Morning crossing Church, how are you doing today?
It is good to be in the House of the Lord with the people of the
Lord. Look around you at 48th St.
We are packed out. That's always a good feeling
just to be rubbing shoulders with other believers.
Awesome to be here today and I'm sure that's happening to all of
our locations all across this region.
If you're inside or online, we're so thankful for each and
everyone of you. Are there any ladies that went
to rise? Was that any good?
My wife came home. She had a lot of really, really
good things to say, really applicative for her life, for
our lives together. And so thankful that that's able
to happen amongst our women, just like uncommon with our men.
And if our, if our relationship with God is stronger and that's
incorporated in our marriages and they're stronger, we become
a pretty unstoppable force. And that's a great thing.
Well, it's been a long journey, 14 weeks.
That's how long this series has been, 14 weeks to get to the end
of the journey, which is where we are today.
But it's no, not as long as the children of Israel.
That was 40 years, so a lot longer for them to make the
journey that it was for us to make the journey.
I've heard a lot of people talk about just different parts as
we've taken this journey along with them that has really showed
up in our lives. Some things that we need to
change, move, adjust, turn over to the Lord, put under the blood
of Jesus, those sorts of things. And here we are at the end of
it. The torch of leadership has been
passed from Moses to Joshua and it's time for the nation of
Israel to take possession of their ancestral home.
What I want to do to end the series is take a deep dive into
the man that Moses became and how God shaped him through his
life. There's a lot of things we can
think back on about what he was like when he was 40, what
happened from 40 to 80 when he came to the burning Bush, and
then from there, 80 to 120 when he became this deliverer of
Israel. But this is taken this this
little snapshot is taken at the latter part of his life.
It's an Exodus chapter 33, verses 15 to 20.
It says. Then Moses said to him, that's
God. If your presence does not go
with us, do not send us up from here.
How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and your
people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me
and your people from all the other people on the face of the
earth? Then the Lord said to Moses, I
will do the very thing you've asked, because I am pleased with
you, and I know you by name. Then Moses said, Show me your
glory, what a bold thing to ask for.
And the Lord said, I will cause all my goodness to pass in front
of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord in your presence.
I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have
compassion on whom I will have compassion.
But he said, you cannot see my face, for no one can may see me
and live. I love this scripture because it
emphasizes the man that Moses became, the man that God shaped.
You remember when he was a young man of 40, he was a completely
different person. He wanted to be the deliverer of
Israel on his own, on his own terms, by his own definition.
You remember he was the guy who looked this way and that and
then killed an Egyptian and hid his body in the sand, acting
more like a terrorist than any kind of a delivered.
That was not a man that God could use.
That was a man who was in charge of his own life and wrecked it,
wrecked his life. But the man you see in this
statement is a man who's holy and completely dependent on God.
If you don't go before us, I'm not.
I can't, I can't go. If you don't go before us, these
people can't go. We have to have you.
If we don't have you, we don't have anything.
What will the rest of the world say?
Do you hear that? It's not about Moses's
reputation anymore. Now it's about God's reputation.
He is a completely changed man, and the thing he wants more than
anything isn't just God to go ahead of them into the Promised
land. It is to see the glory of the
Lord, to experience the glory of the Lord.
He's a man that had gotten to the place where he says, if your
presence is with me, if you don't go with me, I can't go.
I wouldn't dare. It's not about me anymore.
It's all about you. And then and only then could God
unleash his power in Moses because Moses became a
transparent man. And this is what I mean when I
say a transparent man. When people looked at Moses,
they didn't see Moses. They looked right through him
and they saw God. What would it be like if you and
I could become transparent people?
That our relationship with God was so complete that when people
looked at us, when people considered us, they didn't
really consider us at all. It was like we're not even
there. It was like they were looking
right through us and they were seeing God himself.
That's a pretty impressive statement about Moses's life,
but there needs to be something that we kind of to
counterbalance that with. I want you to look at the
Scripture in the Book of Numbers.
Again, it's at the end of Moses's life.
There were a lot of things to deal with when Moses LED this
band of 2,000,000 slaves into the Promised Land.
Just daily things. One of those things was thirst.
I mean, they're in the wilderness.
There's not water in the wilderness.
And so it was a miraculous thing when those 2 million people plus
all their animals would have enough water to drink.
It had to be a miraculous thing. And we read about that different
times in different ways where God made bitter water sweet when
they they, they threw this wood into the, into the water that
was there. That was bad water.
