I Will

Transcript

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

Thank you guys for being here. This is my last week. I know you're welcome. Drew's finally, Drew's pulling the plug. He's pulling the plug. He's given it enough. So if you guys do remember Moses, right, he was just out there doing his thing shepherding and if you remember what happened, what did he see? We saw a burning bush and Moses approached that burning bush and as he got closer he realized, hey, that bush it's actually not burning. It's just on fire. And Moses said that no way to which the bush replied Yahweh. Huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That one's pretty good. Thank you. I do have one that I made up myself. I feel like a comedian. I'm gonna stop it. What are you talking about? Who led the Israelites through the semi permeable membrane? Os Moses. Oh, that was really that one. Yeah, I'm putting that one on somewhere. I think we can make money off of it. So yeah, so that's it. I've really

depleted all the Moses jokes that I have. I don't know if there are anymore. Like I said, we are in Exodus. Exodus chapter 6. Well, that's a tiny font. Sorry. Exodus chapter 6. We're going to cover just chunks of Exodus 6. We're gonna skip the middle part. It's a genealogy, right? We're not gonna go through that. I suggest you do read it. I'm a history fan so it really does take you through the just a genealogy of where everybody comes from that we're actually talking about those major players that we see in the story. So we will start out in chapter 6. Pardon my I have the allergen if you guys notice that yellow dust over everything. We've approached Texas's first out of two seasons, right? Spring. It's billions of little particles are floating around and they're all my enemies. So I always get little allergies, right? But don't worry. In a week we're gonna turn to scorching heat and everything dies. So

God bless Texas. Alright, so like I said, Exodus chapter 6. Then we bring you up to speed to where we are. We just left Exodus 5. Exodus 5, right? We saw Moses, his faith fail not just once but five times. Isn't that funny? Exodus 5, five times. Okay? We ended chapter 5 with Moses going to Pharaoh and saying, hey, let my people go. Let them go to worship. And then we see Pharaoh pretty much say no and put more work on to the Jews, right? Making life harder for them. So we ended with Moses pleading with God once again coming before him with this failing faith, right? Again, which I love Moses so much because I can relate to this guy every day, right? Every day. Things get hard, what do we do? Ah, right? We kind of hanker in and we just sort of try to control it ourselves. Well, here we have Moses. He does better than I do at least. Right? He goes to God with

his stuff. And then what does God do at the end of chapter 5? Oh, he is silent. Oh, that dreaded silence. We've all experienced that before, right? So God let Moses stew for a little bit. And now we're into chapter 6, right? We're into chapter 6 verse 1. But the Lord said to Moses, Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh for with a strong hand he will send them out and with a strong hand he will drive them out of his land. Oof, let me just give you a brief translation. God did not punish Moses. God did not rebuke Moses. God met Moses with grace. We see a great insight into God's character right here, right? One of his Children, man, he's failing. He's faltering once again. Not the first time, right? This is like the fifth time. Now we're adding one more. So Exodus chapter 6, we just now have we have six times. Moses has gone to God with excuses, with complaints and with a failing faith. And once again, God meets

him with grace. That's pretty amazing, don't you think? That's pretty amazing. Let me tell you a story. There's a story back when my oldest son, his name is Noah, he's my second favorite child. Now the boys are even, boys are even, right? But we had flown home to God's country. We had flown home to Tennessee and we had visited my mom. My mom was going to fly back with us and stay. It was Noah's first flight, right? Noah's first experience on an airplane. And so we get in and if you guys can imagine, right, the first experience on it, right? Man, his eyes, I don't think his eyes could have gotten any bigger. Otherwise they would have popped out. Like he would and everything. He couldn't even soak it in enough. He was just touching everything. He was a, he wouldn't stop talking. He's like, dad, look, I'm like, I see, right? Right? Parents, you know, right? It's

