God of Sanctification

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

We are going to be in Exodus. We're going to be in Exodus chapter 30 and 31 today. So if you want to turn to your Bibles there, I'm not a betting man, but I would bet this may be the only Exodus 30 and 31 sermon you will ever hear. That's just a guess. Maybe, maybe not. But, you know, Pastor Daniel Osher and I have been talking a lot about just being faithful to the text, right?

And you know what? We said at the beginning of the year, we're going to go through the book of Exodus and we're going to go through the book of Exodus, even Exodus 30 and 31. And so we're doing it. We're sticking with it. And listen, I think that it, there's a reason that churches don't do this. I think that part of it is that you have to explain things. You have to explain how things were in the ancient near east. You have to explain why God needed to give provision for when you buy a Hebrew slave. Like that's a big deal for us to like hear and then compute. And if you're wondering what I'm talking about, it's like three weeks ago, we cover those verses. Exodus 21. But it pushes us as a church to understand the Old Testament as it presents itself, which is important. It's important for us to understand God's character as he presents himself in the Old Testament

because God hadn't changed. Old Testament God is not a mad God and New Testament God is not a love God. They're both the same God, right? In fact, we're going to be looking at that today. But before we do that, let's start with a biopic. One of my favorites, Lincoln. Lincoln was a 2012 movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis playing the famous 16th president of the United States.

He did a very good job. He won an Oscar for the role. It was a very, very good movie. And what they did was, it's really interesting, instead of portraying the great speeches of honest Abe, instead of kind of playing into all these little tropes, they honed in on his life in a way that we just aren't used to. He was humanized in this film in a way that really, I mean, it actually kind of upset some people because they talked about his strained marriage. They displayed it historically and dramatically. They displayed backroom deals to get the 13th Amendment passed, right? They displayed all this stuff. They displayed the fact that he delayed the end of the Civil War in order to end slavery, which is a really difficult choice, but he's making it. And he's kind of like doing a lot of politicking to make that happen. And you're with him in that. And they don't paint him as some scoundrel or some villain.

He's still the same guy, but the biopic, what it does is it helps. I mean, the good ones, the good ones, they do a good job by looking past what most people think, whether it's a biopic on Elvis, Napoleon, Tanya Harding. Okay, so many biopics have come out, right? Steve Jobs, Bob Dylan, Neil Armstrong. Like they look past, like, did you know Steve Jobs was adopted and a lot of his issues stem from the fact that he was adopted? Did you know that? I didn't. Did you know that whatever Neil Armstrong was going to the moon with, on the Apollo, he was mourning his daughter who just died?

Crazy. You don't think about that until you're watching the biopic and you're like, oh, wow, I get it. I've looked past, like we're not just quoting Neil Armstrong where it's like one small step from it. It's fine, that's fine. That's history and it's good. But there's more, there's more to the story there. And biopics do a really good job, good ones at least, do a really good job of doing that, of showing that. So what if somebody made a biopic about God? What if somebody did that? What are some of the things that you would have to look past? What are the tropes? What are the common pitfalls that we kind of fall into when we think about God, we think about his nature, we think about his character, what he's going to do in a situation? How do we think, how do we conceive of God? What do we need to look past? We're gonna get into some of that in Exodus 30 and 31. That's kind of the stuff of Exodus 30 and 31.

And what we're gonna find is, and this is our series by the way, I mean, this is why we are in this part of Exodus is because we want to know God. That's our whole series. We wanna know who God is. And some of that includes unlearning things that we thought we knew about God. Or way more often, finding the things that you did know about God extend a lot deeper than you understood first. So like, I'm not up here saying, you learned God wrong. You know, like that's click bait. That's not this. We're gonna find two qualities about God and one quality about us. And it's gonna require us to look past our initial reactions or look past what people normally think of. Three things. God is holy.

We are common. God is love. So like, we're not breaking a ton of new ground here. Okay, we're not, this is some basic stuff. But it's honestly, it's stuff that we look past all the time. It's stuff that we take for granted. So let's not, let's look at scripture this morning. It's gonna be great. God is holy. Let's kind of start there. Holy. The word holy has a lot of meaning.

