Well, hey everybody, again, it's great to see you.
My name is Josh. I have the joy of serving as
pastor here at the Garden. Well, this morning we are
continuing our series titled The Story.
It's a 10 week series and we're going Genesis to Revelation
beginning to the end this morning.
We're in week 4 of this series, and really our big objective
across this whole series is to try and make sense of how this
ancient library of texts from different geographies and
languages and different cultures and spaces all together forms
and tells 1 coherent and beautiful story about how God is
redeeming the world in and through Jesus.
And this morning we are picking up the pace.
The first three weeks we covered 15 chapters and this morning
we're going to cover, you know, the next seven books.
We're going to cover the rest of the Old Testament in the next
three weeks. So we're going to be moving
quickly this morning. If you are a if you are a nerd,
this is this is a good week for you.
Like I'm going to drop some drop some Bible nerddom on here on us
here today. But I think as we look
particularly at the book of Exodus and especially on the
giving of the law and the Mosaic covenant, I believe that there's
a lot here for us as individuals who are following Jesus in
Boston in the 21st century today.
And I'm excited to unpack that with you.
Growing up, for me, there was a couple of years where I attended
a private school. It was a residential space and
that honestly, the rules were super duper onerous, came from a
conservative background, and this was a space.
It was a Christian School and man, we had rules about
everything. How you dressed, when mealtimes
were, how you showed up, like how you interacted with the
opposite sex, the language that you could use.
Everything felt like it was regulated and regimented.
And honestly, I hated it. I spent most of that like period
of my life trying to figure ways to to to break the rules without
getting in trouble was a primary objective for me in that season.
And and I would describe looking back, I would say like that
posture. Well, there was some good
intentions behind it had a lot of just legalism, a lot of kind
of rules forward, do these things so that you can be
accepted. And I think a lot of us, I bring
that account up because although I suspect that most of you don't
have an exact like super conservative school space that
you went to, whether it was in your home life or just an image
that you've internalized from somewhere else.
I think a number of us do have this imagination that this is
how God is. This is what God's law is like.
Like following God, I think many of us imagine is kind of, you
know, being squeezed down into this narrow and constraining
space where you can't do anything, you can't have much
fun and, and, and you're just trying to like make sure that
you don't step across the lines and get smited.
I don't, I don't know if the, the verb tense there is correct,
but like we're just, we're just like, can I, can I not get in
trouble functions as a significant part of the
spiritual life of a lot of Christians.
I know, and especially when we start to talk about God's law.
But the picture we see here that Phil read for us, and it's
presented in the book of Exodus is actually very different.
It's a story that connects this story, the story of giving of
the Mosaic Law together with these stories that we've been
looking at over the past several weeks.
Here's the vision that God gives his people.
Again, in verses 5 and 6 of chapter 19, we read this.
If you obey Me fully and keep my covenant, that's the law,
obedience and the Torah, then out of all of the nations you
will be My treasured possession. Although the whole earth is
mine, you will be for Me a Kingdom of priests, a holy
nation. Now you may remember in the
first installment of the series, the creation story, we
discovered that that humanity was created to exist in the
presence of God and to extend His purposes in the world.
And this is what God is saying here.
The law exists not to hem you in and make sure you don't have any
fun, not to avoid being punished, but to allow you to
steward my presence and to extend my purposes.
This is what priests do. And I want to suggest to you
something this morning that might be different than kind of
how you grew up thinking about this.
I know a lot of us have this imagination in our head.
I, I, I was taught this at certain points of kind of like
the Old Testament is all about law and rules in the New
Testament is all about grace. Has anybody, anybody grew up
hearing or thinking something along those lines?
I don't think that's actually consistent with what we see here
in Torah in the Old Testament. Instead, what we see is, is not
a, not a prerequisite for being adopted into the family of God,
but a pathway for flourishing for those who have already been
adopted. Let me say that again, the law
is not a prerequisite for entering the family.
Rather, it's a pathway for folks who are already in.
And look here at what the text says in verse 4.
God reminds the people. He says, you yourselves have
seen what I did to Egypt. I carried you on eagle's wings
and brought you to myself. Before God talks at all about
what the people are to do, what they're supposed to accomplish,
or how they're supposed to behave, He reminds them what He
has done. I carried you.