that annoying dad. Look, dad, look. I'm like, oh my gosh, I see, right? He's looking out the window. He's crawling over my mom to look out the window. And we weren't able to sit together. And so they were sitting sort of on the right side of the plane. One row back, I was on the aisle. One row forward. We take off. Everything is perfect. Noah listened to the entire announcement about all the cool safety stuff, right? He was the only one listening, but he listened. He listened. And then about 45 minutes into this flight, the little seatbelt ding-ding, and we get a call from the captain saying, hey, there's a storm that we just can't go around. It's gonna get pretty turbulent. We suggest you just stay in your seats. Well, if you've flown, that could be any range of what? Right? Turbulence, right? It's a pretty general term for, hey, we're gonna die, right? It's just huge range. So you don't know what to expect. Well, it was on

this side. All of a sudden, the plane just started to vibrate. And then next, we were doing the whole, like, feel like we're dropping 200 feet and then coming back up. You had the lights were dimming. I'm like, there we go. Right? And of course, you could feel the tension on the plane. You could just feel the fear just in this cabin. And I'm listening. I'm looking back, and Noah's eyes are just not as big, right? He's kind of looking around. He's looking for some cues. My mom, God bless her, eyes shut, knuckles white. She's holding on. Nothing else in the world is going on except for those arm rests. And I just hear a little sweet voice. Are we going to be okay? Are we crashing? Oh, so I looked back and I didn't write what every good father did. I said, Hey, man, I'm buckle. And I just reached out my hand and he crawled into my lap. And he says, Dad, we're going to be okay. Right? And you can just see

like every, like his body was just one big, tense little muscle. And I just grabbed him by the face and I said, Hey, you're good. I got you. And he hugged me and you just, oh, you felt the breath and you just felt every muscle release. The turbulence didn't stop. The plane didn't stop shaking, but his fear quit. And his fear didn't quit because I gave him some lengthy explanation. His fear stopped because he found the answer in my presence. Does that make sense? There was a safety. It was going to be okay. I was scared to death, but he didn't get to know.

That is where we find God in chapter six. That's where we find Israel in chapter six. We find a God who is, Hey, he just wants you to know that he's there and he's trying to get our attention. Okay, so let's go back to chapter six to the Bible. And we're going to start there, start there in verse two. And like I said, God did not give Moses an explanation. He gave Moses a revelation. In verse two, he says, God spoke to Moses and said to him, here's the big thing. I am the Lord. Gosh, there is so much in that statement. If there's not a lot in that statement, man, come find me or Drew or a deacon and let us talk to you because that statement is massive. That is what I did to my son. Does that make sense? He's saying, Hey, there's no I'm not I'm not going to tell you anything. I've already given you every bit of information right here. Look at me. Remember who I am.

That's what he's saying with that one phrase. Every ounce of power in his name, every ounce of power in his being, everything that Israel and Moses knows is in this one statement. I am the Lord. So I'm my phone went to sleep. I'm waiting for my face to and then he says in verse three, I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God almighty. But my name, the Lord, I did not make myself known to them. I also established my covenant with them to give them the kind to give them land in Canaan, the land in which they lived as sojourners. Moreover, I have heard the groaning of the people of Israel whom the Egyptians hold as slaves and I have remembered my covenant. All right, there it is.

So like I said, is I am Lord and really, church, I really don't want you to miss it. There was no judgment in this statement. There was no judgment in this passage. This was God's grace and it's a simple truth. It's a simple truth because sometimes the answers to your problem aren't answers at all. Sometimes the greatest answer is simply being reminded that God is who he says he is in times of hardship, in times of stress, of strife, of fear. It's not the answers that are going to make us feel better. I think I think it's just a clearer view of God. When we have a clearer view of God and of who he is, we're reminded of his character. Everything should fall perfectly into perspective. That's why the Bible calls us to be still. That's why we are. That's why that's what God is saying here. Hey, focus up here because this is where I'm going to give you the peace. This is where I'm going to give you the faith. This is where I'm

going to give you the grace. This is where I'm going to give you forgiveness. It's right here. You're not going to find it anywhere else. You're not going to find it at your job. You're not going to find it at your home. You're finding it right here. That's a huge statement. And if you notice, we are still being told that in the New Testament, correct? Which is another thing I'm so glad God gives us grace because we still haven't learned it. But we see here this exemplified back in the Old Testament. And then we see that he mentions the patriarchs, right? He mentions those big dudes, Moses or Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, like the big, like the patriarchs, right? Man, these guys are the these guys are huge in the Jewish history, right? I mean, everything stemmed from this direction. These are where these promises were made. And he says, hey, my name, what I

