Welcome to the River City Church podcast and a message by our
lead pastor, Jason Powers. Our prayer is that this message
would inspire and encourage you, build your faith and point you
to the life changing love of Jesus.
May you enjoy the goodness of God as you follow Him today.
I want to begin with our confession.
We do this every week and this is this is a declaration of
truth and. Sometimes we feel.
This. And sometimes we don't, but we
believe that truth is truth. And so our confession as his
church, as his people is that we are badly broken.
Yes, you are. Grace and peace to you.
That idea, that declaration of badly broken and deeply loved.
We kind of, that's a summary of what we began touching on last
week on our series that's going to go all the way through
Easter. Badly Broken and deeply loved is
a picture of life outside the gate.
You remember we saw last week in Eden, We looked at Genesis 1 and
we saw that God created a world and it was formless and void.
It didn't have shape. It didn't have substance.
It was unfit for life. God was there, but there was no
space for. Us there and so we.
Saw God. What we saw God doing was
creating a home, fashioning, fashioning a space where He and
we could dwell together. And we saw His intention and
calling it he created space, he said let there be time, day and.
Night. And there was.
Time and then there was water above and water below, so there
was atmosphere and then there was water and dry land.
And so with his words, with his voice, by his intention, he
created space. And then for the next three
days, he filled that space, and he filled the sky with.
Sun and moon and stars, he. Filled the sky above the the
waters above with birds. And fish in the sea and then
the. Last day he.
Filled the land. With animals and mankind.
And what we saw was the 7th day after He had formed and filled a
world and he called it over and over again.
He saw that it was good. We saw God stop.
And rest and. Sit down.
He didn't rest because he was exhausted.
He wasn't sucking wind or out of shape.
He was done and what we saw was that place where God sat and
throned over His creation was a. Temple.
It was a home. But it wasn't like other temples
in the ancient Near East where God sat far removed and high
above from his people. God created in this home, this
place that He ordered. There was a partnership.
It was purposeful. He had authority and He shared
His authority with us, and he created mankind and He set him
in a place called. Eden and Eden.
Was in bloom. Eden was already fruitful.
There is God's authority and our authority partnered, and the
plan and the goal was to fill creation.
With this order and this goodness, through the
partnership, God created a home for us to dwell with Him.
When God could have done anything he wanted, when he
could have structured and built anything that he wanted, He
built. He built a place for him and.
Us to be together now we weren't the.
Same In that space there were distinct roles.
God's role was always and inescapably to have absolute,
ultimate, final authority. Only God can call something from
nothing. Only God can separate the waters
above and the orders below. But that doesn't mean that we
didn't have any authority. The authority that he gave us
was real and it was authentic. He had a role and he gave us a
role. And in that, in that combination
and that communion, the plan was for.
Goodness forever. But those roles actually end up
becoming part of the problem. His role and our role, those
distinction. There's actually a word.
And it may be a surprising word to you.
It's probably a word that you've heard before, but maybe.
Not in this context. The idea this word that
describes and illustrates the distinction between who God is
and what God does and who we are and what we do is the word.
Holiness and the word holiness is a description of.
What God is that we are not. And you may have heard holiness
uses this impossible challenge to be good, to be better than
you are. And maybe that generally means
like to get your lust under control or to stop cussing so
much or or to vote a certain way or to do something like this
with your money. And so holiness has almost well
has often been used to describe some kind of a behavior set, but
it goes much deeper and different than that.
Holiness is all the things that God is in his ultimate, ultimate
Ness, in his ultimate authority and his ultimate power.
And it's not what we experience now, but it's that holiness,
right? And so you may have heard
holiness, it may have been like a sledgehammer for you, right,
to remind you what you're not. And it may carry all kinds of
like weight and guilt and shame. But the important thing to see
is in that order, in that system.
God's holiness is what made the partnership possible.
The separation of holiness is what describes life outside the
gate. See, God's holiness is what
allows him to create the garden in the 1st place.
It was God's holiness that fashioned a space already in
bloom when we walked. In it is that holiness that the
serpent refrained as restriction in the garden.
We knew that God was different from us.
We knew that God had ultimate authority.
But the question is. The subtle implication was, why
wouldn't God want you to be like him?
Why wouldn't God want you to have ultimate authority in this
place? And as humanity in the garden,
with all the goodness around us said, you know what?
That's a good question. I wonder why he wouldn't want me
to do that, and the response was to grasp.