I brought you. He talks about who they already
are, treasured priests, holy. And and this rescue that he's
referring to here in Exodus 19 is of course, a reference to the
other key moment in this book, the Exodus, the event after
which the book itself is named. All right, so let's try and
catch up because we left off last week with Abraham and this
covenant to Abraham in chapter 15, and now we're all the way at
Sinai, the receiving of the law. So how did we get from here to
there? All right, so two weeks ago we
saw that God's, or three weeks ago now we saw that God's
people, the first humans, were presented with essentially what
amounts to 2 doors, right? An option to trust God and obey
him, or an option to distrust him, take a shortcut, seize
control and go their own way. Of course they choose door 2.
They sin. And over the next chapters of
Genesis we see this spiral of disconnection and death which
follows. Last week we saw Abraham, who is
so significant here in the story because again, he's kind of
called out of nowhere, but he chooses instead door 1, the door
of faith, the door of obedience. And God cuts this covenant with
him as we saw a promising descendants land and a blessing
to the world. But even Abraham doesn't
consistently choose door number one, right?
At times, he also goes his own way.
In fact, if you look at Genesis chapter 12 where we were last
week, we read about the part of the covenant like the very next
section of that chapter records the story of Abraham.
No sooner than God has brought him into this land that he's
promised him, all of a sudden there's a famine.
And Abraham is like, I'd rather like solve for this.
I'm going to go to Egypt and migrate down here to get what I
really need. What a picture for us, even
those who are followers of Jesus, of our tendency, our
temptation to look for comfort, to look for control, and to be
willing to take a shortcut to find it.
This is what Abraham does. He goes instead to Egypt.
Egypt is a mess. Read that section of Genesis.
And ultimately, Egypt itself becomes a picture in the
biblical narrative of what it looks like when we choose to
disobey God and go our own way. All right, we're jumping forward
2 generations after Abraham, his sons are there, and once again,
they're faced with a similar situation.
Again, there's a famine. What are they going to do?
And man, if there's a beautiful picture of generational sin in
the Bible, this is probably it, right?
Because his family says, oh, we know what Gramps did, right?
We'll go to Egypt, They got food and off they go, following in
his footsteps the same way. And then what happens in Egypt
is something that I think many of us can relate to.
They wind up in exile. See, the shortcut that they
reach for to bail them out of a bad situation becomes precisely
the thing that enslaves them, right?
They're they're looking for an escape and get instead they get
exploitation. We see Pharaoh, the first really
awful villain in the text of Scripture, right?
They start off on their own volition, looking for a shortcut
to what they need, and instead they end up out of God's
presence, out of God's purposes, and in bondage to the exact
thing and place that they weren't reaching for.
And man, I think this is an experience that every person in
this room has had at some level or another.
Like maybe you've been trying to do a little bit of retail
therapy here and there, right? Shopping to soothe that itch and
found yourself with, Oh my gosh, these credit card bills will not
stop. Maybe you've been overwhelmed by
the awfulness that you're experiencing in the world or
even in your home. And so you reach for one of
these little devices, right? Just to numb it a little bit.
And before you know what's happening, you're caught in this
dopamine loop of doom scrolling, can't get out.
All of a sudden your attention is shot, your sleep is shot,
you're locked in. Do the same thing in so many
areas of our life, man. I want fulfilment, I want
connection. God hasn't sent the right person
yet. Maybe this person will be good
enough. Let me let me see if I can get a
little bit of fulfilment over here.
We know that it's not right, but we step outside to take a
shortcut. And so often, isn't it true?
I know I can attest to this. We find ourselves enslaved to
exactly the same things that we tried to use as an escape.
And so this is what happens to God's people here.
And at this point, enter Moses. Because there is this cycle
which happens throughout this portion of Scripture we're going
to see in the coming weeks as well of sin, of exile, and then
of rescue, right? God's people sin.
There are consequences. Their sin ends up resulting in
this pattern of, of disconnection and death.
But God does not abandon them. And this is what we see here in,
in, in Exodus chapter 6 and in verse 6, Exodus comes to Moses
and he says, Hey, I am the Lord. I will bring you the people out
from under the yoke of the Egyptians.
I will free you from being enslaved to them, and I will
redeem you with an outstretched arm.
I will redeem you. And then he goes on to say this.
He says, I will take you as my own people, and I will be your
God. Then you will know that I am the
Lord your God who brought you out from under the yoke of the
Egyptians. That's rescue.
That's deliverance, That's liberation.