It's this kind of overlap of pure, right? If something is holy, it is pure. If something is holy, it is worthy. There's value in it, right? If something is holy, it is completely unique, right? Singular, nothing like it. If something is holy, it is different. And if something is holy, it's also set apart. Okay, so if something is holy, it means all that I just said. It means all of that. And the Bible, I mean, the Bible doesn't really like say, here's the definition of the word holy. Like you have to kind of get it a little bit. But one great question that the Bible asks very often, a lot of worship songs sing this. The question is, who is like our God? Answer, nobody. Nobody, nobody's like God. Nobody's like God. Think about that. Like no one is like God. Nobody's God's first cousin, okay? Like it doesn't work that way.

In Exodus 13 and 31, we're gonna see this in real time. Who's like our God? And we're gonna see it. And it's a little more disturbing than we would like. So let's pick it up in verses seven and eight of Exodus 30, okay? God is telling Moses about the altar, okay? He's saying here's what the altar is gonna be like. He's prescribing worship. He's telling Moses how to set things up to get the altar ready so people can worship. And here's what he says. And Aaron, the priest shall burn fragrant incense on it. Every morning when he dresses the lamps, he shall burn it. And when Aaron sets up the lamps at twilight, he shall burn it. A regular incense offering before the Lord throughout your generations, okay? Every day, twice a day, God wants priests to get incense ready, make sure there's enough, put it out there and burn it. Burn it in the morning and burn it in the evening.

Every day. And this is, man, if this is you, if you have to do this, that's cool for like a week. And then it gets a little bit of a beat down. You're like, ah, I'm sick today, but I gotta go light the incense, okay? Like it's a bit of a chore. It turns into that pretty fast. Look at what God says about the incense recipe. This is verse, we gotta skip down, verses 37 through 38. This is what God says about the recipe for the incense. He says, and the incense that you shall make according to its composition, you shall not make for yourselves. It shall be for you holy to the Lord, whoever makes any like it, to use as perfume shall be cut off from his people. Okay, you make my incense, you are exiled. It only gets more. Here we go. If anybody, look at what God says about the anointing oil.

So this is in verse 26 through 28. So this is the anointing oil. It says, with this, with it, the anointing oil, you shall anoint the tent of meeting and the arc of the testimony and the table and all the utensils and the lampstands, and lampstand and its utensils and the altar of incense and the altar of burnt offering with all its utensils and the basin and its stand.

You might think to yourself, how often do you need to oil that? Dude, it's probably every day, maybe every other. You ever oil metal? Like it's not staying on very long, is all I'm saying, right? It's not like oiling wood, okay, where you can oil it like once and for a week, it's gonna be super fragrant. You're oiling like metal. These utensils, a lot of them are made of gold. You are putting oil on everything, just so it can smell nice. Like you think your wife wanting a bunch of pillows on the bed or the couch is a big deal. No, no, no, no. This is 50 levels higher than that. This is God saying, I want oil on all of it all the time. I want it to always smell this way. And before these verses, he gives the recipe for this oil, okay?

So I want it all oil the same way. So he gives the recipe and look what he says in verses 32 to 33, it says, it shall not be poured on the body of an ordinary person and you shall make no other like it in its composition it shall be holy to you. Whoever compounds any like it, or whoever puts any of it on an outsider shall be cut off from his people. You misuse the anointing oil and you are out. I just wanna stop right here and just say, this level of holiness is not something we're used to. We're not. We look at that and we're like, because it's not just those two either. It's just those and other commands, just like it. Where God is saying like, I'm it.

It's me. And if this is the biopic, whenever we read all those verses, this is where we start to get a little uncomfortable. We start pushing past our conceptions of holy. Cause God's holiness is not something that we encounter all the time. It's not something that we're used to. We don't wrap our minds around it very easily. And we don't handle it very well. Biblically speaking, biblically speaking, God must condescend to approach you. Have you ever been condescending to someone? Right? Yes. Yes, you have, come on, you're human. You've been condescending to somebody. Okay, yeah. I was like, confession time. Yeah, I'm not asking for the instance, but you think of it. The reason that it was wrong for you to be condescending to somebody is because you're not above them in value.