At control. Sure, it's fine that I could
name the animals. Whatever I want, but.
Really, I want to be able to decide what is good and what is
real and what is ultimate. And so in a world where all we
had experienced was the goodness of God in this perfectly ordered
relationship, we decided that we didn't just want to be with God,
we wanted to be like God. We wanted to be God.
And so. But the problem is.
If we're in a garden that God is created by his omnipotence, if
we're in a garden that God has sustained by His character and
by His nature and by His Holiness, well, if we don't want
that anymore, what happens is we are removed from that and that
is the last image that we saw of.
Eden last week, walking out of a.
Garden full of God's. Good provision for us into the
wilderness from the last image we saw of Eden last week was a
gate close behind us barring our re entry.
Not able to get back to the life.
And the goodness and the plan that God had created us for.
That gate is what keeps us from the garden.
But where we left last week was the gate that keeps us from the
garden doesn't keep God from us. The truth about.
Humanity is that since that moment, since we grasped for
control, we've lived exiled in the wilderness.
That word wilderness can often be a Christian cliche.
If you've been a Christian for a while.
If you haven't, I'm putting new lingo in your language.
This is good. Like you can use this for your
language. Like if you've been a Christian
for a while and you follow, you may talk about being in a
wilderness season, and maybe that means like a season of of
spiritual dryness where you sit down and you pray, but you don't
feel anything. Like you don't have that burn
kind of in your chest or you try to worship and you don't have an
emotional response to worship. Or or you just.
Feel like you're not connected to God, like like God is far
away and all of. Those can be aspects of it, but
this idea of wilderness? That we find in Scripture is.
So much bigger. It's so much deeper than that.
Wilderness in the scripture is tangible.
You can feel it, you can taste it.
Wilderness hangs on you, it clings to you, and it defines
every aspect of where you are and how you go.
It is the definition and the distinction from what we were
supposed to be. We saw it last week.
Wilderness in our sexuality looks like what was created to
be. A partnership in creation.
Sex was a good gift given to us by God for for a purpose, so
that we could know another intimately, so that we could be
known in the very fabric and fiber of who we are.
It was supposed to be a picture of how intimacy and union
creates life, but instead we traded that for the ability to
choose how we use it. We want to use it for our
pleasure. We want to use it to control
another, to extract something for the other.
And So what wilderness in our. Sexuality looks like loneliness
and fracture, and that unfulfilled sense.
Of giving yourself to. Someone and not having them give
back in return. Wilderness is real work.
Exile. The work in exile is different
work. Isn't a result of the curse
before the curse? Before the fall?
We worked in the garden alongside God.
Our work. Listen, the idea behind work was
work was God's gift of allowing us to partner with omnipotence.
We have a God who can do anything, who by the word of his
mouth can create something from nothing.
He didn't ask us to make oranges.
He asked us to take the orange tree and spread the orchard as
far as it could go, so that everybody who wanted.
Could have some. We don't have to fabricate.
We don't have to. We don't have to establish and
build an empire for ourselves. God created everything that we
need and we got to partner with Him, but we traded partnership
with omnipotence. For hustle for a.
Few extra hours for a few more shifts so that I can buy the
House of my dreams, the car of my dreams, the.
Vacation of my dreams and exile in our job feels like
purposelessness. Going to work day after day,
working for someone who neither cares for you or considers you
and wondering, is this what it's supposed to be about?
Is this Eden we're building? An empire in a world that we're
not really sure we care that much about.
Shows up in our community, in our connections, in our
relationships. Humanity was naked and
unashamed. Think of the implications of
that. I don't like to walk out of my
restroom, right? Because I'm like 50 years old
and things like hanging like they've been.
Places they didn't used to, right?
There was no body image issues in the.
Garden Eve never wondered where. You know, that's where that
piece of cake went, right? There was There was No Fear of
rejection. There's No Fear of being judged
or overlooked. But we removed vision of the one
who created us in his image, who saw us and said I think you're
beautiful. We were separated from that.
Voice that tells us that. We're enough we.
Separated from that voice that wakes us up in the morning and
says, I have purposeful, meaningful work for you to do
alongside other people who have purposeful, meaningful work for
do. We stepped outside of that.
And so now what? We settle for these carefully
curated perspectives and a little box on these little
square pictures on our phone, and we're projecting a power
that we don't have or a success that we don't feel, hoping
against all hope that will someone will look at us and
think we're pretty enough or smart enough or successful
enough or good enough to envy and to emulate.