But there's also this word here, which is maybe a little bit less
familiar to us, the word redeem. Redeem is the Hebrew word Gaal
here. And Gaal means to restore to
rightful ownership. So say, for instance, maybe
you've been here, We live in a city, You had a bike, It was out
of doors, chained up, and then you didn't have a bike, right?
You came out and said chain was slashed, right?
Somebody brought those Clippers out and the bike is gone.
All right, So this the second part doesn't happen as often,
but maybe you registered said bike and then it got found later
and returned to you, right? It would be a great ending to
the story. All right, Well, if that bike is
was restored to, if it was brought back into the original
ownership, if we were Jewish, we would use the word gal to
redeem. It's not always the the picture
that we have of redeemed, but that's what the word actually
means. It means to take something which
has been lost, which has been stolen and and restore it to its
proper place. And this is what God promises to
do with his people. He says, Hey, you got lost, you
went your own way and you got locked up.
You were stolen away and enslaved.
But hey, I'm going to come. I'm going to break those
shackles free. I'm going to free you from that
which binds you, and I'm also going to restore you into my
family. And of course, over the
following chapters of Exodus, there is this incredible story
and many of you know it, right? We've got the let my people go,
Charlton Heston moment. We've got like all of these
spaces where God shows up and goes to war essentially with the
king of Egypt, the baddest man alive, and through a series of
plagues demonstrates that he is the one true God.
God is going basically, not only am I going to break the chains
that bind you, but I'm also going to reintroduce myself.
Hey, this is who I am. I am the God of your father's,
the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
I'm the God of power and I am the God who has the rightful
claim on your allegiance. And towards the end of this
whole story, there are are a couple of events that happened.
These are events that may be familiar to you.
I wish we could like talk about this for a week, but but
specifically Passover and the parting of the Red Sea.
Obviously, these are moments of deliverance, right In the final
plague, the the murder and evil which has been visited upon the
people of God is now visited upon their oppressors.
Justice is served and people are, are, are set free.
And, and how are the people of God spared?
Well, there's this mark of blood that gets posted up above the
doorways of their homes, of their households.
And what is that all about here? Well, it's, it's a hook we're
looking forward to something we're going to talk about later
in the story with Jesus later tonight or later this this
morning. But it's also an identity
symbol. See, very often blood was used
as a symbol almost in the way that we would use a wedding
ring. God is making a claim on his
people. He's saying everyone marked by
the blood, these are my people. And then we Fast forward shortly
thereafter and what happens? The people began to escape.
They, their, their Pharaoh says that's it, get out of here.
Peace, not peace, but get out of here.
And so they take off and God parts the Red Sea, right?
And if you're if you're noticing here, the ways in which God
takes these chaos waters that we took in verse 1 and creates
something out of them. If you're thinking of baptism,
this moment where we pass through the water to become new
creation. And you see the layers of
symbolism and some of you all I got to tell you are so into
marvel. You you like no, all the
backstories, all the villains like all the like this is how it
was in the comic books. This some of y'all like got the
hip hop history right. You know, like this is this MC
did this and he did this and he pulled in this this beat and
this is this mixtape. Like some of us, some of y'all I
know are swifties in here. And it's just like man, it's
like layers and layers and layers, right friends, we need
to be like that with the Bible. The Bible is crazy.
The layers, the callbacks, the intricacies, the plot twists in
this story are incredible. And this is what's going on
here. God is basically saying by blood
and water, I have redeemed you. Oh, I have restored you to
myself. You are not my people.
It's beautiful. It's what he does with us.
So God rescues his people out of Egypt.
He redeems them in this way, this identity marker, and then
he brings them to Sinai, the mountain where he will give them
the law. Back in the spring, we got the
exciting news that my daughter Ava had been admitted to a
school near our house that we were excited for her to be at
and that was great. We kind of celebrated and had a
little party. And then a couple of weeks
early, a couple of weeks ago, Ava actually started at that
school, right? And we, we began the process of
learning about pick up and drop off routines and Oh my gosh,
like the what they do everyday and all the consent forms that
we have to sign and like, don't bring peanuts.
And like, you know, it's just like an endless list of things
that you have to be aware of. And I think this is actually a
pretty good metaphor for what happens here because see, we
often again misunderstand the law as a prerequisite for
getting in the family. But but what we see here clearly
in the book of Exodus is that God's people are actually
already restored to him. They are redeemed to him by
grace through his sovereign action.
They did not fight off Pharaoh. They did not part the sea.
God did that, right? So God brings them to himself by
his own power. But then they get to Sinai and
there's a constitution. He says, hey, guys, like here's
how we live in this family, right?