When God condescends to you, it's completely appropriate. God doesn't need to apologize at all, actually. That's not how that works. God condescends. God must mute himself or kind of come to us in a very limited way, just so that we can comprehend what he's saying. Just so that we're not completely overwhelmed. And the inherent danger in this, and this is just where we live, man. This is Bible Belt, Texas. This is where we live. The inherent danger in losing this understanding of God's holiness and the inherent danger of receiving God in a particular way, right? Like we receive God in a way where there's so much grace that has to pass through the lines for God to be able to just speak to us, for God to be able to teach us something. There's so much grace there that the inherent danger is thinking that that's all there is to God. It's thinking that if, because God's handling you with kid gloves,

that God wears kid gloves all the time. God does not wear kid gloves all the time. God puts down some laws that are based upon his holiness that are uncomfortable for us. We are discussing the one who, unironically, refers to himself as the ancient of days. What a title. God is the one who is preeminent in all creation. We ascribe to God rightly, he is the one who was and is and is to come. Past, present, future, God is there. God's not just the greatest of all time, God created all of time. He stands outside of time. God is the only one who can turn defeat into victory every single time. The reason that you and I can have hope whenever we are distressed or whenever we are worried about something or whenever we think everything's going wrong, the whole reason that we have hope is because God is in control of that situation and we can say, God, I can't handle this.

This is defeat for me. I need you to turn this into victory. God is the only one who can do that. He's the only one who can create life by speaking it. I mean, think about that. He created all there is by talking it into existence. You talk about manifesting, God is the OG. God did it first. God's the only one who does it. God is not just truthful, he is truth.

God is not just right, God is righteousness. We define justice by his character. There is no one like our God, none. Nobody is holding the bar of what justice is by their character, nobody. And although we can sing rightly, we can sing honor and praise to that King. Yes, we can, glory. It's still difficult for us to imagine it. It is different than anything else we have experience with. God is holy. And it's something to be completely transparent. It's something that when you just think about God's holiness too much and that's all you're thinking about, it can start to maybe get a little depressing. It's uncomfortable. It really should be. That's not wrong. It's just not the only thing that we should think about. Let's think about two other things. First, we are common. The opposite of holy, we are common.

All the ways that God is, we are not. Okay, so our commonality, our non-holiness, right? It comes out, it's expressed in two ways in Exodus 30 and 31. Two rituals kind of bring this out. The first is that because we are common, we are all the same. Okay, we're all the same. So look at Exodus 30, verses 14 and 15. Everyone who is numbered in the census, he's talking about a census like, hey, put this census together. Everybody who's numbered in the census, from 20 years old and upward, shall give the Lord's offering. The rich shall not give more. The poor shall not give less than the half shekel. When you give the Lord's offering to make atonement for your lives. Okay, everybody is the same before God. So everybody offers the Lord the same amount. Now this is the old covenant. Right, it works a little different today. But the way God is setting up the law is he's saying everybody pays me roughly $500.

A half shekel is about that. I mean, don't hold me to that. It's just roughly where it should be, okay? Don't start setting up the weights and measures table on me. Everyone, ever, everyone is going to pay me $500. I don't care if you're rich, I don't care if you're poor, I don't care if you're a slave, I don't care. I don't care. Everybody owes that to me because I am holy and because you are not. And we talked about at the very end of that, but it keeps going if you look in verse 16, another reason, another way that we are common is that we are unholy and need atonement. Okay, it says you shall take the atonement money, which is the 500 bucks, from the people of Israel and shall give it for the service of the 10 of meeting. So that's where the money's gonna be used. That it may bring the people of Israel to remembrance before the Lord, so as to make atonement for your lives.

