Hello Crossing Church, how are you doing today?
It is so good to see you. I don't know about all the other
locations. We got a packed house right now
and that's always so encouraging.
So many people just being able to share in the word of God and
be changed by God. So I want to welcome all of our
campuses joining from all across this region, all of our
locations. And if you're inside or online,
so thankful for each and everyone of you as well.
And I've had an interesting experience in the last week,
more than interesting, like a really formative experience.
My wife's had knee problems for a long time.
It's gotten a lot worse. She had a knee replacement on
Tuesday and it is absolutely amazing what God does through
those doctors because she was started surgery at 10:00 and she
was walking on a new knee at 1:30.
I mean, is that nuts? And they, you know, and I did a
little research and like the first knee replacement was like
1968. How many of you want to be a
candidate for that one? And before the knee replacement
surgery, what did people do? I mean, and that wasn't that
long ago, was it, that it was just, you were just out of luck.
You were in a wheelchair on crutches or something like that
from then on and how that would affect you.
And I, I'm just so thankful that God has given us human beings
the opportunity to be able to learn things to such a level
that that that kind of thing can actually be accomplished.
It's just such an amazing thing. So she's watching at home today,
but I'm just thankful for a God who just does amazing things on
his own and through his people. Would you agree with that?
He is a good God. He is just a really, really good
God. And I'm praising God for that
today. So we're in this series called
Decisions in the Desert, Walking with God in trial and triumph.
And it's about Moses and the children of Israel from the book
of Exodus. In the first week, we talked
about the birth of Moses and we connected that to what it means
to be a child of God. One of the things we learned in
that sermon was the proximity to God is more important than
production for God. And a lot of us, we struggle
figuring that out, that when we're in in close proximity to
God, he's going to do great things.
But we just need to not just try to do things for him, but to be
with him. The second week we learned how
Moses learned humility and how that reshaped his entire life.
But things had to go all the way down to the foundation and even
below that, and God had to lay a new foundation.
In the third week, we learned about the 1st 9 plagues that God
used to predispose the Egyptians to let the Israelites go and how
God judged an empire for defying him.
And and then in the fourth week we learned that God can redeem
his people, but the cost of sacrifice is high.
We learned that through the Passover.
Today we're going to learn something else that even though
we can be delivered out of bondage because we're going to
see the nation of Israel delivered out of bondage and we
have our own kind of bondage. Just because we have freedom
from that bondage doesn't mean that we don't have to serve
anyone. You are designed by God to
serve. Obviously we know that from the
one we follow, and that's Jesus Christ because he said the Son
of Man didn't come to be served, but to, to serve.
And so we take that from him that that we, we, we might not
think that we have to serve, but we're going to have to serve.
Somebody just has to be the right somebody, which in my mind
took me back to the 70s and a song that I remember that was
really popular in the 70s. I want to see how many of you
remember it. They're going to play a clip
from it. You may be rich or poor, you may
be blind or little, maybe living in another country under another
name, but you're going to have to serve somebody.
Yes, you are. You're going.
To how many of you recognize it? Yeah, four people.
Bob Dylan. But it may be the devil.
It may be the devil. It may be the love.
But you're going to have to serve somebody.
Yeah. It's from an album that he came
out with called Slow Train Coming, and it marked Dylan's
new found faith in Jesus Christ. And Dylan's conversion is
interesting. It came after a really difficult
stretch in his career. And a fan in the front row threw
a necklace up on stage and it had a silver cross on it.
And rather than ignoring it, Dylan went over and picked it up
and put it in his pocket. Later on, he was experiencing a
personal crisis. And it can that the crisis
continued and he reached into the pocket of those same genes
and he pulled out that silver cross.
And what he said was it led to a profound moment where he felt
the presence of Jesus with him. And it inspired him to write
that song and a number of other songs.
The thing is, what Dylan wrote in that song is absolutely true,
and Dylan made the choice pretty clear.
But a lot of the time it's hard for us to see that that choice
is that simple, that you're going to have to serve somebody.
Might be the devil, might be the Lord, but you're going to have
to serve somebody. When we read the story of Moses,
it feels a lot like there's an oppressor and then there is the
oppressed, this people group that's oppressed.
