are things about our God that are revealed to us. There are things about him and about his character that he does choose to share with us. And we can take comfort and solace and courage and faith in those things. But what we cannot do is seek to fully understand him. Because at the burning bush, when Moses holds his feet to the fire and he says, what is your name? God says, no, I am. I'm all that you need and you will not not understand me. And you will not confine me to your intellect. I am too big for that. And so, when we encounter God, and we look at the name Yahweh, and we hold it with the reverence that it deserves. We should respond to God with awe-filled wonder. The same way that Moses did. The same way that the saints of the Old Testament do. The same way that Paul does when he's confronted on the Damascus Road. We should, as believers, respond to God first with awe-filled wonder. This is why Proverbs tells us that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Because until we respond to God as he intended us to respond at the revelation of his name being I am, we cannot hope to understand the rest of scripture and appreciate it and him for what he is. And in all actuality, we should be thanking God for answering Moses' question in that way. Because it feels like an insufficient answer, but upon further thought, it reveals his all-sufficiency. It feels like he's shortchanging us, that he's being dodgy and that he's being mysterious, but what he's doing, he's doing us a favor. Because we can say, thank you, God, for being the God who heals. Thank you, God, for being the God who humbles. Thank you, God, for being the God that lifts up. Thank you, God, for being the God that is sufficient, that brings peace, that brings everything that I need. Thank you for being the God who provides. Thank you, God, for being the God who sees. And thank you, God, for loving us enough for not allowing us to limit you to the boxes we'd like to put you in. Thank you, God, for being so wild and so wonderful and so awe-inspiring that you're too big for a name. So the right response to Moses in the burning bush is to be filled with awestruck wonder and to say, thank you, God, for how big you are and for apparently how much you love me. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are and what you've done. Thank you for in telling us your name, not telling us. We thank you that you are. That you are who you are and you always will be who you are. Thank you for the solace and the comfort and the peace that we find in that. God, we thank you that there are ways to understand you, that there are ways to know you, that there are ways to become familiar with you. But God, we also thank you for being so wild and so wonderful that you will not fit in our boxes. Thank you for being a God that's bigger than we understand. Thank you for who you are and how you've loved us. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's so good to see everybody. I've got a lot of people sitting in seats that they don't normally go in. I don't know what you're doing over there, Zach, DJ, Laura, what in the world? I'm totally distracted. And just, I need to give you a peek behind the scenes before I just dive into the sermon like there's nothing happening in my life. I know I'm jovial now. This is serious. Yesterday, my sister-in-law, Jen's sister, Lauren, was in a really bad car accident and has just a lot of broken bones and is currently in surgery. The doctors say that she will recover and walk again, which is just a wild sentence to hear about your sister-in-law on a normal Saturday. So Jen was doing something yesterday afternoon, got home, grabbed Lily, and fired down to Athens, Georgia. So she's down there. So I've got John. Normally on a Sunday morning, I get up at 5, I shower, I come into the office, I'm locked in at 545, I run through the sermon, and I just kind of steep it and I try not to let anything distract me and I just focus on that. And then at about 930, I come over here and I glad hand you guys and pretend like I'm not trying to think about my sermon. But I'm just focused on that for most of the morning. This morning I was getting John ready, right? And so just all the scramble of that and getting a toddler ready and kind of run through my sermon, juggling Bluey and Lucky Charms and then coming back and trying to go through it. And then at 9.20, I'm like, okay, I'm ahead of the game. This is really good. It's time to go to church. I've got plenty of time. And I go to get all my things, and I'm like, I don't know where my car key is. I can't find my car key. And so I just start frantically looking for my car key and at 935 I called our good friend Anna Johnson and I was like, hey I think I need a ride to church. You have a car seat. She had pulled in the parking lot. She was like, all right coming to get you. And so she came around and as we pulled up I said, Anna park front and center because this is a great look for me to show up with you at church while my wife is out of town. So when I say, I don't know what's about to come out of my mouth, it's honest. All right. And if you're sitting there thinking, is this an elaborate way for him to excuse a potentially terrible sermon? Yeah, that is. All right. It's June. Ride with me. In one way, I'm completely frazzled and off center on the sermon and I'm just really