What God is saying is that everybody comes and they bring an offering and when they do, when they bring that offering, that is going to be viewed by God as a hand raise of, yes God, I wanna be remembered before you. And if God does that, then that is making atonement for our lives. You say, are you worth $500? Well no, we're worth a lot more than that. However, when it comes to what the Lord is asking us to pay for atonement for our lives, he's saying 500 bucks a year. And it's not meant to be an insult, but it should help us understand this offering, many other rituals that are kind of played out here, they display the fact that we are in great need. Not only are we common, not only are we kind of all the same before God, but that we are in need of atonement. We are in need of our sins to be paid for. And this is exactly where we can misunderstand our own sin. This is where the biopic might need

to just do a deep dive a little bit and start talking about our own sin, because when you tell somebody that they're common, when you tell somebody that they're sinful, which is kind of bad in our society today. We think it's gonna hurt self-esteem, we think it's gonna, look, I get it. Biblically speaking, whenever you understand that you are sinful, whenever you do sinful things, whenever you are prone to that, whenever you are, and really anything that you try to muster up in your own power is not gonna be worthy of anything before the Lord. Okay, we don't have that power to do that. However, it is not a reason to beat yourself up to talk about how worthless you are, to talk about how you're never gonna amount to anything, to talk about, that's not really appropriate.

That's not an appropriate response to the fact that you're common. To talk about how worthless you are, that's not really the point of it, and it kind of misses some major parts, right? In other words, you don't need to just beat yourself up and wish yourself to have never existed, okay? That's not what we're talking about here. We're not talking about self-loathing, in other words. But here's what we're also not talking about.

This should help us understand that our redemption, our atonement, is not inside of us. Okay, in other words, we don't got this, okay? Like when somebody's like, no, you got this. No, you don't. In fact, you never did. And look, I understand, I understand why we say that phrase. It's fine, I'm not trying to like come down on that. Like don't start correcting parents at the baseball games, okay, don't do that. That's not what this is about. It's about you and I understanding that on the one hand, it's not about self-loathing, it's not about beating ourselves up, on the other hand, it is not about thinking that we are somehow great enough to muster our own salvation or that we could somehow perform our way out of the situation that we are in. We are common, we are in sin, we need those things paid for and we don't have the money to do it. It takes God reaching down and buying us out of that

and buying us out of that with his own blood. Buying us out of that. We are common, God is holy and we need to grasp both of those. We need to understand like the depths of our sin nature, just how really, just how evil we are. We need to grasp that and we need to grasp God's holiness to understand God is love. Now there is probably not a phrase more thrown around in Bible Belt America, in Burleson, Texas, than God is love or love is love, either one. Those are both thrown around a lot. But say, hey, God's love. And sometimes, sometimes that is thrown around as some kind of spiritual band-aid, like we should never have expectations of people. You know, or some kind of thing like we should never say that anything anybody ever does is wrong. Okay, so love is kind of pit against morality, right? Like you can either be loving or you can be moral, but you definitely can be both.

For God, all of this is wrapped up in like boundless love. Let's think about the love of God for just a minute. Let me just try to get you to think about it in a different way. God's love is such that if someone, if another person loved you this way, and let me tell you, no one loves you this way, no one can possibly love you this way, okay? They can't do it. They don't have the capacity to love with the boundless love of God. They can't do it. If God's love were expressed from one person to another, and they did it like out loud, like here, like if somebody would just stand up and like declare their love for Kimmy. I almost said you, but Kimmy, I'll go Kimmy, not Erica. I just don't wanna embarrass you. Just don't wanna embarrass you. Too late.

If somebody would stand up and declare their love for Kimmy, right? I mean, just declare their absolute unabashed, unashamed love for Kimmy, okay? She's getting nervous even as we speak. Her face is red. It would be deeply humiliating for her to hear. She might just begin to cry. Like just almost instantaneously, she's near tears now. Look, if the love of God, if God's boundless love was expressed to you out loud in front of people, it would be beyond secondhand embarrassment. It would be beyond cringe. We are way past awkward. You would feel naked. You would feel completely exposed because that kind of love like sees through you. The closest I think that we can get is the unexpressed love, often unexpressed love that we have for our children. Like if somebody would say, hey, write down in like three paragraphs, how like why or how you love your children. Well, like, you're like,

well, that's not gonna happen. I don't know how I can compose that in three paragraphs, right, like it doesn't work. It's too much. I don't think I could make it through that, right? Actually writing it out, much less listening to it. And that's why, I mean, look, your parents, if you're mad at your parent today, you might not be, it's fine. But if you are, just know that they probably love you and have a really hard time explaining that. They just do. It's just hard. It's hard to explain. It's hard to put into words. It's hard to express appropriately. God's boundless love. Now, I mean, if it were expressed out loud to you, you would be a puddle of tears in three seconds and you wouldn't recover for months. I mean, it is devastating in all the right ways. It would crush you. We need to push past an overly simplistic understanding of God's love that dips too hard into sentimentality.