It's really easy to just turn it into something binary.
But if you look at the situation in the historical context, it's
a lot different than that. It's a lot more complicated than
that. Last week, Clayton kind of gave
us a history lesson, and he began by talking about Abraham
and how God provided for Abraham.
You know, Abraham was the first one to use this term for God.
He called him Jehovah Jireh. How many of you heard that
before Jehovah Jireh? And what that means is the God
who provides in God, it will be provided.
And he said that when he was willing to offer his own son
Isaac as a sacrifice to God, and then God provided a substitute,
God provided a ram with its horns thought caught in the
thicket as the substitute sacrifice.
And then Abraham said, Jehovah Jireh, God will provide.
He didn't just provide for Abraham.
He provided for his son Isaac and Isaac's son Jacob and
Jacob's twelve sons. And one of those sons was
Joseph. And even though his brother sold
him into slavery, this is actually the Nexus.
This is where Egypt becomes a part of this story is they sell
him into slavery but God uses that in such a profound way
because it was through Joseph that Egypt and the entire
surrounding area was saved through 7 from 7 years of
famine. It also gave Egypt incredible
wealth. During that famine, all of
Joseph's family moved from Canaan, migrated down into Egypt
because that's where the food was.
Nothing wrong with that. The thing is, and this is where
it gets complicated, they weren't meant to stay there.
That wasn't the land that God gave them.
Canaan was the land that God gave them.
He had set aside their own country for them, but they got
comfortable living in Egypt and then they didn't want to go back
to Canaan when the famine was over.
In Exodus one one through 7, the Bible says these are the names
of the sons of Israel. Israel was the name that that
God changed Jacob's name into Israel, who went to Egypt with
Jacob in each of his each with his family, Reuben, Simeon,
Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun and Benjamin, Dan and Naftali,
Gad and Asher, the descendants of Jacob numbered listen 70 in
all. So those sons, their wives,
their kids and their wives, 70 people.
Joseph was already in Egypt. Now Joseph and all of his
brothers and all that generation died.
But the Israelites were exceedingly fruitful and they
multiplied greatly and increased in numbers and became so
numerous that the land was filled with them.
So remember what was supposed to happen?
And God had told him be fruitful and multiply.
God had given him a, a wonderful land to do that in Canaan.
But they went down to Egypt because of the famine, got
comfortable in Egypt. Listen to me, some of you are
comfortable in Egypt. Now it's going to get real.
You get comfortable in Egypt. That's a dangerous thing to do.
You need to be where God intends for you to be, and he intended
him for to be in Canaan. But they but they got
comfortable in Egypt. And then Exodus 18 to 14 tells
us the rest of the story. Then a new king, to whom Joseph
meant nothing came to power in Egypt.
Look, he said to his people, the Israelites have become far too
numerous for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly with
them, or they will become even more numerous.
And if war breaks out, we'll join our enemies and fight
against us and leave the country.
So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced
labor, and they built Pytham and Ramses as store cities for
Pharaoh. But the more they were
oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread.
So the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites and worked them
ruthlessly, made their lives bitter with harsh labor in brick
and mortar, with all kinds of work in the fields.
And in their harsh labor. The Egyptians worked them
ruthlessly. When we think of slavery, we
tend to want to put it in our own American historical context.
But this was a lot different. People that were abducted in
Africa, put on slave ships, and brought to America didn't have a
choice. But the Israelites did have a
choice. The Israelites chose to stay in
Egypt. They start didn't start out as
slaves. They weren't a conquered people.
They were an immigrant people group, and history shows that
there was such diversity in these two cultures between
Israel and Egypt. They were so vastly different
that they found it comfortable to be a part than to be
together. That's why you see Israel living
in a separate area of Egypt called the land of Goshen, and
you see the Egyptians living where they were living.
They liked the space between the two.
They didn't assimilate their cultures.
They say separate cultures and then they found work with the
Egyptians and that's what led to their comfortable lives.
And it did for sometimes, but times change.
That's another Bob Dylan song, by the way.