was, I was called El Shaddai. That was the name that they called him way back then. And this means God Almighty, right? It just means God, right? It's huge. Just his presence high up in the sky, right? Kind of at a distance. Does that make sense? But here he says, guess what, Moses, you get to call me Lord. I want to start a relationship with you and my people. We see here God taking another step closer to what human beings, what his creation needs in order to form that relationship with him. Right. And what's the next step after this? We see it in the New Testament. Guess who comes in the New Testament? Have you read the Bible who comes in the New Testament? It's not rhetorical. You can answer Jesus. Nice. For that is the right answer today. Right. That's the right answer. Right. And what comes after Jesus? The Holy Spirit. Man, it's his plans in action, right? It's working the same plan that he has lined out for

Moses. It's the same plan. God has lined out for us in the Bible. There's nothing different. Makes sense. So here we see God wanting to get much more intimate with Moses. He's formed this relationship. He's speaking to Moses on a very relational level, and he's pretty much holding Moses' hand through this entire process. Because he knows. Right. He knows. He knows humans. He knows our weaknesses, and he knows what we need. Okay. So we see we see that as we engage into chapter or verse six. This is one of my favorite parts. In Exodus chapter six, this entire this entire section, say therefore to the people of Israel, I am the Lord and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from slavery to them. And I will redeem you with an outstretched arm with great acts of judgment. I will take you to be my people and I will be your God. And you shall

know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you into the land that I swore to give Abraham to Isaac and to Jacob. I will give it to you for a possession. I am the Lord, man. This is an interesting part of Exodus. Matter of fact, this part of Exodus is actually still kind of practiced amongst a very select Orthodox Jewish sect, right? Around Passover, they drink from cups, right? There's about five different cups they drink from in the cups are representative, represent representing, let's say that of these what we call the I wills of the I wills up there. Oh, there they are the seven I wills. All right. Once again, we see God has mentioned it over. He has said it multiple times. He says what I am going to fulfill my promise God is saying, I'm going to do this. And he goes and he gives us a whole new set of promises. And

the cool thing about these promises is that the language the Hebrew language, this is what we call the perfect tense. This is not a future tense. This is not saying, Hey, I'm going to do this. God is saying this as if it's already happened. It is divine promise. That's pretty cool, right? He's already saying, Hey, this is going to be done. I've already promised you I'm going to deliver you and I will let me give you some more. Let me give you some more promises. And the cool thing about these promises, man, we get such an insight into a hope that God gives these are these are almost hope statements. Right. And before we move on, I do is one of my pet peeves. I told you last week about my other pet peeve, people who don't understand the difference between mercy and grace, right? My students still to this day probably don't understand mercy and grace. Well, I think a lot of people

confuse faith and hope. They often interchange the words, but I really want to make the clarification. Faith is trusting God right now. Hope looks forward to what God will do. Do you see the difference? Here in here in a few verses, we're going to see that the Israelites will leave Egypt by faith, but they will wander in the desert and they will seek the promised land out of the hope of a covenant that God made with them hundreds of years ago. Somebody told me a statement a long time ago that faith is the root. Hope is the flower. And you can't have one without the other. Does that make sense? Without the root, there is no flower. Without the flower, there's no need for a root. They both have to be aligned together in order for us to achieve and for us to see where that's coming from. If we can understand the difference between faith and hope, it should be eye opening into the true character of who God is.

Okay, so I said faith and hope and that's what these seven, these seven I wills do. So let's look a little bit at the hope. Alright, so the first hope that I think these I wills do is they give us a hope of in his word. He's mentioned it multiple times. Oh, hey, remember what I told you? Well, here's me, I'm going to fulfill it. Then he gives us some more. Not only does he do that, we see another aspect of his words. What does he give Moses? He gives Moses and the Israelites a blow by blow play of what's going to happen. And what do the Israelites and Moses still do?