We've traded community for image.
And listen, I want you to hear me say real quick like I know I
get loud and, and, and you know that there's no judgement in
that. I know.
Why we do it? Because all of us have made
honest. Mistakes and been judged.
And condemned for it. And so I understand that
instinct to go never again. I'll never again subject myself.
To that. But friends, that's the
wilderness we traded being known for being.
Fabricated we've replaced vulnerability with performance.
That's exile and in our parenting, parenting is God's
gift to us to partner what it was like I mean, just think
about the Godhead in Genesis one, right?
Let us create mankind in our image and he created male and
female and now in the context of our loving marriages and our
relationships, we get to. Experience, not entirely, but
something like that. We get to create life and we get
to watch it and tend to it, and we get to help form that life in
a way that's going to be able to respond to the God in the world
and fill it with goodness and life.
And we're so afraid that someone's going to put something
in and we should listen. I grew up in the 90s, man.
We didn't have videos and stuff like that.
Like we were pretty safe. Now there's Everything
Everywhere in We're afraid of our kids, but it wasn't supposed
to be that way. Our desire and our children is
to make. Something that's going to
outlast us. We know we're listen, the
mortality rate continues to hover around 100% for humanity.
But you know something? Ecclesiastes tells us that he
has placed eternity in the hearts of men.
We know that we're not. We know that death wasn't.
Part of the original picture. We know that it's not like that.
And So what we want to do is we want to create something that's
going to live after us, that's going to that's going to when
we're gone, that's going to be able to carry the things that
we've seen and the things that we've known and the things that
we've done, want to carry that into the next thing.
So we've got this eternity that we're striving for, that we're
reaching for, and we spend every single day in a bare knuckles
bloody war against time. Again, I hope is that you don't
hear judgement in this. I'm in the same war, in the same
battle as you are. This is not a catalog of our
moral failures. What I hope you hear me doing is
describing what it's like to live apart from what we were
created for. To live separated from the
reality that God designed us for you.
That the reason that you ache for that is because it's in you.
Listen, these ideas of having something that lives past you,
these ideas of creating something good and being a part.
There's a reason that purposeless jobs suck the
lifeout of us. Because at a cellular level, we
know it's not supposed to be that way.
This isn't some fever dream that we're imagining.
It's across times and across cultures.
It goes everywhere. It is the image of God that
exile can't fully stamp out, but neither can it.
Fully help us realize we were created to know the God that
fills and satisfies us. We tasted it.
It was on our tongues. We experienced it.
And then we chose autonomy and then we chose.
We wanted to do it our way. Sure, I'll do the work, but I
just want to decide what sex is about.
Sure, like I'll have the relationships, but I want to
decide what to do with my money. I want to decide where I go.
We were liberated from what we saw was this tyranny of.
God's holiness, but we were liberated from a world where His
goodness creates everything that we ever need.
We were liberated into a world without the goodness that He
brought with Him. And that's what we're searching
for ever since forever. The problem is we.
Hear this exile right, we read the story about being outside of
the. Garden.
We see the heading and it talks. About oh, it's the curse, right?
And so we read about this exile, we read about this wilderness,
and and because we distrust holiness, we think that exile is
like God's. Silent treatment, right?
Like. Like we think that God's just
like a little too thick to. Talk to us right now.
Right kind of arms folding. Is like shaking his fingering.
Listen, I want to tell you our holy God is not throwing a
temper tantrum because you had a lustful thought, exile.
Is the reality that we. Chose exile is the reality.
That we continue to choose when we look at holiness and we look
at. The.
Path and the plan, and we choose our own way.
Once again, we choose exile. That's not where we left last
week. Do you remember?
We left with the gate closed. We left with mankind walking
into the wilderness. But we read this Exodus chapter
25 verse 8, God coming to his people, and He said they are to
make a sanctuary for me so that I may dwell among them.
Purpose of God's desire. For a sanctuary is so that
again, he could be restored to them.
So here's this question. We have a holy God.
With all his. Authority and all his.
Goodness and all his. Power and all his intention for
us. And we have us and we are.
Afraid, and we are distrustful, and we are separated, and we.
Have this gap. How does a holy God and a fallen
humanity reside together? How how does it happen?