And then the times when Moses struck the rock with his staff
and water came out, this time it's related in Numbers chapter
20. And what God says to Moses is
speak to the rock, and water will come from it.
Speak to the rock. Moses and Aaron gathered the
people together. But when Moses began to speak,
instead of speaking to the rock, he spoke to the people.
And this is what he said in the 10th verse.
Must we bring water out of this rock?
Stop right there. Must we bring water out of this
rock like Moses could bring water out of a rock, like Aaron
could bring water out of the rock?
When God said don't speak to the people, speak to the rock and
the water will come out for you. And who's the one who's going to
be bringing that water out of the rock?
It isn't going to be Moses, it isn't going to be Aaron, it's
going to be God himself. It goes on to say that he struck
the rock with his staff twice, bringing out enough water for
all. So he says this to the people.
Then he strikes the rock 2 times with his staff, which is
something God didn't tell him to do.
And then he took the credit away from God for himself.
Now you know God made good on his promise.
And so the water came out, and the people had their thirst
quench quenched. But Moses had this momentary
lapse in humility. And because of that one
momentary lapse in His humility, God says this in Numbers 2012,
two verses later. Because you did not trust me
enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, You
will not bring this community into the land I give them.
He had disqualified himself from entering into the Promised Land.
It was like God was saying, you know, Moses, I'm going to let
you look into this promised land, but you're not going to be
able to walk in it because you took the credit away from me.
How does that hit you? I want you to think about like
the totality of Moses's life, how far God's taken him, and
then he has this one momentary lapse in his humility and does
this thing, and then God says you are now disqualified from
going into the promised land yourself.
How many of you would say, you know God?
I think that's pretty harsh. I think you're kind of, you
know, coming off the top rope on this one.
Don't you think you could have a little bit of mercy?
Don't you think you can have a little bit of grace for this
guy? Just one little slip.
I mean, Moses entire life had been directed to deliver God's
people to this new land and all of a sudden all he gets to do is
stand on a mountaintop and look in.
Come on God, where's your compassion on this man that you
love so much? Now I'm going to say something
here that might startle you. I think that's the beauty of it.
I think there's something incredibly beautiful about this
moment, if you, if we can get outside of our own selfishness
for a little bit. You see, Moses had become so
close to God, he'd become so far beyond what he had been early on
that God held him to a much higher standard.
Can you imagine being so close to God that the slightest slip
would cause a great problem? Moses had become so pure and so
holy in his thinking, so set apart for God's purpose, that
even the slightest mistake was a huge one to God.
OK, so if I'm looking at Moses and I'm kind of doing some
comparative thinking here, I had a real problem.
I had a real problem with this because gotcha.
God watches me as I do so many things outside of His will.
How about you? Does God see you doing all sorts
of things outside of His will? Let me tell you, it is a full
time job for God just to forgive me.
And I bet it's a full time job for Him to forgive any one of us
but Moses. Humility was so focused that any
departure from God's expectations was inexcusable.
And I have a question to ask here.
Do you think that God sees that kind of a potential in US?
How is Moses any different from us?
He's just a guy that God had a plan for that was walking in
that plan. A lot of times he was obstinate,
like he was fighting against that plan, and yet God used him
and God shaped him and God molded him and he was so
obstinate. It took him 40 years to learn
humidity, humility. He didn't learn it quickly.
And I'm sure there's a lot of things in your life as I know
there are in mind where I'm, I'm not going to be able to get this
quickly. It's going to take me some time
to be able to understand God this way and then incorporate
that in my life, even in a semi consistent way.
But what about the potential of that?
Can God see the potential of that?
Where we might become the transparent person?
Where we might become a person who is so dedicated to God that
even something small would push yourself would be a big thing?
This is something that we should want in our lives.
Love that. And then the curtain falls on
Moses's life. God instructs him to go up to
the top of a mountain called Mount Nebo.
And Mount Nebo is in the present country of Jordan, Southern
Jordan area, anciently called Moab.
It was a high mountain range. And from the top of that
mountain he could look out and he'd be able to see the the
wilderness in front of him and then the entire Jordan River
Valley. So this land that the nation of
Israel was going to take, I'm going to show you a picture of
it right now. That's the top of Mount Nebo
where you see that sculpture. And if you look beyond it, I
mean, this is taken, you know, aerially.
But if you look beyond that, you'll see that there's these
these hills of the wilderness. And then if you look way out
beyond that, you can see the green of the Jordan River
Valley, the Jordan River Valley coming all the way from the
north of of Israel down to the South where it dumps into the
Red Sea. Once you turn.