hoping and praying that the Lord will order my steps and my thoughts because I want to do justice to this passage because it's one that I love so much. In another way, and I'm reminded of this by the Holy Spirit from time to time, God's been preparing this sermon in my heart and in my head for 20 years. I love this passage. I love where we are. We are at Moses and the burning bush. And I love it so much that we're going to spend two weeks here. We're going to look this week at the five excuses of Moses and how we can relate to those. And the next week we're going to come back to what God says his name is, I am, because that is an amazing statement worthy of camping on for a week. As we arrive here this morning, what I want to bring to mind is something that we talk about often at Grace, and it's intentional. A few years ago, a good friend of mine was kind of pressing me. What do you want for Grace? What do you want to produce at Grace? What do you want to be about? I knew, based on past church experiences, what I didn't want to be, but he was pressing me into what do you want to be? What do you want grace to be? And that's how I arrived at that phrase that we use here all the time, kingdom builders. At grace, I want to produce a church full of kingdom builders. We have five traits at grace. If you leave, if you go out those doors, on the wall, over the glass windows and over the doors are the five traits of grace. People of devotion, step-takers, partners, conduits of grace, and kingdom builders. Those are all out there. That's who we want you to be. And the apex of that is to be a kingdom builder, someone who builds God's kingdom. And the idea is simply this. We acknowledge at Grace that we all spend our lives building a kingdom. The question is, whose kingdom are you building? Are you going to waste your life building your little fiefdom? And maybe you're really good at it, and you leave an inheritance and a legacy that lasts for a generation or two. But eventually it will pass away. Are you going to invest your life building your kingdom? Or are you going to invest your life building God's kingdom? And so at Grace, the goal is to have a church full of kingdom builders. People who understand that every gift, every talent, all the time, all the treasure that I've ever been given is to be leveraged to help build God's eternal kingdom, not my sorry temporary one. That's what we try to press on you over and over and over again. And it's my desire to have a church full of activated kingdom builders who understand that every gift they've ever been given is to be used to build God's kingdom, not their own. It's why I so often return to Ephesians 2.10 that says, we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. And so the idea here is when God knit you in your mother's womb, he had for you good works for you to walk in. Just like he had good works for Moses to walk in. And it's your job as an adult to find those good works and to faithfully walk in them. Parents, it's your job to help your children identify their good works and encourage them and inspire them to walk in them with trust and fidelity to their God. This is what we talk about at Grace all the time. And when we talk about kingdom builders, I'm talking about things big and small. Some of us have big God-sized dreams that we don't dare give breath to because we're afraid people might judge us or that it's impossible and we shy away from it. Others of us have small God dreams right now of just repairing our marriage or a relationship or just growing in our own faith or just getting to a place where we can actually reliably and dutifully disciple our own children. I don't know what the size of your dreams are and I don't know what God has placed on your heart, but here's what I do know. And here's what I am certain of that. God has given you something that he wants you to do. God is pressing on you to take a step of obedience, to build his kingdom, whether that's through generosity, whether that's through a relationship, whether it's realizing that you have been placed in your workplace to be a pastor there, not to forward and advance your career there. That's secondary to your primary role of being a missionary and a pastor in your workplace. Maybe it's simply to prepare your marriage, to repair your marriage. Maybe it's to start a ministry. Maybe it's to start a small group. Maybe it's to start a Bible study. Maybe it's to volunteer somewhere and get involved in a nonprofit. I don't know what God is pressing on each of you to do, but I am certain that he's pressing something somewhere. And so this morning is only going to work if you can lock into that. If you can lock into what that is, and you can ask God, God, what are you pressing on me to do? What should I think about? What should I consider? What's my next step of obedience? What would you have me start? What would you have me stop so I can start? What would you have me do? What conversation would you have me initiate? What neighbor would you have me reach out to? What Bible study would you have me start? What nonprofit would you have me volunteer with? This sermon only works if you're willing to lock into what God has for you to do to build his kingdom. I kind of feel a little bit this morning, this isn't completely true because I do think it's universally applicable if you'll tap