They falter. We see it in verse nine. If you go if we read that next verse, verse nine, Moses spoke us to the people of Israel, but they did not listen to Moses because of their broken spirit and their harsh slavery. So even though God had laid out the plan, boom, we they didn't listen. Do we have a plan laid out with us by the way? Yeah, God laid out a plan for us, hasn't he? What's the plan? Satan loses, Christ wins. Heaven gets a new start here. And all we have to do is faithfully serve him until that time. There's the plan.

Right? My good friend Kenneth, we are in love with the book of Revelation. Everyone thinks it's super scary, but there is not a more hopeful book in the Bible if you ask me, man, that is hope. We have the plan laid out. Again, I almost I almost hate that I volunteered to preach because I get convicted about 1000 times a day when I'm preparing for these sermons. I'm like, dang, I stink, man, God, thank you so much. I stink. Man, thanks for just meeting me where I am. I suck. Right? Like, that's how I feel when I'm preparing these sermons. So maybe that's that was Drew's plan too. I don't know. But when we when we see life falling apart, man, we tend to wander towards the world's philosophies and the world's fixes. And what we see here is God saying, hey, listen to my words. I said to you a few weeks ago, you can't be influenced by what you don't know. There's a reason why

spending time in the word is so important. Because his truth, his character, who he is, is found from the first verse in Genesis to the last verse in Revelation. It is his love book to us. It is our salvation story right there. Why are we not in it more? Why do we care more about spreadsheets than about spreading the word of God? Does these are the questions that is a rock that comes up as we look at these I wills the hope in God's word means that we have to believe every single thing in the Bible is 100% true. And we see it every, every prophecy that was stated in the Bible has come true, except for some of the right ones in Revelation. But can you name another religion that can make that claim and has the data to prove it? No, we serve the one true God and we have the one true book. Why are we not spending more time in it? Why are we not spending more time in him? The

next thing this is right. But again, the hope, I mean, if you just again, read the book, hope is through every single thing. God knows we are sinners. My gosh, right? I told you last week, our actions are imperfect. There's no way they're going to be perfect. So God doesn't expect your perfection. God expects your imperfect action. Does he not? And there's no excuse. If it's going to be imperfect, he might as well just get it over with. Right. And if you're working in the will of God, you're not going to mess up.

You're not going to mess up. He's at work, things are going. The next thing that we see about hope, excuse me, is that we see God's faithfulness come through over and over. We can see his faithfulness with the Israelites. We can definitely since the beginning of Exodus, we can see how faithful and graceful God has been with Moses, haven't we? And I look and when I look in my own life, I and I again, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to say it boldly. You can challenge me, but God is way more faithful than I am. Yeah, like way more like infinitely more faithful than I am. His faithfulness that that should give us hope. Right. That gives us hope that man, we are resting on a foundation that will not falter. Man, if he is your strength, if when something goes wrong, if he's the if he's who you run to, instead of to like Google or somebody else for help, man, like that is some

earth shattering truth. That's a power that you won't tap into anywhere else here. Not even on TikTok, guys. I don't think you can find it on TikTok. The other thing I see about God's faithfulness is God meets us where we are. That's really important to me. It's Easter. I always get so emotional around Easter. Man, Jesus's birth was amazing. His death, I am so thankful for, but it's his resurrection that sets it all in place. It's his resurrection that's allowed me to be found over and over and over again. And the truth of the matter is I'm not re found. He never let go. He's never let go. We've tried to get away, but he has never let go. He meets us where we are. He meets us in our sin. He does. He doesn't expect you to be perfect. He knows your weaknesses. He knows your faults. He's still waiting there. He's still loving you. He's still holding you. He's still

waiting for you to look up and recognize who he is. That's some amazing hope in that faithfulness. The next thing I see, and when I look at the Israelites, I see just this this this amazing temptation towards the deceit of busyness. The sin of busyness. If you remember back in chapter five, what happened to the Jews, to the Israelites when Moses made this claim? Would the Pharaoh increase their workload? Right. So I know some of you understand he's they're they're all working overtime. Right. They're working double shifts. They're all working double shifts and and and and of course they falter and we have the same issue, don't we? Do we have the same problem? Man, we come here on Sunday. Monday starts. Man, that world is screaming freaking loud, isn't it? It's loud. And in our busyness, you can I mean you can split it up in any different reason. I've met people that