And honestly, that's why we're sometimes very careful about the worship songs that we sing because it's a very common joke and my brother and I share it. My brother was a worship leader for a long time so we categorize those songs as God is my girlfriend. So it's probably, I probably shouldn't do it as often as I do, but the idea is that you're just like, you're just getting really sappy in your, in kind of sentimental in this love song that you're singing to God. It's appropriate to sing love songs to God, hear me. But just to just say I love you over and over again, like let's pick some poetry here. Like let's talk about it in a way that is appropriate. Like let's really give our all on this. Like if we're really telling God we love Him, like let's worship Him as the creator, not our girlfriend. Okay, let's do something that is worthy of Him.

And without an understanding that God is holy and on high and has standards that we could never dream of reaching, without that understanding, then it won't mean as much to us to understand that God, that God, the God who's holy, condescends and speaks to you and wants a relationship with you. That He, He, the one who's on high, the King, the one who can snatch victory from defeat every time.

That guy, he knows your name. He knows the hairs on your head. He knows you're coming and you're going. He knows everything that's ever happened to you. He knows what you're worried about right now. He knows that, think about that. The God of the universe could preoccupy Himself with many other things besides whatever you're worried about, especially whenever that's gonna change in five minutes. But He does, He does. The kind of love that God has for you is difficult to even conceive. But it would bring you to your knees. Because you don't grasp it until you understand how holy God is and how common you are. That you don't deserve that kind of loyalty.

You and I don't deserve that kind of love. And yet, and yet, God gives it. We don't, we don't really grasp it. God's love has teeth. God's love has grit. God's love does not flinch at suffering. God's love is tough. It is connected to His holiness. It is connected to our commonness. And here, I wanna read kind of the end. And I wanna kinda show you where this is going. Because we can understand God as love. We can understand God as holy. We can understand that we're common. That's fine. But I really wanna put this in to practice for you. I want you to understand it. Exodus 31, 12 through 13. This is the very end of kinda all that's going on. And the Lord said to Moses, you are to speak to the people of Israel and say, above all, you shall keep my Sabbath. For this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations that you may know that I, the Lord, sanctify you.

Okay, couple of questions arise. Number one, why in the world are we talking about the Sabbath right now? We haven't talked about Sabbath in the whole chapter. Exodus 30, 31, no Sabbath. At the very end, God's like, oh yeah, and Sabbath. That's important. What's he doing? Is he saying that if we obey this, then everything else is good? No, no. He's helping us understand a big why behind all of this. Why it's a big deal for nobody else to copy the incense and the oil. Why the priests have to be washed before they enter the temple. Why animals need to be sacrificed and their blood has to be thrown everywhere and it's super gross. Why?

Because the Sabbath is a display of being set apart. Think about it. The Sabbath is nothing special. It's literally a day of seven. That's it. It's common, actually. There's nothing special about that day of the week except that God set it aside and made it holy. That's it. That God put his holiness on top of a day and that's all it needs to be holy. Look at that last line.

The very last line that says that he's telling him to keep my Sabbath. Why? That you may know that I, the Lord, sanctify you. It's me. I'm doing it. That's what the Lord is telling us. You might say, I don't understand. God's love doesn't just take on your mess and we are thankful that God's love does that, right? Amen? Oh, amen. Your mess is not as big as mine. I need a big amen on that, okay? Okay, thank you. Somebody can testify. Okay, God's love definitely takes on our mess and we are thankful. But God's love wants to make us holy like him.