into it and let it be, but I kind of feel this morning that this is almost an old school Marine recruitment tactic. I've heard stories of a guy that signed up for the Marines and there was an assembly at a school and the different armed forces, armed services came and they presented, this is why you should join the Army. This is why you should join the Navy, the Air Force. And they kind of did, this is awesome. You get to fly planes. You get to do this. You get to do this. You get to do this. And the Marine goes last. And the Marine comes up, and a lot of you guys know how this story goes. The Marine comes up, and he says, I've been watching you all. There's three, maybe four of you that have what it takes to be a Marine. If you think that's you, I'll be at my desk. That's it. That's the talk. Who has the most recruits? The Marine. Right. That's what I feel like this morning is. This sermon is not for everybody. Some of you are not ready for it. You're just not. That's okay. But some of you are. And if it's you, I want to press you this morning to answer God's call and to step into the obedience to which he is calling you. So let's press in together and learn from the example of Moses at the burning bush. goes out. Remember, as a young man, he walked out of the palace one day, and he saw Egyptian guards beating some Hebrews, some of his brethren, and he went to their defense, and he was so angry and virulent in his defense that he ended up murdering the two guards that were beating the Hebrew people, and so he had to flee. And he went to a place called Midian, and Midian had a priest named Jethro, and Jethro had seven daughters, and one of them was named Zipporah, and Moses married her. And he spent 40 years in the desert as a shepherd, long gone from his previous life in the palace. And one day he's shepherding, and an angel of the Lord appears to him, and there's a bush that's being burned but not consumed and he walks up to it. And in the subsequent reading, what you'll find is that the bush tells him, take your shoes off. You are on holy ground. And he realizes that he's in the very presence of God and God asks him to go do something. God, in our vernacular, we would say, God says, this is how I want you to go build my kingdom. Go and do this. And he tells Moses, I need you to go to Pharaoh, and I need you to tell him to let my people go. And I know that I alluded to this last week, but I want us to be on the same page as far as this ask, because it's a ludicrous ask, right? For some farmer to come, some shepherd from the wilderness to come into the most powerful palace in the world and walk up to the most powerful man in the world and say, I need you to let your slaves go. Let's understand that it's not just slaves and it's not just the ego of that, but this is his very economy. This is how he gets things done. If he lets the Hebrew people go, it's not just, well, that was a possession that we had and now we don't have it anymore. If he lets them go, it's, this is my workforce. This is how I get things done. This is how I pay the bills. This fundamentally changes the foundation of my country. So it's a pretty big ask. And God says, I want you, Moses, to make that ask. And Moses, in this discourse with God, offers five excuses. And I think that they're, I think that they're wonderful. I think it's a really a delightful discourse if you read it and you open your mind to what it must have been like to be there. And I think that we have this discourse with God, whatever you say, whatever, whatever is in your heart that God is calling you to do, however, God wants you to build his kingdom. And here's what I would say about being kingdom builders. One of the reasons we phrase it this way is some churches are, they're the orphan church at this church. We care for orphans and that's wonderful. At this church, we do prison ministry at this church. We do missions missions. At this church, we do children's. At this church, we do outreach to the unhoused. Whatever it may be, some churches have a specific thing that they funnel everyone to. And that's wonderful and good. And I would not deride any of those. Those are always choices between better and best. But at Grace, what we said is, I don't want to direct you where I think God wants you to go. I want you to walk with God and go where he would have you go. And if you can build his kingdom from here, wonderful. If you need to leave this church to go and build God's kingdom elsewhere, good. Be a kingdom builder. So that's our heart. And I don't know what God is calling you to as he seeks to use you to build his kingdom. But I do know that whatever is in your head and whatever you think it might be, we have some of the same excuses that Moses has at the burning bush. And so here's the first one in verse 11 of chapter 3 after God has told him what he wants to do. But Moses said to God, who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt? Who am I that I could possibly do this? I'm nobody, God. I'm a shepherd. I've been a shepherd for 40 years. No one's going to listen to me. You've got the wrong guy. And this is our natural instinct too. I know somebody who's very dear to me that every time they think of an idea of what God would have them do, they have this voice in their head that probably needs some counseling that pops up that says, who do you think you