are just proud of their busyness. I am so important. I am so busy. I don't have time. Right. We know those people or we know the people that are too scared to move and so they hide behind their busyness. Maybe they're too fearful of doing what God has in store for maybe they're too fearful of success. Did you know more people are fearful of success than they are failure? Failure is a known outcome. Success is the unknown outcome. So when people say they're scared to fail, no, no, no, they're actually scared to succeed. We shove our lives with busyness. We give our excuses of why we have to be busy. Well, I want this for my kid. Why? I want I got to pay my no. None of that is actually important at all. Busyness is really if you want to break it down. Busyness is just the sin of worry. Busyness is an indication that you don't have trust in your God. I know it's tough to hear. It was

tough for me to realize that for myself. But that doesn't matter, right? Again, God knows us. He meets us where we are. He is still waiting. He's waiting for all that buzz. He's waiting for you just to sit again and to be still and do what? To look up and remember who he is. The next hope that I think that we can see here. Oh, make sure we're good on time. Run a little low. The next hope that we that we look at is is the hope of this covenant relationship. Okay, we see it over and over. We even see God himself say it to Moses like, hey, you're going to know me on a different level. And then we can even see with the with the prophecy fulfilled with the coming of Jesus Christ and then the presence of the Holy Spirit. God literally lives inside of us if we have asked him in there. That's how intimate he needs it. And that's how intimate we need it. Again, don't get me wrong. God

doesn't need you. He just wants you, which is even more amazing. Right? Yeah. There's times my wife doesn't want me. Yeah, right. There's times your coworkers don't want you. But there's not a right and so there's not a single time God doesn't want you. He wants to have this covenant relationship. So as we kind of end this, I do want to look back and I want to I want to look at those seven I wills infused with the hope of the promise that they bring. I will bring you out. Nice. We get to have our burdens get to be relieved. How many of you guys have relieved your burdens to God today? Yeah, I know I have because I was preparing for this. I know I can't do it without him. Right? How many of you carry burdens throughout the day? How many of you carry them into your night? How many of you give your burdens to God on a very superficial level and then expect him to solve them? Man, if we faithfully give our burdens

to God, he has already promised right here, man, he will relieve them. And not may not be the way you want it. It may not be anytime soon, but he promises he will relieve your burdens. The next hope he gives out is I will rescue you. He's going to deliver us right even from those burdens beyond those burdens. The things that we need to be delivered from. Maybe it's an addiction. Maybe it's work. Maybe it's that sinful thought every time I get behind the wheel of my car. He promises to deliver. The next promise that he gives us is I will redeem you. Oh, right. This is that emotional part. That redeeming story. Man, God died on the cross to set you free. And this again, just like last week, this is not freedom for you to do whatever you want. This is not freedom for you just to go to work eight to five come to church on Sundays. No, no, no. This is freedom with a purpose. This

is freedom to go out and fulfill the Great Commission to fulfill his will and to spread his kingdom to every single person who has not heard it. It's the freedom that we get that when we approach him, man, our sins have already been forgiven. Did you know that? Like you're okay. You were washed clean right now. You are sinless because of a sacrifice made for you. If that's not hope, then I have no other way to tell you. We get to approach him clean. We get clean slate each single day. We could start anew because of the hope that we have in his redemptive power. The next one. I will take you as my people again, that deepening of the covenant relationship and the language here that's used is actually still practice in certain ceremonies. Some of you have heard of marriage. Some of you say I will take you as my wife and I will take you as my husband. It's the similar type of

language. It is literally God inviting you in to a covenant relationship into a family, into a bond that can never be broken. Once you've asked him in, he's not leaving. It is a deep, deep seated relationship. The next promises, the next three can all be summed up into into God's character. Right. We see that I will bring I will be your God. I will bring you into the land and I will give it to you. These this gives us what this insight into the hope of God's character. One, it reminds us of his identity. He's not just God Almighty. Who is he? He's your God. He's my God. That is huge. That is a personal. That's a personal claim. There's no more just God sitting up on high. Man, he is coming down. He's meeting you face to face. We also see that we find peace. I will bring you into the land. He is giving the peace and he's giving the promise of his covenants being fulfilled, which leads us to that