That God wants to sanctify us. That God is not just concerned that we're like obeying this and not obeying that. And that's not, it's not just some simple concern over obeying rules or not. God, like he did the Sabbath, wants to take his holiness and he wants to put that upon us. Why? Why? Because we're so great? No, we're actually just super common. We're just, I'm just a guy. And yet, and yet God in his boundless love for me that I don't deserve, nor do I really understand. He takes that out of love, he takes that holiness and he just puts it on me in a way that, I mean, it's just difficult to imagine. I do not deserve. God wants to sanctify us. In other words, God in his holiness and his love wants to take us common people and make us like him. He wants to make us holy. I wanna give you a quick sampling of the Old Testament and some of the new to prove my point.

I think it's actually really helpful. You might wanna write these verses down. They're really great. Ezekiel 36, 25 through 27. I will sprinkle clean water on you and you shall be clean for all your uncleanness. So God's the one sprinkling. And I will give you, this is God talking, I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you. 27, and I will put my spirit in you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. Who's doing the action there? It's God, it's God the whole time. This is a foundational set of verses for understanding the New Testament. Ezekiel's in the Old Testament. Let's keep going. Psalm 51, 10, what's our prayer? Create in me a clean heart, oh God, and renew a right spirit within me. It's not saying God helped me perform enough to earn a clean heart. He said, give me one, why? Do we deserve it? No. Why are you getting a clean heart?

God's boundless love for you. That's why you're getting a clean heart. Colossians 1, 21 and 22. And you who were once alienated, hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now, God has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death in order to present you holy and blameless and above approach before him. You have the cross happening. You have your redemption happening with a big why at the end, why? To present you holy. Not so that you can put your hands in your pockets, look down and kick the ground and be like, I'm gonna get some more Christian. No. God sent his son to die for you so that you can walk in holiness.

God has a dream for you. Hebrews 10, 14. By a single offering, he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. If you're in Christ, you're being sanctified, is sanctified, excuse me, you're being made holy. That's what sanctified means. You're being set apart. You're being made like God. And that God did that with a single offering. His son, God wants to sanctify you. God takes great pains in order for you to be holy. God is working you into his image. This is not some afterthought. This isn't some like, well, I mean, I'll cover their sin, maybe they'll be holy. This is the point. Here's what these laws teach us, right? That God wants to sanctify us, but it's not just that, that he wants to do that with us. He wants to do that with his presence. God wants to sanctify us, but he wants to do it with us. He's not doing it with like 10 steps to be more sanctified.

He wants us to do it in his presence, with him, daily, knowing us, us knowing him. He wants that relationship with us. But that relationship with us is not just some ethereal kind of however we feel about it. God is on a mission to make us more like him and each step in our walk, each time we choose to pursue God, that is good, but it always, always needs to be wrapped up in him. God doesn't give us, for example, God doesn't give us techniques. He doesn't just give us techniques to heal, right? He didn't just do that. He wants to give himself to us and that his presence is healing. God doesn't wanna just point the way. God is the way. God doesn't send us on an errand because he's on his phone and too busy to talk to us. God wants our attention, our time, our dedication, our devotion, and he knows the condition of our hearts right now. And he knows that's gonna take a lot

for us to be devoted to him, for us to turn away from the things that try to distract or try to reach for our hearts, right? God, in his barrenless love for us, didn't just save us. He wants a lot more for us than just saving us from hell. In fact, salvation itself is more than just not getting something in the end. Salvation has more to do with living a life of holiness. And it's, look, it's not just like not cussing in a church building, okay? It's not like your kids behaving or just honestly,

so silly. It's so silly, the things that we settle for that we think are holiness, it's just crazy. It's absolutely crazy. It bothers me so much. I don't say it very often, but I'm saying it now. It really, really bothers me. Like, man, holiness, holiness has so much more to do with an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ where you are praying, you are listening, you are walking, you got joy, you're suffering, you're bringing that to him. You're figuring it out. You're confessing, like you're saying you're stupid to people, like that's a real thing you should do.

And that's part of you becoming more like Jesus. Jesus saves you to make you holy. Okay, right now. I'm gonna call Jacob back up. I want you to think about a few things. I want you to think about this day. What do you think about today? What do you think about right now? How would this change the way you pray right now? If you understood that God's desire, his dream for you, is to become more holy. Like right now, like this day, this week, you're like, I don't know, I was gonna catch the Cowboys game. Like I had thoughts about what I was gonna do this afternoon. But like, what if there was mixed in with that, a prayer of just like, and you meant it, and it like, you don't have to, it doesn't have to be some grand prayer. Like nobody has to be quoting you. Like it's gonna be some awesome thing that you're praying. You can just simply say like, God, I feel dumb and I wanna be holy.