The reason I want to show you this picture is because the last
week, last week, you know, we had the sermon on complaining,
right? And, and God did this thing
totally out of character where he told Moses to put a bronze
snake, make a bronze snake and put it on a pole, break the
commandment of graven images, put this thing on.
And everybody had to look at this because these snakes were
biting them and they would still bite them, but the venom
wouldn't kill them. That is an artist rendering of
it. Do you see it?
The post with the snake coiled around it all the way to the
top. Some of you go.
You know what that looks like? That looks like the symbol of
modern medicine, doesn't it? Well, the symbol of modern
medicine, if there's any doctors or anybody in the healthcare
industry that's listening to me that you would say, now wait a
minute, that is the, that's about the God Asclepius, this
Greek God. Well, just to tell you, you
know, Asclepius, that mythology, Greek mythology was 500 BC and
this was 1000 years before that. All I'm saying is that the
Greeks copied their homework off the Hebrews, and it was from
this point that Moses was able, at 120 years of age, to see the
land that he had never set his eyes on before, the land that
God was going to give the nation of Israel to possess.
Now you saw the picture of how rugged that is.
Moses is 120 years old. He's 120 years old and he
climbed that mountain. He didn't take a cable car,
didn't take a Jeep. He walked it.
And who was with him? No one.
He was alone. So that gives you an indication
of the vitality of Moses, even at 120 years of age, to climb
that range of mountains to the top of that mountain, to be able
to see the Promised land that God was going to give that
nation of Israel. And God had told Moses that when
he got to the top of the mountain and saw the land, he
was going to die. So Moses, the friend of God, was
shown the essence of his life. This is why you were born for
this. You were made to bring these two
million people to this point. You've done what I told you to
do. You've been the person I created
you to be. And I can almost hear the words
of the apostle Paul 1500 years in the future echoing backward
in Second Timothy 47, where he said, I have fought the good
fight. I have finished the race.
I've kept the faith and while looking at that land, Moses fell
dead at the feet of God. And what follows is surprisingly
one of the more beautiful passages of Scripture.
In Deuteronomy chapter 34 verse 6, it says he buried him in Moab
in the valley opposite Beth Pior, but to this day no one
knows where his grave is. The poet put it this way.
By Nebo's lonely mountain, this side of Jordan's Wave, in the
veil of the land of Moab there lies a lonely grave.
But no one dug a sepulchre, and no man sought air, for the Angel
of God upturned the sod and laid the dead man there.
In the entire Bible, there's only one man that God buried
himself. And when we bury someone, we get
the shovels out, maybe we get a backhoe out, we dig a six foot
hole, we put a vault down into the ground that a casket fits in
before we fill the remainder of that hole back up.
And I wonder how God buried Moses.
Maybe he picked up the entire mountain and placed his body in
the midst of it and then gently set it back down on him.
Moses, this mountain will be your tombstone because it
reflects the mountain of a man that you've become.
I want to share one more passage about the man that Moses became.
It's written in Deuteronomy 3410, and it could have been the
epitaph that was written on his tombstone, if he had.
One says this. Since then, no prophet has risen
in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, who did
all those miraculous signs and wonders the Lord sent him to do
in Egypt, to Pharaoh and all his officials, and to his whole
land. For no one has ever shown the
mighty power performed the awesome deeds that Moses did in
the sight of all Israel. That's the kind of man that only
God can make. When a man or a woman is fully
submitted to God and humility, their potential has no earthly
limit. And humility is the only way God
can shine through US. Pride, it takes us away from
God. Pride becomes a mirror where we
look into it and we think, look at me, pride is the most ancient
of all sins, the sin of Satan himself.
But then God breaks that pride down like he did in Moses, and
he says it's only through humility, the recognition of who
you are and who I am, that you can truly be who I've designed
you to be. God has a plan for your life.
And, and I know that God has a general plan for humanity.
He has an upper story plan for humanity, but he doesn't just
have a general plan. He has a specific plan for your
life, your individual life. How else could the apostle Paul
say under inspiration Ephesians 210 for we are his workmanship
created in Christ Jesus under good works that God has prepared
beforehand, that we should walk in.
And that means that you live under a calendar of divine
appointments every day, every time you get up, every time God
allows you to live another day, you have a string of divine
appointments in front of you that God is designed
specifically for you. In Hebrews chapter 12, he tells
us to lay aside every weight and all the sin that entangles us
and run with endurance. What the race that has been
marked out for us. That's not general, that's
specific. You see it in Moses.