The times they are changing and eventually the geopolitical tide
turned against them and Israel became a permanent underclass.
Over the years, their rights were whittled away, and then
they became a service culture for Egypt.
They were no longer free. They were owned not by
individuals, but by the state of Egypt and made to work for the
betterment of the Egyptian empire.
So let's personalize that. Let's bring that into our own
lives. That's how sin works.
Sin doesn't take you all at once.
It breaks you down a little bit at a time, but after a while you
wouldn't even recognize what you used to be.
You see, freedom means that you're able to make choices.
Choices in what you say and what you do and who you are and who
you want to be. But freedom needs a purpose.
And our purpose, as defined in the Bible, is to love and serve
God and to love and serve one another.
That's the great commandment. Jesus said it right, To love God
with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your
neighbor as yourself. That's who we're supposed to be.
It's what makes our lives matter.
But when we choose to serve ourselves, we can end up slaves
to those choices, just like Israel did.
And Bob Dylan had that right. I wonder how many of you feel
stuck right now, like you're in a spot that you never imagined
you would ever be in, but here you are.
And you feel like, you know, you're backed into a corner,
like there's no way out. And it, you know, it could be
anything. It could be that you're enslaved
to your addiction, or the results of your choices, or the
results of other people's choices, and you feel trapped
and you feel powerless to change anything.
Enslavement will do that to you. So you get up every day and you
endure the hardship of those choices.
You make your quota of bricks. You get enough to survive
another day. Heard it said one time.
I dig in the ditch to get the money to buy the food, to get
the strength to dig the ditch and your life just becomes this
never ending cycle. First time I went to Haiti, it
was the first time I'd ever been in a developing country that
really never has never developed.
And I went there with a lot of predispositions in my mind.
I had heard all my life this statement.
People in America, there are people in America that have it
just as bad as people in those countries.
When I went there the first time, I figured out that's not
even close to true. There's no such thing as that.
There's no one that's so poor in America that experiences the
poverty that's in Haiti. Let me explain why that is.
The poorest person in America can still drink water that won't
kill them. The poorest person in America
can still get a public education.
The poorest person in America can still walk into a an
emergency room and get treatment.
If you grow up in Haiti, the water will kill you.
If you get sick, you die. But that's not what I'm talking
about. Here's what true poverty is.
True poverty is when a father or a mother looks at their child
and realizes that there is absolutely nothing that they can
do to change that child's destiny.
They can't change theirs and they can't change their child's.
No matter how hard they try, no matter how many barriers they
want to break down, they cannot do it.
And you know what? That is hopelessness.
And that, my friend, is poverty. Poverty is when there is
absolutely no way that you can change the circumstance that
you're in. And I came back changed from
that first trip. And it's hard then to understand
when you're in that circumstance, how God can be
your Jehovah Jireh. He can be the God who provides.
In those 430 years of enslavement, I'm sure that
Israel felt that way, but He still is a God who provides.
He provided for His people not because of their choices, but in
spite of them and all the choices of those who went before
them. You know how He did it.
He sent an 80 year old Hebrew outcast, a former terrorist with
nothing but a shepherd's staff made of almond wood.
That and the power of Almighty God.
And if God can use an 80 year old broken down man with a
shepherd's staff that has the worst reputation, check this
out. He can use you because it's all
of that and the power of God. We've already heard about the
plagues and how it brought Egypt low and the lowest came from the
Passover and the death of the first born.
Why did that happen? You know, some people would say,
why would God be so ruthless? Why would he be so awful as to
do stuff like that? Clayton brought that question
up, and I've heard people say if you read that story in the
Bible, it'll actually tell you that God hardened Pharaoh's
heart. Like, it sounds like God made
Pharaoh incapable of making the decision to let the Israelites
go. But you're not doing a thorough
reading of that story. If you do a thorough reading of
that story, what you'll read is this in the early stages of the
plagues. Where it was hardship but not
dying. It doesn't say God hardened
Pharaoh's heart. It says Pharaoh hardened his own
heart. And as you move through the
plagues, it changes the language changes from Pharaoh hardened
his heart to God hardened Pharaoh's heart.
Some people are go, that's a hard one to explain, Jerry.