How do we bridge that gap? Well, that's what we talked
today. But the first thing we have to
see is it begins with him, God said by his voice, his desire,
his intention, the same, the same voice that spoke light from
darkness, the same voice that spoke the waters above and the
waters below said, I am coming to you.
You make me a space. Create a place for.
Me. And this voice spoken to God's
people in the wilderness. They had just spent 400 years in
slavery. They had spent 400 years under
the authority of a king of a pharaoh who did not care for
them, who was not out for their flourishing, who did not provide
for them what they needed. They worked under slavery to a
king who said he will extract everything from them.
And that was the only system that they knew.
And So what God said is I want to show you what I'm like.
So now turn a couple over pages to.
Exodus chapter 29. He said I'm coming, make me a
sanctuary. And in verse 45 he said, listen
to the voice of your Creator, the voice of your holy God, hear
his heart. He said, I will dwell among the
Israelites, and I will be their God, and they will know that I
am the Lord their God, who brought them out of Egypt so
that I might. Dwell with them.
I am the Lord their God, he said.
I called you out to be with you. This is an invitation to Eden in
the wilderness and God said make a place for me, make a space a
defined. Space with an area that place
where God would meet with His. People was called the
Tabernacle. It was a literal, actual,
physical place among the company of Israel.
So now let's talk. Just a little bit about.
You know how the Bible is set up?
God. Called his people.
Out he makes his kind of He says, hey, you're going to be my
people. I'm going to be your God.
And for the next 16 chapters, from Exodus 25 to Exodus 40, God
tells them how to make a Tabernacle.
And let me just tell you, it is. Bro bro.
You've like got a little bit of the OCD on this one.
God, right? Like like, I mean, it is, it is
a so let me show you these are OK, 16 chapters.
What I've done is I've gone through this and I've taken out
simply the subject. Headings right?
Like like. Like the like this is what is
this And so this is what the subject headings in 16 chapters.
This is what it takes. To build a Tabernacle.
Dang dude. I mean it's furniture, right?
There's a table, there's an arc, there is an.
Ephod, there is clothes. There, there is all there's.
All these kind of things, right? This is a heady list.
There are basins, there are altars, there are skins, There
are. Listen, at one point in this God
says, hey, there's two guys that I need you to call them out like
I want you to tell them because they're Craftsman and I'm going
to give them my spirit and they're going to make.
These curtains and they're. Going to make the God took he to
every every single detail he attended to every detail and
listen as your pastor just to show you that I am not.
Out of touch with reality my. Guess is Exodus 25 through 40
are not your favorite. Devotional reading topics.
Right, like this is like the book of Numbers, right?
Like where? You're just a little bit going,
OK, I don't need this. But listen also as your pastor,
I want to tell you what we have here is one of the most
shockingly beautiful expressions of God's heart in all of
Scripture. You cannot get away from this
right? Because what God said is it is
so important that I be able to dwell with you, that I'm not
leaving. Anything to chance?
I'm not leaving anything to chance that you and your
distrust miss it or that you who don't get it.
We see in Genesis chapter one this beautiful poem about how
God separated and formed in fashion.
Exodus 25 through 40 is not nearly as poetic as Genesis 1.
It's the same. It's the.
Same heart of the father that just wants to be with his.
People, sometimes I have to help my children clean their room,
not so much anymore because they're grown, but there are
times where it's just like, I cannot be in there with you
because yuck. And So what do you say?
Like the dishes, you got to put your clothes up.
You got to do this, right? Is that me being obnoxious?
Yes, because I'm sinful and because I'm not like God, right?
But the illustration is the same father who wants to be a Listen,
let's get specific the. Father, who wants to be with?
You. Helping.
Us form a space and fill it together.
This is Eden. He did it in Eden.
He created a. Space and he started and he said
just go be fruitful and multiply now just go do what?
You do. Now go do exercise your
authority. This is the same thing.
This is the thing here. And he did it for us.
This is not some obsessive compulsive God.
This is not some micromanaging God who is just trying to have
His way because he does. This is a God who realizes that
holiness is an architecture for intimacy.
Holiness is the structure that allows us to experience God as
He is every cubit, every thread count, every pomegranate sewn
into every Him, on every rope, every kind of wood that you can
imagine inlaid with gold and the robes and all of this, every
single thing. Because he could not wait to.
Move in and be back where his people were.