He was a man who had a specific plan.
God has this plan for our lives, but as long as our pride gets in
between US and God, we will never be able to experience that
potential. We have to be humble and you
know, humility. You can pray to God for
humility, and that's a scary prayer, by the way, because you
know he'll answer that one. You know, my mother used to say,
if you ever pray for patience, duck.
And I really think that's true. And if you pray for humility,
humiliating things are going to happen to you because that's how
you learn humility, right? But the Bible says humble
yourself in the sight of the Lord and then he will lift you
up. So are we going to give God the
responsibility of humility, or are we going to take that
responsibility on ourselves like God teaches us?
Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord and He will lift us
up. Every one of us has the raw
material to become exactly what God has planned for us to be.
And then God can and will change the world through us.
Unfortunately, we're like the younger version of Moses a lot
of the time. And we try to do it in our own
power. We like setting our own agenda.
We like writing our own story. But our story is never going to
be anywhere as good as the story God has planned for us.
And I, you know, I mean, this would be a great time to, to
say, OK, Moses. Well, there's a, a great person
to try to live my life after. There's a great person that I
need to use comparatively so that I can and, and, and that
that's, that's not bad. That's, that's a good idea.
But you know, there's someone better than that.
It's interesting, isn't it, that in the Old Testament, and it was
true when it was written, that since then no one has risen up
in Israel that has done these mighty things and these
wonderful works, You know, for no one has ever shown the mighty
power and performed the awesome deeds that Moses did in the
sight of all Israel. And that was true when it was
written, but it's not true anymore because someone has
written up, risen up in Israel that is greater than Moses, far
greater than Moses. And the signs and the wonders
that he accomplished were greater than Moses.
And the greatest of all those signs and wonders was to have
the willingness to lay down his life and to die alone on a cross
for you and for me. For nothing that he did, but for
everything that you did and that I've done and that I will do and
that you will do. Past President, future, all that
burden of sin, taking on himself, bearing that sin alone
on that cross 2000 years ago, being buried in a borrowed tomb.
And then the greatest of all signs and wonders ever
accomplished, that ever will be accomplished in the human
experience was the Sunday morning that an Angel came down
and rolled that stone away and sat on it.
And my Savior, who had been so brutalized and so ruined in his
humanity, walked out of that tomb alive, and the only marks
on him were the ones that he chose to hold on to his trophies
and proof. Thomas, don't believe me?
Put your fingers into the nail prints in my hands.
You don't believe me? Put your hand into my side.
He kept those. That is the greatest hero of
God's word, and he's my hero, He's my Lord.
Listen, you might be dealing with realities that have come
from setting your own agenda, maybe from making your own
decisions. Maybe other people have made
decisions for you and you feel victimized.
You feel broken like Moses did after that first 40 years.
You might be feeling destroyed and broken and shattered right
now because you failed or somebody failed and you're
living in that failure. Maybe things haven't worked out
the way that you wanted them to. Maybe you're feeling like Moses
in the wilderness when he said I have become an alien in a
strange and foreign land. Maybe right now you're feeling
deconstructed. Maybe you've started in on this
journey of faith, but instead of God building you up, you feel
like he's tearing you down. And maybe He is tearing you down
because he's getting down to that faulty foundation that you
built your life on to make sure that you're building your life
on the one and only foundation that you can build it on.
And that is Jesus Christ. And once that foundation is
laid, what God will build on that foundation is greater than
anything you can imagine. That's how He will make you in
into what He wants you to be. He removes all that has been
built on a bad foundation, and then He will build His holy
temple in your heart. Maybe you're beginning to
experience God laying that foundation and building that
house. He's doing it out of living
stones and precious jewels. Where are you right now with
God? Maybe today is the day that
boldly you speak to God about humility.
There's none of us that can say, Yep, I'm here, I've arrived.
The real question is whether or not you'd be willing to be on
your knees for it, to look inside and ask yourself the
question, the question that we started this series with, who am
I? And realize that you are always
intended for God to set the identity of your life, not you.
I want you to think about that while we move to a time of
decision. So, you know, I, I, I, I preach
up there, I'm elevated that that's really just so people can
see. It's not because I'm any better
and some of you know me and you'd go aim into that.
You know, some of you just watch me or see me, but you don't
really know me. And if you do know me, you know
that I'm a very inconsistent person.
I struggle a lot in my walk of faith.
Sometimes I feel pretty strong, sometimes I don't.