Can you fix that? God's not waiting for like the perfect formula. You know, like you don't have to go through the Lord's prayer just to say that part, like at the end, just say it. Just pray it like right then. Just say like, God, I wanna be holy. I don't even know what that means. But I wanna be holy. I wanna be more like you this week, this week. What if you let it change how you spend your time? What if, what if all the good things that you do in a week, right? That they weren't about proving to yourself or other people that you're good. What if nobody saw it? Would you still do them? It's a good thing to ask. You understand this. You can put your whole life on this truth that we were talking about this morning. Your entire life, your parenting, your career, your schoolwork, your friends, your social standing. You can put it all there. All of it is there. Nothing, nothing needs to like spill over the side.

God can take all of it on and say, I have a plan for you. I want you to give me everything. And I will show you what this is for. God's not super impressed with your plans for your life. He's got better ones. He knows that. But many times he's waiting for you to take all those great plans you got and just kind of put it in front of him. And so, I don't know. I don't even know what to do with this anymore. How we figure it out.

How me be holy before you. I want you to think about this year and maybe think of it kind of retroactively. Like, I know we're whatever, in the last quarter of the year maybe. From now until the end of December, I want you to think about like, what do you think God's plan for you and your life, what do you think is included in that plan between now and the end of December? How does God wanna make you more holy between now and the end of December? Have you ever thought about that? Like, what's God's plan for you to become more like him in the next four months? What's the fall gonna look like? We just kind of hit the fall. In fact, I think tomorrow is the Alltonnal, anyway. We start seasonally, tomorrow September 21st is the Alltonnal Equinox. It's fine. So we're officially in the fall. Okay, I'm a nerd. I wear it, okay.

This fall, right? This fall. What's God's plan for you? Here's my encouragement. We're gonna pray right now. We're gonna do this right now. But here's my encouragement. I want you to honestly get before God as we pray right here. I want you to honestly get before God. And I want you to say to him, I want you to say like, I need your plan. I need to know what you want from me. Like, I need to know what the next step is, but I need you to show it.

I was talking with a friend last night and I was just tore up. I was tore up over a big decision. You know, it's a lot of drama. Internally. And he said something that's really interesting. And I would encourage you with the same thing. Look, you've got like today. You've got tomorrow. You got now until the end of December. Like, do you really believe that if you ask the God of the universe, if you would ask him earnestly to say like, hey God, I don't know what to do next. I really need you to do it. And I need you to show me. And it needs to be kind of obvious. You think he's not answering that prayer? You think he's not? In spades.

In spades. It'd be like, it'd be like if you went to your parent or if your kid went to you and you're just like, I need to know how I can work on just growing up and like being an adult. Like, parents dream about those moments, but they are few and far between. Okay. Like if you would go before the Lord right now and just say like, God, I wanna grow up. I wanna know what that next step is with you. I wanna do that with you right now. You think God's not gonna answer that?

Really, the only question is like, do you have the guts to ask it? That's really it. Do you have the guts to ask it immediately? I will tell you friends, I'm not perfect at it, but I will tell you God's faithful in it. He's been faithful to me. He's been faithful to many of you. You know God's faithful. He's not gonna trick you. He's not gonna lead you down a blind alley. God's got this.

Let's pray. Would you pray with me? Lord, we don't know. And that really is the full stop on that sentence. We just don't know. You do. And that's really the full stop on that sentence. You're holy. We're common. And yet, the love that you love us with is just, it just doesn't make sense. It defies everything we know about human existence. And there you sit, just loving us. Thank you for it. Lord, help us to just love you back. I mean, it's just such a weird offering. It doesn't compare to what you give us, but you love it when we sing to you. You love it when we obey. And you love it when we just come with a desire, a heart that wants to be in your presence.

I pray that you would meet us in that. It is in your son's name that we pray, amen.