last one. He always keeps his promises over and over. We see it. He's given us a hope. He's given us a hope in who he is. He's given us a hope in what he says and he's given us a hope in the promises he makes. If God said it, he's going to do it. Do you believe it? Yes or yes. That was horrible. Yes or yes. Yeah. Yes or yes. Yeah. Are you sure? I need you to understand what that means. Yeah. Do you get it? Yeah. That's amazing. This is just a message of hope in those I wills. Right. And then what does Moses do, poor guy? Moses in the middle, I just go right back to doubting. Yeah. Hey. Yeah. Yeah. And then Moses even comes as we see. Oh, sorry. As we even see it towards the end, if we skip all the way to the end of chapter six. Oop, I'm going. Moses said to the Lord, behold, I am of uncircumcised lips. How will the Pharaoh listen to me? He's going now. He's

going to the next level. Not only is he incompetent, not only is he not worthy, but here we have him saying, I am no longer. I am unclean. I can't go and fulfill this duty after all of this, after all these promises. Again, I see myself so much in this, right? But again, it just points to that constant need, right? If you are, I mean, 100% unadulterated dependence on God. That means one, you're 100% broken. Are you broken today? And are you dependent on him today? 100%. Yeah. Even if you are, guess what? You're going to fail. That's pretty fun. There's hope. That's the hope story. But God knows it. Just like Moses, he offers you grace and he is waiting for you to walk on back. Okay, like I said, God doesn't rebuke Moses. And as we move into chapter seven, we see some amazing stuff happen. I won't be able to get to all of chapter seven. Sorry, Drew. I don't, I'm

out of sermons. I guess it's going to be up to you, big guy. But what I do want to mention is that this stuff carries over into the New Testament. Right? We see Paul write about it all the time. We see Paul write about it. It's the same thing. People won't look to God. Who do people look to? You. If you hold the title of a Christian, people aren't going to look to God first. They're going to look for you. Are people going to read the Bible first? No. They're going to read your life. They're going to read your Facebook posts. They're going to read the words off of your lips. That's pretty huge. And that's my time. But again, the message of hope is pretty clear as we work, as we go through this. And again and again, I want us to be clear. When you read any book, any part of the Bible, it's not about you. What we've talked about today, the Pharaoh is not important. The Israelites

are not what is important. Moses and his failing faith and his weakness, that's not important. What is important is to remember who he is. That's the main idea here today. David, whenever you're... And it's about endurance. This entire time, again, we know the ending. We know that God's already won. The devil has lost. Just like here, the Pharaoh has already lost. We may think he's won. Israel may think that he's won. But gosh, what? God's already delivered his people. He's just preparing and growing them. He's preparing them for that next step. And that's love. We do it to our kids. We rear our kids so that they're going to be ready for their next phase of life. It's the same principle here. You may not see it now, but like I said, God is working. He's working behind the scenes. He's working in the struggle. You guys stand with me, please. Close your eyes. Where are you in this story? Are you like

Moses? Discouraged? Questioning? Doubting? Are you Israel? Are you just overwhelmed? And tired? Are you trying to stand in obedience? But finding it harder and harder and finding and asking yourself, is it worth it? The answer is not complicated. And it's not an explanation. The answer is, I am the Lord. God, I thank you so much for who you are. I thank you so much for your name. I thank you so much for God, for your character. God, I thank you so much for the forgiveness that you offer us. I thank you so much for the grace that you give us. Lord, and how we need it. Lord, I thank you for our mercy. Lord, I'm so thankful that as we go through our trying times, we build an endurance. We build a faith that just like Moses and just like the Israelites, is not a momentary thing. It is a lifetime of trust that it takes to grow your kingdom, to be a disciple, to make disciples, to love people the way they need to be

loved. Lord, as we leave this room here today, would I ask that you give us the strength? Lord, you give us the courage to stop, to be still, to no longer wait for your explanations, but for just to look up and acknowledge that you are God. You are my Lord. Lord, we love you so much. Lord, we give you this day, we give you this life. In your name we pray. Amen.