I goes, no, it's not really isn't.
And I like to use this illustration.
If you were to get like a lump of soft wax and you were to roll
it up like into a ball when it's soft, OK, and it kind of
solidifies. And then you were to take a lump
of clay and roll it up into a similar sized ball.
And you had in one hand you had the wax and in the other hand
you had the clay. And on a day like today, you
would take it out and you set it on your driveway in the sun.
What would happen? What would happen to the wax?
Somebody say what would happen to the clay, But the sun is the
same. The sun hasn't changed.
The sun's effect is the same. What determines what happens?
It's the substance that it's shining on, right?
This is what happened with Pharaoh.
He determined the substance of his heart.
He could have said he could have made the choice and said I
choose to be wax. I choose to allow the power of
God to melt my pride, my ego, my sense of power, the the fact
that I got everybody believing I'm a deity.
He could have done that, but instead he determined the
substance of his heart and he said, I'm going to have a clay
heart, not a wax heart. And so God's effect on him was
to harden his heart. So at first he had the choice,
and then he didn't have the choice.
Listen to this. Pharaoh made choices, but after
a while, his choices made him. You make choices, but after
you've made some of those choices, those choices make you.
They define who you are. You don't define what they are
anymore, and that's a hard thing for us to have to learn.
This is what happened to the Hebrew people when they moved to
Egypt. This was after that process.
Now we look at the details of the Passover.
We looked at those last week, but I want you to look at this
one. It's really an obscure part of
the story, but we read about it in Exodus 11, verses two and
three. It says this.
Tell the people. God is telling Moses tell the
people that men and women alike are to ask their neighbors for
articles of silver and gold. You know, that was after the
death of the first born. Do you think if your first born
was still alive and your neighbors first born, they're
getting ready to have a funeral service for that one and you go
and ask them for all their precious stuff, they're going to
say yes. Look what the verse three says.
The Lord made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the
people. The Lord can work on a human
heart. In Exodus 12 verses 35 and 36,
it says the Israelites did as Moses instructed and asked the
Egyptians for article of silver, articles of silver and gold and
for clothing. And the Lord made the Egyptians
favorably disposed toward the people and they gave them what
they asked for. So they plundered the Egyptians.
That's amazing. You can have whatever you want.
Just get out of here. You know I, God can do that in a
bad way and God can do that in a good way.
In other words, God can do that in your heart.
He can. You know you, you may be
resisting God, and God is putting it on your heart.
I want you to do this. You need to do this.
God can definitely influence your heart.
How many of you ever heard you can lead a horse to water, but
you can't make him drink, but you can feed him salt?
And God does that in bad ways or good ways.
He can. He can move a human heart
without taking away their choice.
He can definitely move it. He's doing that here.
Now I want you to understand why He said that.
Not only did God provide for the deliverance of His people out of
bondage, He provided all that they would need to serve Him.
The plunder of Egypt was not for making Israel rich.
It was for them to rediscover their identity as the people of
God. They had forgotten who they
were. They had forgotten their
identity as the people of God. There was 70 that went from
Canaan into Egypt. And here we are 430 years later,
and the Bible says there were 600,000 men on foot, not
including the women or the children.
That's how we know that by this time there were over 2,000,000
Israelites, which is really important to know when you think
that Moses is moving over 2 million people across the
desert, where there's no water, where there's no food, where
it's blisteringly hot during the day and cold at night.
Pretty amazing how many people. But over those years they had
forgotten their identity as the people of God.
All the years in the generations of slavery had erased Israel's
understanding of who they were. You know what?
If our choices have made us long enough, we can forget who we are
and we can forget whose we are. You and I live in a world and in
an American culture that has no idea who they are.
They're just reaching out everywhere to figure out
identity. When their identity is clear,
our identity is clear. We are the people of God.
We are the children of God and we need to act like that instead
of act any way we want to act. They didn't know who they were.
The plundering of Egypt was designed to give them all that.
They would need to rediscover that identity through
worshipping and serving God. And it's interesting that it
wasn't taken into some treasury. It was distributed to the
people. All the people got that plunder
to hold on to that plunder. But there was a reason for it.