My son Jackson is at college. He's far away, and every once in
a while he comes home. There's a whole different energy
when Jackson's coming home. My kids are like my girls at
home. They're just like, be nice if
you fill the fridge like that for us, you know?
Like, we're here. We're here every every day,
right? Listen, I want you to sense
like, like I'm a sinful, selfish person and my heart resonates
with fatherhood like that. That's the image of God.
That is how God feels about you coming home, about you getting
to experience him, about you getting me there.
He couldn't wait to move in. Here's the problem.
Wherever we go, there we are. All of our fears and doubts and
insecurities and distrust and grasping for control.
And autonomy, it's all there in the wilderness with us.
It's all there defining our relationships with God and each
other. And So what Lent is about, the
season of Lent that we're in leading up to Easter, is
honestly sitting with that pattern.
Eden wasn't an isolated incident, it was a reflection of
the character of God. The Tabernacle wasn't an
isolated incident, it was a reflection of the character of
God. There's this pattern of God
calling out separating. Forming and filling and
inhabiting. That's what Genesis 1 is.
That's what Exodus 25 through 40 is.
He rescued his people from slavery.
He gave them a form of a place where he could dwell and
inhabit, and then he filled that place with his presence.
It's the same father impulse. He always does the same thing,
always the same thing, and so do we.
He always takes the initiative. To respond to us.
And we always perceive His Holiness as a threat.
God's just trying to keep me from having fun.
God's just trying to get in my pocket.
God just wants my. And so with our fear and
distrust over the holiness of God, we cling to our stuff.
And we once again back into exile, wondering why things are
the same, wondering why we once again find ourselves rejecting
the home that we were built for, rejecting the Father who has
crossed time and eternity to be with us.
And since we've been in the wilderness for so long, we just
decided that we'd furnish it. We'll furnish the wilderness.
We'll dull that ache. We'll make it so that it's not
existential, it's just kind of ambient.
Yeah, we're just a little bit. Lonely, but we got our.
Addictions. We're a little bit bored, but
we've got our credit cards. We're a little bit afraid, but
we've got enough people and stuff to distract us, right?
Lent is removing all of those. Things and allowing ourselves to
get hungry again for the home that he just keeps offering.
That's the garden and the wilderness confirms it.
God wants to be with his people, but something.
Has to be done. About what we bring into holy
places right like that. Like that's the thing if the
wilderness. Could cure us it would.
Have cured us. We would have entered the Israel
would have entered the Holy Land and they wouldn't have had any
problems. If the wilderness could cure us,
then our loneliness would fix us.
But we just keep doubling down. We just keep betting on the same
horse that continues to finish dead last every time, over and
over again. There's a problem that we bring
with us. And the problem is that's the
problem that has to be dealt with.
That's the problem that God has to address.
And there is a word for the way that God makes that dwelling
possible. There is a word for the way that
God takes a tent, build, fight by sinful human hands and is
then able to indwell it and fill it with his holy presence so
that we can not just understand it, but experience it.
That word. Is atonement.
Atonement is how God inhabits space with sinful people.
And I know you just like, well, why doesn't he just like wink at
it? Like why like God, why can't you
just like say it right? Well, there's a picture in
Leviticus. So Leviticus 16 is the chapter
that talks that. So the, the Hebrew word for
atonement is kafir, right? And it is where we get the word
the Jewish high holy day, right? Yom Kippur is this day and it is
a day once you heard, I would encourage you this week or today
or whatever, go home and read Leviticus 16.
And yeah, it's an interesting chapter for sure because it
talks about what it takes for the for the high priest, in this
case, it's Aaron. For the high priest to enter
into this place. I just want to read one verse or
a couple of verses. Leviticus chapter 16 verse 29
God says through Moses, this is to be a permanent statute for
you in the seventh month on the 10th day of the month.
You are to practice. Self denial.
Now listen. He doesn't say hey whenever you
want, hey whenever you feel like it, hey, if your guilt ever gets
really bad and really heavy, then on that day you can go.
That's not God's holiness. We don't get to just recklessly
crash into the place. He is holy.
It would consume us if we did. If we just barged carelessly
into the presence of God, it would consume us.
So he says, here's how you do it.
There is a date and there is a place.
Practice self denial. Self denial is Eve going Nah,
I'm not going to take that I'm going to go over here and start
planting orange trees I'm going to leave that alone like God
said so he says practice now that self denial that's what
fasting is that's why we say no to social media or to food or to
whatever it is that that you choose to fast so we can just go
I didn't get it right but I'm going to practice I'm going to
get it right now we. Practice self denial and no.