As a matter of fact, the times I feel stronger, I'm probably
further than the times I feel weaker.
That make sense to you? And then we come to this point
of decision and I come down on the floor.
You know, I've done that ever since I've been here.
And the reason I'm standing on the floor is because I want, I
want there to be a visual representation of the fact that
we're all standing on the same ground.
We're all just people who mess up a lot, but we are also the
children of God that are loved by God beyond our ability to
even understand it. And I would just like for you to
consider something today. I would like you to consider not
just maybe praying a prayer that God would move in your life.
I would like you to consider coming up here and getting down
on your knees. I mentioned this, I think last
week that I had a person a long time ago when I first came to
Quincy and they saw that I was doing that, that I was inviting
people to come up and get down on their knees.
And we would always have kind of a, we wouldn't have like a short
song and let's go home. It would be, we spend some time
up here and it was like a long time and people would come up.
And I remember talking to a person, it was at an event, at a
Salvation Army event. And, and that person said to me,
that is so humiliating. Why would you bring a person up
here and make them get down on their knees in front of other
people? That's humiliating.
And I thought about that word, that word humiliating.
What does that word mean? Humiliating.
Well, it humbles me. And then I thought, is that a
bad thing? Is it a bad thing to be humbled
before Almighty God? Is it a bad thing to have a
physical representation with my body that I'm getting down on my
knees because I realized there is a God and I'm not God and he
is God and, and I need to honor him as God and I need to be
dependent on him as God and, and to approach God like that, to
approach God more as a a prodigal son who I don't really
deserve to be part of a member of your family.
But if you would just let me be a hired servant, you know, I'd
be happy with that. And then what happens then God
grabs a hold of you and he puts his arm around you.
Just like in that story. That father wasn't hearing any
of that. He, he, he was saying my son was
dead. He's alive again, was lost.
But now he's found. Go kill the fatted calf.
Put a ring on his finger, put a robe on him.
Right. We humble ourselves in the sight
of the Lord, and then he does what we can't do.
He lifts us up. He exalts us.
We live in a world crammed full of people who exalt themselves.
Why do, why do we do that? We have these huge tragedies
that happen. They've had, there's been a lot
of them, right? These hurricanes and stuff.
And the people get up at the mic and you know what they do for
the 1st 15 minutes, they thank everyone.
Have you ever heard of that? I would just like to thank these
people and I would like to thank these people and I would like to
thank these people. You know, so we're all doing
this thing. We're all doing the whole
exaltation thing. What if we just was, we're
humble. Maybe, maybe church is a place
that we can be honest just for a moment.
And instead of giving each other trophies, what we do is we just
come before an almighty God and we get down on our knees and we
humble ourselves before him and then wait for him to exalt us.
And when he does that, then we're blessed.
I don't know what you're dealing with.
A lot of people in this room, a lot of people online already
believers. Maybe today is a day that you
just lay something down and that's what this is for.
Just lay something down. Maybe this could be a burning
Bush moment for you or your life is focused and directed by God.
I don't want my will anymore. I want yours.
And for many of you here today that have never made a decision
to have an intimate personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
And I'm not talking about being a church person.
I'm not talking about having your name on some roll.
I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about you and Jesus
Christ having an intimate relationship together.
That's what he's calling you into it.
If you've never done that, you might have done all the other
things around it, but you've never done that.
Here's an opportunity to do that.
There's going to be somebody right over there by that
baptistry that loved nothing more than just talk to you about
it and pray with you about it. But I'm telling you right now,
we are in this singular moment right now in time and space, and
the angels of heaven are around this room, and Satan is not
welcome here. And the Holy Spirit is in this
room. And the Bible says that Jesus is
walking up and down these aisles because we're two or three
gathered there. Am I in the midst of them?
He's here. He knows you, He knows your
story. He knows all the things you say
to yourself that aren't even true.
And he's not here to judge you. He's here to save you because He
loves you. Would you stand with me?
Let's pray, Heavenly Father, in Jesus name, I pray that all of
the defense mechanisms, all the strongholds inside of our heart
would just come down right now. That you would bring them down.
All the places that we like to hide from you.
And even though, Father, that sounds like being exposed, help
us to realize that you are not a God in this moment in time that
has any desire to judge us. If you did, you would not have
sent your Son Jesus to die for us.
You are here to love us and to heal us.
You're here to call us your children.
You are here to bring us home. And I pray, Father, that we'll
have the courage to trust you and seek you with our hearts
even now, in Jesus name, Amen.