It was a test. Exodus 25 verses one through 9.
The Lord said to Moses, tell the Israelites to bring me an
offering. Guess what an offering is?
It's a choice. How do I know it's a choice?
Look at the next words. You are to receive the offering
from for me, from everyone whose heart prompts them to give.
They had to make the choice. These are the offerings you are
to receive from them. Gold, silver and bronze, blue,
purple and scarlet yarn and fine linen.
Goat hair and ramskins dyed red and another type of durable
leather. Acacia wood.
Olive oil for the light, spices for the anointing oil and for
the fragrant incense and Onyx stones and other gems to be
mounted on the efid and the breast piece that's of the High
Priest. Then have them make a sanctuary
for me and I will dwell among them.
Make this Tabernacle and all its furnishings exactly like the
pattern. I will show you that gold would
be beaten into sheets and it would overlay a wooden box made
of Acacia wood called the Ark of the Covenant, as would a table
for bread. And a lampstand would be
fashioned after, with pure gold and jewels mounted on the
breastplate for the high priest. And it's all right there in
Exodus. You can read it all.
God gave them the plunder so they could return it to him.
Why? Because identity is what they
needed the most. Who cares if you have some gold
or silver in your house if you don't know who you are?
Why is the second highest suicide rate in America among
the very rich? Why is the highest suicide in
America among the young? Because what we really need is
to know who we are. And what do we use riches for
today? To have the biggest house, the
finest clothes, the fanciest cars, the best portfolio?
Isn't that just us trying to shape our own identity?
When are we going to realize that all we have and all that we
are comes from the hand of Jehovah Jireh, the God who
provides? We think about these riches, but
often we miss the true riches that God gave his people.
In Exodus 13, one and two, it says this.
The Lord said to Moses, This is right as they're leaving Egypt.
Consecrate to me every first born male.
The first offspring of every womb among the Israelites
belongs to me, whether human or animal.
That's powerful too, because while Egypt was consigning their
dead first born to the ground, Israel was consecrating their
first born to a sacred purpose. Think of the contrast between
the wailing in the background and the worshipping in the
foreground. And God.
He never stopped providing. He was in the cloud that gave
him the shade on hot desert days.
He was in the pillar of fire keeping them warm at night.
He was in the manna and the quail that came daily to feed
them. He was in the rock from which
water flowed to quench the thirst of over 2 million people.
And he was in the sea that destroyed their enemies.
He was everywhere. And he's here right now, that
same God. And I know there's people that
say, well, you know, there's that Old Testament God and then
there's the New Testament God. Like the Old Testament gods mean
God. New Testament gods, really nice
God. Old Testament God is a judgment
God. New Testament God is peace, love
God. God never changes.
He's never changed. He's the same God the Bible says
yesterday, today and forever. And he is here to help you today
to rediscover your identity, not as a child, but as his child in
his family. And you know how he did it
through the death of his first born.
Why do you think that they had to take a one year old male lamb
without any spot or defect on it at the height of its life?
Why did they have to butcher it, catch it's blood, put the blood
on a doorpost in the lentil of their house, the doorway of
their life, so that God would say, when I see the blood I will
pass over you. You know some people say, and
I've heard it's repeated many times, that the Angel of death
went over Egypt. That's not what the Bible says.
The Bible says the Lord passed over.
The Lord passed over and when I see the blood I will pass over
you. And he gave his first born.
All of that is a shadowy image of what God was going to do
14170 years later, the death of his first born Jesus Christ, and
his resurrection from the dead. And Jesus Christ is here in this
room and in every room right now.
He's not limited by time and space, and He is here to provide
all that you need for living every day of your life.
But it comes with a choice. And the choice today is this.
You're going to have to serve somebody.
Some of you right now are saying, well, Jerry, truth is
I've made too many choices. And now, just like you said, my
choices make me. I've got good news for you
because you're right. You're exactly right.
Your choices are made like you've blown it.
It's gone, your opportunities are gone, you're backed in the
corner. You're a hopeless person.
Except I know a God who sent his Son, who says, if anyone is in
me, if anyone is in Christ, He is a new creation.