Work because in this world we work to provide for ourselves.
On the Day of Atonement, we recognize that He calls us to a
or where He provides, we manage, we.
Partner atonement will be made. For you on this day to cleanse
you. And you will be clean from all
your sins before the Lord. The Day of Atonement was one day
a year where one man would take the blood of the sacrifice, and
he would go behind the veil into the very presence of God.
And you remember what we said in Eden, right?
The image of God is about representation, right?
Like we in our forming and filling and managing of
creation, we represent the wisdom of God.
Well, now this high priest enters into the presence of God,
and he represents the people just because it's one.
Guy doesn't mean it's private. It doesn't mean listen, I know
we. Live in a very individualistic
world, right? In a very individualistic
culture where we want to say my sin is my issue, it's my
problem. There's nothing of that in
Scripture. What the high priest is doing is
bringing the sins of the people. We as a humanity are separated
and fallen away from you. And we represent that
brokenness, that fallenness, that contamination.
We bring it into the presence of God.
And what happens is then when we walk out and we return, he
returns with a space cleanse prepared for his dwelling.
Again, this isn't some control free.
God. This is a God.
Who is so concerned that we have access to his?
Presence that he leaves nothing to chance.
No hope that maybe this. Time we'll get it right.
The priest brought contamination and he returned with atonement.
And the good news now is that the people of Israel could say
our God is dwelling with us. We do have access.
He is as one among us. Atonement is a crucial, vital
part of our story because atonement restores what sin
contaminates. And listen as you get into that
Leviticus 16 and as you read all about that.
It's gruesome, there's a lot of blood and there's a lot of death
and we can just go. How could God do all?
The blood and the death on that. Read the news, you think?
We don't have. Blood and death.
Here's the idea behind this God didn't choose this.
This wasn't the original plan. It wasn't supposed to be like
this. When you remove the giver of
life, all that's left is death and it plays out every day,
right? In front of us.
And we baptize it. Oh, you got to have it.
You got to do that. It wasn't supposed to be that
way. That's not God's desire.
Desire. I did a funeral for a 16 year
old young man this year. This week, one of the most
impactful demonstrations of love in a community that I've ever
seen. But over and over and over
again, 200 times, I watched 141516 year old young men walk
through the doors of this funeral Chapel, strong and brash
and brazen and brave. And they walked.
In because that's what we've. Trained them to do and.
That's what we've told them that they need to be.
And I walked them walk in together, arm in arm, brave
striding out the front. But a crazy.
Thing happens, man, the closer you get to that casket.
They weren't brave anymore. You can blame them.
I just grieved. So many kids had to have that
experience. So many kids had to look at
something that they shouldn't have to process.
To ignore the contamination of sin is to say would be for God
to say I'm OK with that. I'm OK with loneliness.
I'm OK with young people trying to define themselves by their
sexuality or by their income or by their their Instagram feed.
We can all agree that wouldn't be a very loving, father
fatherly thing to do. And So what God does is remove
every doubt. About how committed he.
Is to us entering into His presence, thought of everything,
thought of everything. But the problem is because
there's gravity in this mercy, right?
Like he has provided a way in for us, but it's heavy it.
Forces us to face. The reality that we have fallen
short, he has. Forces us to.
Face the reality that we don't measure up.
It forces us to face the reality that we that we chose.
This that we, that we. Did this.
And because of that, we still perceive that holiness as a
threat. We still understand the list is
too long, the details are too much.
We can't possibly go over that. And so we still don't trust him.
Anybody who wants to give me that many orders in that
directions, he must not be trustworthy.
And then once again, the serpent is reframing God's holiness as
manipulation or as control. And so we interpret wilderness
now as punishment. God must be mad at me.
So I got to stop being so bad. Friend, I want to tell you that
is a hopeless endeavor. That control thing.
It is baked in by the wilderness.
It is baked in by our entire lives in exile.
Holiness is not God's invitation to get your act together.
Holiness is a gift. Holiness is what happens.
It's the gift of being with God again.
Remember in our Proverbs series, this thing that we kept coming
back to over and over and over again is that we're shaped by
proximity. Things that we stand closest to
become what we look like, right? I remember talked about how my
music tastes have changed as I just get worn down and over and
over again by, you know, by the things that I listen to.