are? You're not going to do that. You're not going to follow through with that. You're not actually going to do it. And so I would be willing to bet that even as I pressed upon you, what's your thing? What does God want you to do? How can you tomorrow begin to build his kingdom? What steps of obedience can you take? For many of us in this room, our very first thought, if we even had the guts to identify that and say it out loud, speak it to ourselves, I bet for a lot of us the very next thought was, who do you think you are? Who am I that you would send me to do that? I'm not going to, that person's not going to listen to me. No one's going to come to my Bible study. I can't be a pastor in my workplace. They know who I am. And we begin like Moses to disqualify ourselves. So it's helpful to look at God's response when he says, who am I? And God said, I will be with you. And this will be a sign that it is I who have sent you. You have brought the people out of Egypt. You will worship God on this mountain. He's like, I'm going to be with you. I will come back here. And so if God is calling you to something, he will be with you in it. But that's Moses's first excuse. So Moses says, who am I? And God says, it doesn't matter who you are. It matters who I am. I'll be with you. Don't worry about it. God swats it aside. And Moses says, okay, I've got another one. Here's my other excuse. Here's his next question. Verse 13. I'm just going to read straight through so you guys can get a sense of the passage. And God said, I will be with you. And this will be a sign that it is I who has sent you. When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain. Verse 13. Moses said to God, suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you. And they asked me, what is his name? Then what shall I tell them? And then this won't be on the screen, but verse 14 is, this is where we're going to spend all of our time next week. It's maybe the most amazing verse in Scripture. God said to Moses, I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites. I am has sent me to you. This is where we get the name of God. I am. And that's what we're going to talk about next week. This name of God is so powerful that 4,000 years later, Jesus is being arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane by 300 guards of the high priest. And they go to him and they say, are you Jesus of Nazareth? And he says, I am. And those words knock over all 300 guards. These are powerful words. God says, I am. But let's look at what Moses is asking. Okay, okay, all right, all right. I'm going to go back to my people. I'm going to go to the elders of the Hebrews. I'm going to say, God has sent me from Midian here to free our people, and I need your support as I go to Pharaoh and begin to negotiate our release. When I do that, God, this is something you think is possible, which is ridiculous. When I do that, who should I say sent me? What is your name? We're going to talk about God's answer to that next week. But here's the point of Moses' question for this week. Moses is asking, God, will you put your name on this? Will you put your name on this mission? Is this something you are behind? Is this something you are supporting? Am I doing this in your name or am I doing this in my own name? And when we feel that God has directed us to build his kingdom in a certain way, it is right and good to pause and say, God, are you putting your name on this? Because if God's name is on it, then he will see it through. But if God's name is not, then it is on us. And that is not good. So before we take a step of faith and obedience and walk, we need to be sure that God's name is on it. A few weeks ago in FAQ, I was talking about how can we be certain that we have heard from God? How do we know that we know that we know? And I said, you can test him sometimes. Look at what Gideon did with the fleece. God, make this wet and the ground dry. Okay, God, that was a neat trick. Make this dry and the ground wet. Okay, God, thank you. Now I know that I know that I know that your name is on this project and you want me to go do it. It's good to ask if God has put his name on something before we go. I remember at my previous church, and this is one of those moments where I hope that no one from my previous church is listening to my sermons because it's a little bit disparaging and I don't mean it to be. It's just a good illustration of this. My senior pastor was a guy named Jonathan who gave me tremendous opportunities and is still supportive to this day and is really wonderful as a human. And we, at the time, were running three services, 9.30, 10.30, or 11 and noon or something like that. Yeah, 9, 10.30 and noon. And so we were redlining. And those were pretty full. Noon wasn't very full, but we were redlining as a church. And we had some people who wanted to come, but we had a lot of them in the service industry. And so they weren't able to make it to Sunday morning because they were paramedics or nurses or servers or whatever. And Sunday morning was difficult for them. So Jonathan got the idea, let's do a 5 p.m. service. Let's have a Sunday evening service for folks that have to work on Sunday mornings or just would rather come to that. Betty and Steve Rock would love that. They would be the first to sign up. They bug me about it every week. Sorry, Beth. We're