Here's the way that we do things.
There's some things that are in, there's some things that are
out. If you walked in this morning,
you passed a sign on which you saw these identity statements.
We attune to the Holy Spirit. We imitate Jesus, we cultivate
Shalom, right? This is who we are attempting to
live into. This is who we are as a church
community. And this is kind of the same
thing as what's happening at the Mather School.
What we are attempting to do here, God with his people is
saying like, you're already in the family, but then here's how
we live together. This is what it looks like to
walk that out in our family. And look, this is super
important for us because I think people often get thrown by the
law of Moses, like, first of all, because it has some things
that I think I hope we're on board with, like do not kill,
honour your parents. Everybody up here agrees with
that today, right? Like there are some things in
the law that are obvious, they seem universal, right?
These are good things for all people.
And then if you're in Boston, you won't have to be here very
long before somebody is like the Bible and shellfish and like the
crossing of fibres together, like what, what, what is even
going on, right? And the law also contains a
bunch of those things, right? Things that don't make any sense
to us and don't actually apply to us.
So how do we figure out like, how do we make sense of this
question of like, what pieces of this are relevant to us and what
is not? Well, the law is absolutely a
unique document for a particular people in a particular time and
place, right? So it doesn't just transfer one
to one. I know some Christians are doing
that. And if you want to, good luck
first of all, right? But also we see clearly in Jesus
that that's not actually the way, but there are the purposes
of the law and understanding these purposes are so helpful
for us. And, and you can understand the
purposes pretty simply across three major categories.
And all of these categories are relevant for you and me.
All right, So the first big category of what's going on in
the law is these rituals of identity.
We'll say these, these rituals of identity.
And there's all of these ways that God prescribes from Exodus
all the way through Deuteronomy, where over and over he explains
what it means to live as the people of God.
And there's a lot of thing that has to do with remembering your
story, understanding where you came from.
Like these people are going to go through generations.
And we are so quick to forget, aren't we?
And so God's puts in place things like Sabbath, this, this
weekly ritual, he places these festivals in their communal life
that will shape them year after year, things like the day of
Atonement. And, and, and there's also all
these like physical and tangible markers like the, the, the, the
text of scripture that they will notice on their door frame.
And actually even in some cases where on their forehead, right?
There's all of these things to remind the people of God who
they are. That's the first category,
rituals for identity. But second, there are also
boundaries for holiness. There are boundaries for
holiness. See, God is significantly
concerned here in Torah that his people, this people that he's
calling out from all of these other nations are going to in
fact wind up being kind of just like all of the other nations,
right? And, and all of the other
nations, not great, right? Corruption and idolatry,
selfishness, right? Bigotry, us, them.
Like there's all of these different ways in which the
cultures around them are actually toxic.
And so God puts in place a great deal of of law, of rules of
guidance to maintain the purity of the people.
And some of this has to do with actually like avoiding clear
sin, things that we would think of as sin.
And some of it is just like, Hey, stay away from those
people, right? We're just going to have some
different food laws so that who you eat dinner with is different
because they, they're going to rub off on you, right?
You can't actually be my covenant people if you're
constantly hanging out with the folk who are taking you in the
other direction. So God has these boundaries for
holiness, these these boundary markers and rituals, everything
from sexual ethics to the the prohibitions on idolatry to the
food laws and many more. And finally, there are what we
would call rules for flourishing.
So not only are there rituals for identity and boundaries for
holiness, but they're also rules for flourishing.
And God is very deeply concerned about this.
See, his people was never intended to be a private thing
for individuals so that in eternity, after they die, they
go to a different place. That's part of it, but that's
not the primary lens of the story.
See, actually a great deal of Torah is about like, how do we
care for the people on the margins?
How about the orphans? How about the widows?
How about the people who don't have a home and our sojourners
with us? We want to make sure that we
don't treat them just like we were treated by Pharaoh and the
Egyptians. Like, how are we going to set up
our society, our economics, our social patterns in a way that
makes sure that no one ends up persistently on the bottom?
We're going to have things like the year of Jubilee where all
debts are released every second year.
Everyone is set free. All private property goes back
to the person, back to the community, right?
Things are, all of these things are being reset on a regular
basis to create equity in the community, right?
People are told, don't harvest your whole field.