It's the same idea, Father. Wants to be.
Close to us. He doesn't say get holy and I'll
come close. He says if you come close, I'll
transform you. I'll make you able to experience
all of Eden. When we resist that, everything
in US tells. Us.
We're resisting. We resist.
Holiness because it's constrictive it right because it
just, oh, he just doesn't want us to have fun.
When we resist holiness, what we're resisting is nearness.
We're resisting an experience of the God who loves us enough to
make a way. Everything in the Proverbs, that
whole idea of proximity, it's been pointing to this.
You cannot remain unchanged when the Holy One moves into the
neighborhood. He just can't do it, but he
comes. 1st. He moves in first and he invites
us just to linger. That's not a threat.
We read that as a threat. I just.
Want to say like it's my, it's my pastoral responsibility and
do that. That is not a threat.
This is not an angry God clicking his tongue.
This is not a God with his arms folding, waiting for you to be
something that you're not. The whole point of this is God
comes near to make us holy. He comes away to burn up the
exile. He comes away.
Yeah, sure. Like we're not back in the
garden yet. But listen, side note, I've read
the end of the book. Revelation 2122 sounds a lot
like Eden, fully abandoned and filling the earth.
We're not there yet, but he's here now and all he wants is
just for us to. Linger just a little bit.
To let him refine our fires. What if he just says, hey, what
if you give that up for a minute and you start to see that you
don't have to keep filling your face to feel something?
That you don't have to keep giving yourself away to feel
something. Command of God about purity and
righteousness and generosity and love.
That is not the pathway to blessing.
I'm going to say that again. Are you listening?
The command of God is not the pathway to blessing.
The command of God is the blessing.
It is his presence in our lives so that we don't need to
sacrifice our the image of Him in us, our fruitfulness, our
nakedness and unashamed. We don't have to sacrifice that
to make somebody else thumbs up. It is to be existent in the.
Place where we are. Eternally loved and approved of
the Tabernacle is not some neurotic God and his impossible
demands. Tabernacle is the exact same
invitation as Eden. Will you trust me enough to
partner with me in ordering this space, God?
Didn't drop the. Tabernacle on their.
Heads, he said. Here's what the.
Form of holiness looks like you want to be a part of it.
He looks at your relationship with your children and says,
Holiness looks like let them go and teach them to love me.
Do you want to be a part of it? There's nothing that I want you
to do because we so easily at this place, get into this place.
We just go, OK, well now. All right, I'm going to go and
not be holy. Well, that's backwards.
I don't want to do that right. I'm not asking you to go out and
behave in a certain way. Here's what I'm asking.
Will you intentionally and deliberately this week begin to
question your doubts and your fears about holiness?
Will you begin to question why you think that this path that
you're on to make and create a way through your job or through
your relationships with your? Will you begin to?
Question whether that is ever going to ever really be able to
deliver what it promises. If it was, it probably would
have by now. We begin to entertain the idea
that God's holiness is a gift. It is the experience of the life
that we have been yearning for and longing for.
And will you then stay? There, stay there.
Long enough to be shaped. Your part is the same as it was
in Eden. The same thing that you were
supposed to do in the shadow and the cool of Eden and all that.
Not performance, not curation. Just don't walk away.
Just don't leave his presence. Holy Spirit, you are that
expression for us next week when we look at the temple and how
you filled that place. Lord, now This Is Us.
And so, Holy Spirit, I pray that you would convict us this week
when we're tempted to outsource our identity.
I pray that there'll just be like a little buzzer, a little
ache in our head that would be like, that's not it.
You don't have to give yourself away for that.
When you bring conviction to our hearts about thought or behavior
or or a thing that we've put our hope in or our trust in or we
are afraid by something, when that happens, I pray that we
would label it as exile and we would instead look at you in
that place. Father God, we trust that Your
desire is to make a space in US and with us and dwell there.
And so that is our desires to once again partner with you.
And Lord, we don't have ultimate authority.
We cannot do this apart from You.
We cannot. You take the initiative, You set
it up, You make it happen. Give us the faith to be partners
in your redemption. Jesus, we ask these things in
your name and for your glory. Thank you for joining us today.
River City Church is all about experiencing and expressing
God's love in our lives and community, and we hope that
you've been able to experience that today.
As grateful as I am that you've spent this time listening in
this morning, this podcast is no substitute for full
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May the Lord bless and keep you in all grace and peace.