not doing it today. And he said, let's do this. But I don't want to preach it. That's too much work. And I don't want our band to have to do it. That's too much work for our volunteers, which about the second point, he was right. About the first point, come on, man, just go preach. But he didn't want to preach it. So he said, we're going to show a video and I'm going to be too tired to run it. So Nate, you be the campus pastor for the 5 p.m. service. You make it go. Recruit people to set up pipe and drape to make the auditorium smaller for the amount of people that are going to be there. Recruit a band, run it, recruit all the volunteers. You're the campus pastor of that service. You be in charge of it. You make it go. It was a big task. And as he and I were talking about it, I remember one day in his office, I looked at him and I said, I just need to know one thing, Jonathan. Do you feel that this is something that God has directed you to do? In today's language for this sermon, I would say, has God put his name on this to you? Has I am sent you? Because I knew that it was going to be discouraging and I knew that it was going to be hard and I knew that it was going to be a tough sell. And I knew that I was going to have to lean on some relationships and some friendships to make this thing go. And I didn't know if it was going to be successful. But I knew that if God put his name on it, that it was going to flourish. And so in those moments of discouragement, I needed to know that Jonathan felt that God had put his name on this and sent him to do it and said, yes, go and execute this thing. Because in those moments of discouragement, I could lean on that moment. That's what I needed. And so I asked him, is this something that you feel strongly God has asked you to and directed you to do? Because if it is, I can have confidence as I walk into it. And his response was, well, let's just see if it works. And I knew it was doomed. I gave it my best effort. We lasted 10, 12 weeks and we folded up the tent. God's name wasn't on it. It's important to say who is sending me? Whose name is on this? We need to know that. And so God says, my name's on it. I am. We're going to talk more next week about what that name means. But he says, you have me. You tell them I am sent you. I'm putting my name on this mission, on this instruction to go build my kingdom. You go. And so Moses says, okay. And you would think that this would be enough. That Moses says, who am I to go? And God says, don't worry about who you are. You worry about who I am. And Moses says, well, I don't have the ability. And he says, I'm going to supply you with the ability. And God says, well, who should I say, send me? And he says, yeah, I will send you. Okay, put my name on it. You're good. You should think that would be enough. But Moses has another excuse. In chapter 4, verse 1. After this whole discourse, this I am, I'm going to give you the power. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. Moses' response, because he's human, is, what if they do not believe me or listen to me and say the Lord did not appear to you? Moses says, no one's going to believe me. No one's going to listen to me. I'm going to go and I'm going to say, hey, God sent me and you guys have been in these moments. Or someone tells you that God has told them to do a thing and because we're jerks, our skeptical minds go, did he? So Moses says, I'm going to go and say that I'm doing this in your name and no one's going to believe me. I'm a shepherd from Midian. No one's going to buy this. What do I do? And God's response is really amazing. God says, do you see the staff in your hand? Moses, we presume, based on the text, is holding a staff. And he says, yeah. And God goes, throw it down. Moses threw it on the ground and it became a serpent. And God said, pick it back up. Moses bends down and he grabs the serpent and it becomes a staff. And God says, that's nothing, buddy. I've got a lot more of these in my back pocket. If anybody needs proof that you're with me, I'll give you a sign when you need it. You're fine. It's this little wink. I'm going to take care of you. I'm going to show you. And I believe that God is still in the business of doing these things. I believe that God is still in the business of winking at us. He may not turn your staff into a serpent and your serpent into a staff, but he will show you. If there's something that you think God wants you to do and you're trepidatious about it and you don't even dare breathe it and speak it out loud because it makes you so nervous and it makes you so worried. If there is something that you believe God is pressing on you to do and you're not sure if you should do it, God will give you those staff moments. He will give you those winks where he tells you that he is with you. I've had so many of those at Grace, so many of them. It's not very many times that I've been brought to a place where I'm thinking about maybe I need to quit. This is too hard. This is too difficult. Maybe I just need to get out of the way so they can get a real pastor that actually cares about others and things like that. Thanks. Maybe I need to get out of the way. Maybe I'm not in the right job. Maybe I need to quit. I'm just so discouraged. And the very next day, God turns a staff into a serpent. He encourages me in this uniquely God way. And I