Make sure you leave some right for the for the folks who don't
have enough. So it's not just rituals for
personal holiness. They're also cultivating this
way of life together as a community that creates
flourishing for all, not just for them, but for others as
well. And, and the reason for this is
very simply the, the text makes clear is so that you will be a
witness to the nations, so that everyone will look at your
common life together and say, oh, that's what God is like.
That is what God is like. God is, is, is holy and just.
And, and in order for you to remain rooted in this, you need
this constitution, you need this pathway in order to live in the
family. Now, ultimately we discover that
Israel does a very poor job of following this kind of same as
us, right? What we'll see all the way
through. In fact, if you look at Torah,
there's all of these laws, right?
And but they're not all dropped in one place.
It's like some laws, some stories of them disobeying those
laws, some more laws, some more stories of them disobeying those
laws, some more laws, more stories of disobedience.
It's just like, it's a mess, guys.
They don't follow. In fact, we see this repeated
cycle of sin, right, disobedience, exile and rescue
over and over and over. So what the the book of Judges
is all about, it's just watching this pattern play on repeat.
But for us, I want to pause here.
We're going to pick up this thread next week, but I want to
pause here and, and think about the law for us because according
to the New Testament, we are not bound by the Mosaic law.
Like if you are into oysters, you want to wear some Lululemon.
Good news. There may be other reasons why
you shouldn't do that. I don't know.
But like, nothing in the Bible, right?
You're good, freed up permission from here.
But I think we very often because of that, because we
understand, we get like Paul is there, we've read some of that.
We understand that we're not bound by the law in those ways.
But very often we still find ourselves falling into one of
two ditches, one of two pitfalls, if you will.
On the one hand, we imagine that the Christian life, the life of
faith, is all about earning our acceptance.
After all, why would we have all of these rules?
So in in order to, in order to be good enough, to be worthy, to
be accepted, to experience the love of God, we've just got to,
we've got to follow the rules. We've got to climb this ladder
of acceptance in order to belong.
Some of us believe that and some of us don't believe that, but we
still believe that, if you know what I mean, right?
Like we wouldn't say that on a test, but if you look at our
lives, we're still striving, hustling and trying to earn our
keep and friends even before we get to the New Testament in
Jesus, we're going there. But even here we see that that
is that is never been the way this relationship with God has
worked from the very beginning. God calls his people by grace.
He breaks off their bondage and he says, welcome, come on in
into my presence. I want to be with you.
I want to cooperate with you to extend my purposes in the world
from the beginning. Friends, if you this morning are
still trying to get your life cleaned up enough before you can
be a Christian. If you're trying to do enough
right thing so that someday you'll be worthy of love and
belonging, I have good news. Like stop it.
You don't have to. That's not the way.
God already says yes to you. He already welcomes you.
You're already in. The acceptance letter is sitting
on your desk and all you have to do is say I'm in.
All you have to do is receive the gift.
Even here with God's people in the Hebrew Bible, we see the
same thing. Grace comes first, not guidance.
There's no hurdles they have to jump over in order to become
part of the family. They just have to trust God.
So that's the first thing. Some of us are in the ditch of,
of striving and trying to pay our way in to be good enough to
get there. But there is another ditch and,
and honestly, I think probably more of some of y'all are over
here. Some of y'all are over here.
Sometimes I'm over here, sometimes I'm over here.
And the other ditch is honestly, it looks more like entitlement
and, and at times the church is at fault here, honestly, because
we have focused so much on how you become part of God's family,
which is good. We should do that.
That's really important. But we focus so much on becoming
part of God's family that we haven't talked much about what
it looks like to live as a member of God's family.
Like what does it mean to actually live in the way of
Jesus, to live in the way of love?
The law is given as a gift. You see this throughout.
It's not a burden, It's not a problem.
David says, like, I love your law.
It's the pathway to flourishing. And look, the Mosaic law is a
different law for a different time and place, but we still
have the law of love. We still have the the direction
of the Spirit. The New Testament still has a
lot to tell you about how to live and how do we relate to
that? I think sometimes, sometimes I
sometimes maybe you get in this posture.
We're like, I prayed the prayer I'm in.
I did the thing. I go to church like I'm I'm one
of the good guys now. Like that's it.
And friends, adoption is not the end of the journey.
Praise God that you have been adopted by grace and also great.
Now you've got to figure out how to be part of the family, what
it looks like because there's some culture, there's some
rhythms, there's some some ways of doing and sharing life that
shapes us in the way of love. And so friends, I want to invite
us to consider this morning, what does that look like for
you? Like, what does that look like?