The old has gone and the new has come, and it only comes through
him. That's an amazing thought when
you think about it, that God has the ability to take all of those
bad choices and erase them and cover them like the Egyptians
were covered by the sea. He can cover them in the blood
of Jesus Christ. And he says, here you are,
here's a new choice, choose my son.
And when you choose Jesus Christ to be your Lord and your Savior,
you can become a new creation. And I can tell you this, that's
a good choice. We're moving to a time of
decision. It's funny how I'm taking for
granted this right now, but you know, being the primary
caregiver to my wife is making it hard for me to take this for
granted. What I'm doing right now that I
can just walk down those stairs and walk back and forth and not
have to give it any thought at all.
And I'd like to tell you this. I would like to tell you that
when you come to Jesus Christ, he's going to make everything
great. I'd love to tell you that.
Like it's going to be poof and it's all better.
That isn't true. My wife is teaching me that
right now. It doesn't get all better all at
once. Yeah, she got to walk on it, but
it didn't look pretty when she was doing it.
She is walking on it, but she has to use a Walker.
Hopefully tomorrow she graduates to a cane.
She really struggles lifting her leg, but she can do this, and
she could do that a whole lot better before she had her knee
surgery. She had a lot more mobility
before she had her knee surgery. And they say the first couple
weeks after knee surgery, you're asking yourself, why did I do
this? This was the dumbest thing, but
maybe the 3rd and the 4th week you're saying something
different, which is this? Why didn't I do this a long time
ago? I want you to hear the truth.
When you surrender your identity to Jesus Christ, it's going to
be uncomfortable for you. It's not going to be easy for
you. People come out of that
baptistery and it is wonderful. It feels so good.
It looks so good, right? But that's just the first step.
And it's amazing to see the miracle of a person being able
to walk right after a prosthetic joint is put in.
But they got a long way to go before they're climbing steps
and running. We just have to be patient as
God teaches us to use muscles we haven't been using.
I know from other people I know personally that have had those
knee surgeries that it gets better and it doesn't it it
doesn't take forever and it's worth it.
Let me tell you this, being a Christ follower isn't easy, but
it's worth it when you have a bad days and good days, painful
days and easy days. He's not a genie in a bottle,
He's real, and every one of those steps that you take for
him, you're going to make some progress and He is in it for the
long haul to win it. If you don't know Jesus Christ
personally as your Lord and Savior, there's absolutely
nothing standing in your way from doing that today except
you. He is holding back every dark
force, every power, every principality, everything that
would be against us. He's holding it back and He's
protecting this moment for you right now.
He is here in this place. He's here to meet you.
If you want to meet Him, there's going to be somebody right up
there by that baptistry would love nothing more than to just
talk to you. Pray with you about what your
next steps are. God will begin doing something
amazing in your life. You think what I've been
describing in my home is amazing.
It's nothing like this. Because He can replace a human
heart, an eternal thing. Many of you here today, you've
made that decision. You've made that choice for
Jesus Christ. But that doesn't mean that the
things in this world don't get in the way.
And sometimes we just need to reboot.
I don't know how techie some of you people are.
Some of you are as old as me, which means you're not that
techie. Now I've got a son who's like a
tech expert. And I mean, that's how he makes
his living. And you know what he tells me?
He says, dad, did you turn it off and turn it back on?
How many of you heard that from your kid before?
And then you want to slap him in the face?
There's a lot of times that solves the problem.
Let me tell you what these steps are, is turning it off and
turning it back on. That's exactly what it is.
You're just rebooting. You're just reminding yourself
to go back all to all of your spiritual defaults.
And I invite you to come up here and have that time with the Lord
today. In any case, it's decision time.
Would you stand with me, pray with me, Heavenly Father, in
Jesus name, please take these moments that are in front of us
and help us to realize, just like you dealt with the children
of Israel, that you are dealing right now with the children of
God, your children that you've provided for, that you love.
Even when we forget you, even when we push you aside, you love
us. And I pray, Father, in Jesus
name, that you would speak that still small voice, those
whispers into our hearts, and help us to respond to you, the
Father who loves us in Jesus name, Amen.