go, okay, all right, we're in. I remember, I guess it was last week, I mentioned Memorial Day is very special to me at Grace. And so I always preach on Memorial Day because of how grateful I am for what God has done on Memorial Day. It was the first year that I was here. And when I got here in 2017, it was a bad scene. To say it was a dumpster fire is actually a disservice to dumpster fires. It was really bad. If they didn't hire some poor schlep in April, they were not going to make it out of May. It's just where we were. We were in debt. It was bad. And at the time, we were looking week to week at offering. And when I got here and I saw the finances, I just said, I just made it my prayer, God, please don't let us go into any more debt over the summer. Please just let us get through the summer because the summer is bad giving months, just typically at a church. I said, just let us make it through the summer without accruing any debt. And then maybe we can start to chip away at it in the fall. That was my prayer. And we were coming to the end of May. Memorial Day is the last weekend of May. And we needed, I don't remember the numbers, so just go with me, but I think we needed about $11,000 a week to stay afloat. I have no idea what it is now. Probably $47,000. That's how much we need every week. Just give it. But we needed like $11,000 to stay afloat. And that particular week, we needed $13,000 to come in. And again, don't quote me on these numbers, but these are approximate. We need $13,000 to come in just to not go into debt and be able to pay our bills in May. And I remember praying that week, God, please allow $13,000 to come in, which on its face is an absurd prayer because Memorial Day in church world, we all know it's one of the lowest attendance attended and lowest giving Sundays of the year, Memorial Day and Labor Day. So the idea that we would need to bring in whatever it was, 15, 10 to 20% more on a particular week. That was a holiday weekend where nobody comes and nobody gives was an absurd prayer. It was a miracle in and of itself, but I remember praying it. God just let $13,000 come in. And we get to the Tuesday. Tuesday is when I learned what the giving was from our finance director, and I'm just refreshing my email, waiting for it to come in to see if God delivered on this prayer. And I got the email and I frantically click on it and $13,000 did not come in. $28,500 did. It was the largest Sunday of giving of 2017 until December. It was amazing. And I saw God turn my staff into a serpent. And then my serpent into a staff. And he said, I'm here. I got you. I'm with you. Let's go. You're in my hands. And there have been other moments. And so now what I say about grace, Aaron Winston likes it when I say this, God likes grace. I don't know why. He just does. Look at us. Who would have thought? He just likes us. And he's just rooting for us. And he's with us. And he shows up in these amazing ways when he turns our staff into a serpent and our serpent into a staff. And if God is calling you to do something and you have a moment's hesitation about it, I'm certain if you pray for it and if you look for it, he will turn that staff into a serpent for you too. And he will turn that serpent into a staff. Just give him a chance to show up and wink at you. But once he does, walk in faith. Once he does, walk in courage. But don't be like Moses, because Moses saw that cool trick and he's like, yeah, great. But how about this? Fourth excuse. Exodus 4, 10. Moses said to the Lord, I mentioned this last week, Pardon your servant, Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue. This is a legitimate gripe. We talked about last week that scholars believe that this probably indicates that he had a speech impediment of some sort, that Moses more than likely stuttered or had some other thing that kept him from speaking eloquently. He was not silver-tongued. He was not charming. Moses was not the guy. There's some people that when you go to dinner and they sit on a certain side of the table and you're on the other side of the table, you're bummed out because all the fun's down there and I have to talk to stupid matt down here you know it's just a bummer you want to be with this guy moses wasn't that guy moses for the sake of this illustration was matt sorry matt that's what you get for sitting on the front row pal he wasn't eloquent he wasnspoken. And how is he supposed to go in to the most powerful man in the world and make these negotiations? How is he supposed to do this? God, you've called me to this thing, but it's not in my skill set. That's not what I'm good at. You want me to be like Chief Shepard? We can talk about that. You want me to go negotiate with the most powerful man in the world? I'm not silver-tongued. I can't do this. So he says, I'm not qualified. I don't have the skill set for that. And I would be willing to bet that if there's something that God is pressing on you, something you need to start, something you need to stop, a conversation you need to initiate, a relationship that you need to patch up, a step of obedience that he wants you to take, I'd be willing to bet that for a lot of us, we kind of go, we disqualify ourselves. We go, I don't have the right skill set. God, you've got the wrong person. Those are not where my talents and abilities lie. I don't think I can do this. That's