And not just for you personally, but in the in the community that
you're in, like here as our broader church community, we do
a lot of things in these spaces, but also in the smaller groups
that you are part of. What are your rhythms of life?
Do you have rituals for identity?
Are you doing things on a regular basis that reminds you
who you are and whose you are that help to ground you in the
reality that that you have been made part of God's family by
grace? My friends, honestly, a lot of
us I think would have a lot more joy if we spent more time in the
presence of Jesus, just wondering at his awe and his
goodness and his love and his grace towards us.
There is rough stuff out in the world, and yet we have been
rescued. Praise God.
Like if you've been liberated from something, we need to think
about that. You need to be reminding
yourself about that regularly, getting excited about that,
worshipping God about that. So we need these rituals of
formation. That's why we come to church on
Sunday. It's why we make space in our
lives or quiet time to spend time on our face before God each
day. It's it's why we have things
like the church retreat and these other spaces.
Like there's not a legalistic requirement for you to do these
things. You don't get a merit badge
because you show up. But you absolutely do need
rituals in your life to remind you of who you are and where
you're going and what's most important.
Friends we also need in our lives and boundaries for
holiness. Like we are not immune, right?
We're supposed to be for our neighbors.
We're supposed to be loving our neighbors showing up.
It's not about just retreating from the world, but also if
we're not going to look exactly like our neighbors, right?
There need to be some. Like how you spend your money or
invest or save should be different from somebody who
doesn't follow Jesus. Like how you program your life
and your kids lives, your daily routine, your weekly stuff, what
programs you're in. Like I'm not here to tell you
how to do it, but I am here to say like that being a Christian
should matter for that, right? You should be thoughtful about
what does it look like to build a life that that allows me to
practice the presence of Jesus, that allows me to extend his
purposes in the world. That isn't just about like, how
do I, like, get the best possible job, make the most
possible money, have the most spectacular vacations available?
Those are good things. I'm not against any of that.
But if those are at the very centre of your life, your
liturgies don't have enough holiness in them.
Friends, we need things that will form us as a community, not
just as individuals into rules for flourishing, right?
We need to practice justice and hospitality and inclusion and
mercy and generosity as a community and as individuals
within that community, right? The way of Jesus is still not
just about going to heaven when we die, praise God for that.
But it's also about learning to live in a way that speaks, that
declares to the nations and to those around us, this is what
God's family looks like. This is how they move together.
This is how they live together. And we need some habits for
that, right? We need to, we need habits of
generosity. We need habits of solidarity.
We need habits of presence if we're going to become those
kinds of people. Look, I've covered a lot of
ground this morning. I'm curious about what this
looks like for you. We're going to begin to move
into a time of response and friends this morning.
This message is not about following a checklist, A to do
list. It's not about some new kind of
law developed and designed by Pastor Josh and accepted by
everyone else. But I am going to suggest to you
that you have the Holy Spirit, you have the word of God.
And our lives need to be saturated by those, guided by
those, not just so we can avoid punishment, not so that we can
be part of the family. If you accepted Jesus, you
already got that part, but so that we can go on this journey
together of becoming a people of love, a people who are hold
space for the presence of God and extend his purposes in the
world, who love God and love our neighbors well.
And this invitation is for all of us, God's people then and
God's people now. The law, friends, is not an
entrance exam for applicants, but a syllabus for those who are
already part of the community. How are we engaging the
curriculum, Friends? This morning we're going to
pivot in our gathering to receive communion.
And this is really appropriate because I just talked about
rituals for identity, and there's no beautiful one than
this right here, because this reminds us who we are, where we
come from, and why we are beloved.
It's a call back explicitly to the story we've already talked
about today at Passover when God used his blood to to to mark out
his people. Blood is still a marker for us
today, and so as we partake of the juice or the wine that
represents his blood, as we eat the cracker that represents his
body, we root ourselves in this story, this memory, this
identity that we are God's people.
Rescued friends, how have you been rescued today?
How has Jesus intervention in your life been some good news
that gets you excited? Do you have a story of
liberation that you are excited about wanting to tell people
about? Let's remember that.
And when when we see these these guidelines, these rules, when
the New Testament has some stuff to tell us about how we live as
a people, may we shift our relationship to it from
something that we kind of onerously go along with in order
to avoid punishment to a faithful belief that God desires
our flourishing and that of the world and has entrusted his way
to us in order to guide us into that.
Friends, we me, we be people who live in and from his very life.