what Moses said. And you know what God said to Moses? Hey, pal, I made you. I made your mouth. I made your brain. I'll give you the words. Don't worry about it. And later we see, I'm also going to give you your brother Aaron, who is silver-tongued and is good at doing it. I will put, not only will I give you what you need to do to get this done, but I will put people around you who can help you get this done. This is an amazing thing that God does as he sends us to build his kingdom is not only does he give us the skill set that we need to get it done in his goodness and in his grace, but he also surrounds us with the right people who supplement us where we are weak. I can't tell you how blessed I feel in the decisions that we make as a church that at every decision, at every turn, every big thing that we we do, I am surrounded by people both in my elder board and in my friendships and in my advisors and on our committees who are smarter than me about that particular area. They're not smarter than me in general, okay? I'm not willing to concede that. But they're smarter than me in that particular area. And we lean on their expertise and they advise us, God, I am weak here. I can't guide the church in this way. Great. Here's five people to surround you that know more than you about that, and probably are, in reality, smarter than you. You should listen to them. God does this. He doesn't just equip us for what he calls us to, but he surrounds us with the right people that we can lean on and trust as we walk into that. And so that's Moses' last excuse. I don't have the skill set. And God says, I know. I do. I made you. I'm calling you to this. I've put my name on it. I've winked at you. You can go. I've got you. And then we get to Moses' final excuse, which is frankly hilarious. Exodus 4, 12 and 14. Now go. I will help you speak and will teach you what to say. This is what God says to Moses. But Moses says, pardon your servant, Lord. Please send someone else. Now we're just at the heart of it, right? Like the rest of it was smoke and mirrors, you know? When you ask your kid to do something and they give you all the reasons why they can't do it. And you're just like, yeah, you just don't want to do it. You're just being lazy. Like, yeah, I know. And then they have to go do it. All the smoke and mirrors are gone. Now we get to the heart of the issue. Oh Lord. Fine. I hear what you're saying. Please send someone else. Like I'm comfortable. I've got a life. I'm fine. I don't want to upset the apple cart. I'm used to this. I've been a shepherd for 40 years. This is normal to me. This is what my life is. I'm old. I'm in my sixties. I'm like really old. You know, we're just coasting until the retirement home at this point. When you hit 65, like you're just waiting, right? I'm good. I'm comfortable. Please don't make me do this. Which is what we say. God, my relationships are good. My life is good. My life is comfortable. Don't make me upset the apple cart. Don't make me be the weird one at work. Don't make me be the weird one in the neighborhood. Don't make me rearrange my, I'm 40. Don't make me rearrange my life around those things. That's not how I set things up. God, please, God, send someone else is what we tend to say. And this is the first time this happens, and I think it's amazing. Verse 14, then the Lord's anger burned against Moses. And he said, what about your brother Aaron the Levite? I know he can speak well. He's already on his way to meet you. He'll be glad to see you. So Moses says, I want to have. I've placated you. I've put my name on it. I've given you a sign. I've assured you that I'll be with you, that I created you, that I'll give you the words to speak. I'm even bringing your brother Aaron to go with you. Go do the thing you're supposed to do. And whenever I read this, my thought is, may the wrath of God never be kindled against me because after all the assurances in the world for the thing he wants me to go do, I still have the response of, oh Lord, please send someone else. No! You go do it. You do it. You do it. I don't know what God's pressing on you. I don't know what he would have you start or have you do. But here's what else I know. Or here's what I do know. Moses, from this moment at the burning bush, goes on and becomes, this is true, one of the most known figures in human history. You understand, every tribe and every nation and every tongue virtually that has ever existed from this point on knows the story of Moses. They know who he was. They know what he did. Moses had no idea at the burning bush that the first five books of the Holy Bible would be called the books of Moses. He had no idea that he would bring God's law down from Mount Sinai and give it to the people and that that law would echo through the centuries for Jesus to satisfy it. He had no idea that in eternity he was going to appear with Jesus at the transfiguration on top of a mountain thousands of years later. He had no idea that God is going to use him in Revelation as one of the two witnesses. He had no idea what was in front of him. All he knew is that he needed to do the next thing that God asked him to do. Very quickly, I want to tell you this story because I think it's relevant. I'll try to go fast because we're at the end of our time. I have a friend who was on staff with me at my last church at Greystone, a guy named Jim Hollinsworth. Jim was the associate pastor, executive pastor there. And one Christmas, his small group received something from a sort of co-op that provides things for people in need. And there was a stack of papers of families that were in need and they needed some Christmas gifts that year, much like we do with the tree that we do every year. And him and Melinda at Small Group picked up a piece of paper and there was a family on it that happened to live in a particular trailer park down the road. And all of the families that their small group picked were located in that trailer park. So Jim and Melinda said, gather your stuff and we'll go drop it off. We'll be fine to do that. And so they go to drop it off. And I was talking to Jim this morning because I wanted to get the origin story right. And he said they felt his word was icky going the first time which makes sense but they went anyways and they dropped off these gifts and they dropped off this gift with a single mom and it happened to be in a trailer park where the population was 95% Mexican immigrant and they made they made a good connection with this mom and they kept in touch and so they just followed up to see how she was doing, see if she needed anything in January. And through conversation, one of the things she said is, you know, my kid's going into middle school. I don't speak English. They're struggling academically, and I don't know how to help them. Can you help them? And Melinda said, sure. And so she started showing up at the community center and tutoring this kid after school a few days a week. Well, that kid's friends found out. Another mom started sending more kids to Melinda. And then Jim started going. And then they got a volunteer to start working with them. And then it grew and it grew and it grew. Within a couple of years' time, it became a ministry known as the Path Project. They bought a trailer in that trailer park. They served out of there full time. Melinda quit her job to do this full time. Jim went halftime at the church to give time to Path Project. And then there were more needs and an after-school program and then ESOL for the parents so they could go be advocates for their children in the schools. And then this remarkable thing happened. The company that owned that trailer park reached out to Jim and he says, I don't know what you're doing, but I will give you a free trailer in any trailer park that I own across the country because crime is down, graduation rates are up, rent payment is up. Things are more consistent. This is across the board better for the community. Can we do more of these? Then you fast forward five years and I'm in a gala where things are being auctioned that I can't afford at all. I'm just watching rich people compete with themselves to support Path Project. It's amazing. Jim does it full time. They're nationwide. He didn't have the skill set. He was not a fundraiser when God called him to do this. There was not a vision in there in Jim and Melinda's mind that we're going to go nationwide with community centers and trailer parks to do after school programs and ESOL and offer haircuts and just general hygiene. That was not in their mind. All they did is take the next step. They didn't know at their burning bush what God was going to do. They just knew that they needed to buy some gifts for this family. And then while they were there, they needed to talk to her. God is pressing on you to do something. And maybe it's so big, this is what excites me. There's somebody in here. It's not everybody, and I don't know who. But there's something in your head that's so big that you're scared to say it out loud. You're who I'm preaching to. Do it. Take the step. Do the thing. Let this be your burning bush. Allow God to push you into obedience. Ask him if his name is on it. Watch him turn staffs into serpents and serpents into staffs. Let his assurance wash over you. And when it comes down to you admitting that you need to do it, don't be like Moses and say, oh Lord, please send someone else. Just go do the thing and let's see what God does with a church full of kingdom builders that he is enabling and equipping for his ministry. The last point is simply this. If God is calling you to something, he will equip you for it. If there is something God is pressing on your heart to do, do it. And let's see what happens. Let's pray. Father, thank you so much for this morning. Thank you for stories like Jim and Melinda's. Thank you for Moses. Thank you for keeping for us a record of this discourse at the burning bush. For us to see how you give assurances, how you wink at us, how you put your name on things. How you give us the skills that we lack and how you provide for us the people that we need. God, I pray that this can be a burning bush moment for some people in here who will go and do the thing, who will start the ministry or reach out to the people or begin to take the steps. God, make us a church full of kingdom builders, full of people who seek to allow their lives and their time and their talents and their treasures to be used by you to further your kingdom. Give us a distaste for our own such that all we want to do is build yours. Equip us to go, point us in the direction, and wind us up and sustain us as we run towards you. Use us, Lord. Make us kingdom builders. In Jesus' name, amen.