Land and Kingdom

Good morning, friends. Great to be with you today. Glad that you are here with us. We've got a lot of ground to cover today, but before we jump in, just a couple of quick, just family housekeeping things. Want to give just a couple of moments to address these.

Number one, we've already talked for the last few weeks about the fact that next Sunday is so. And because that's a departure from what we normally do around here, don't feel like we can ever repeat that too many times. We always tend to miss somebody anyway. But we are the kind of church, we believe that serving others in Jesus name is equally as important as gathering here in his name. And so we want to encourage and invite all of you to join us next weekend.

Now, after we serve throughout the weekend, Saturday evening and Sunday morning, we will gather here next Sunday evening at 6pm Like Joel mentioned, we're going to use that as a time of worship. It'll be a time when we recap serve day. But we also do some really important things at that service every year, including approving our next year's budget. Just affirming a few key leaders and addressing some very practical changes we're proposing to our bylaws. Now, we've emailed an explanation of all of those details a couple of different times in the last 10 days or so, but we want you to be informed about and invested in the strategic direction of our church.

And, and we really need your help with that affirmation process. So please join us next weekend and we'll look forward to talking more about that when the time comes. Now, the second thing I want to ask you is how many of us like coffee? If you like coffee, let me just hear you say, oh, yeah. Okay.

By the time you see me each Sunday morning, I'm already caffeinated. I don't know if you would know what to do with me without any caffeine at all. Caffeine and prayer are both very important parts of preparation for Sunday mornings for me. But hospitality is a really important part of our Sunday morning gatherings. And we have just come to the conclusion that serving free coffee to everybody is actually a better form of hospitality than selling it to just a few.

So two weeks from today on September 28th, that's the week after serve day. When you come into the Commons, you're gonna see a new coffee bar over in the corner of the what has been our cafe seating area. And we're going to begin in two weeks providing free gourmet coffee to everyone. And in doing that, we're going to support global ministry by sourcing those coffee beans from a grower who works with some very mission minded folks in Southeast Asia. Now, our coffee bar we're really excited about it, is going to take the place of our World Harvest Cafe.

And we look forward to unveiling that and experiencing that together two weeks from today. So come ready for some caffeine in a couple of weeks and we'll look forward to lifting a cup with you. Now, having said all that, let's dive in. Let's dive into today's message. Okay, the greatest story ever told, which is episode four in God's Story.

Up to this point in time, we've covered this ground. Let me very quickly recap in case you're just joining us and if that describes you, we're so glad you're here today. We said episode one God created a beautiful world and humanity was rebelled and broke it. So God promised in the very beginning a future Messiah named Jesus who would restore what sin had broken. Episode 2 God promised a childless old man named Abraham that his descendants would become a nation that would bless the whole world.

And the name of that blessing is Jesus. Episode 3 Because Abraham trusted God, God called Abraham righteous. And we said last week that that God also declares us righteous when we place our faith in Jesus. Now today our focus is gonna shift from Abraham to some other key players in God's story, starting with a guy by the name of Moses. Abraham's descendants became a nation while living in Egypt, where they were eventually forced into slavery.

So God raised up a prophet named Moses to lead his people to freedom. And through Moses, God gave Israel a written law that was intended to guide every facet of their lives. God introduced the most famous section of that law, which you and I know as the Ten Commandments, with these words. Exodus chapter 20, verse 2. God said, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

And I want us to notice that before God even got into giving specific commandments, he stressed, first of all, who he is. He is creator and sustainer. He is the God above all gods and the King above all kings. And God didn't stop there before he mentioned specific commandment number one, he talked about what he had done. He had rescued Israel from the abuse and oppression of slavery.

Now, God's 10 Commandments, which are laid out for us in Exodus chapter 20, fall into two distinct categories. The first four commands focus on our relationship with God. Commandment number one is to worship God and nobody else. Number two is to not make or worship idols, substitute counterfeit gods of any kind. Number three was to treat God's name with respect and honor.

And number four, God said, I want you to trust my provision by setting aside time for Sabbath for worship and rest. And from there, God went on in commands 5 through 10 to focus on our relationships with others. To honor your parents, to honor life and don't murder. To be faithful to your spouse and not commit adultery. Number eight, to be honest and not steal.

Number nine, to be truthful and not lie. And number ten, to be content and not obsess over what others have, or find ourselves resenting others for what they have that we don't. God's commands teach us a great deal about his character by revealing to us what God values. But God knew when he gave them that we would never perfectly keep all of them. God gave these commandments to illustrate his unparalleled holiness and to show us how desperately we need a Savior.

And again we said last week, the name of that Savior is Jesus. Now, as we think about God's commands, there are a couple of things we need to understand. One of those things is that who God is and everything God has done, all of that entitles him to rule our lives. When we live in awe of who God is and what God does, we will tend to want to honor and obey Him. But when we take God for granted, when we begin to lose our reverence for him, obedience begins to feel more like a chore.

The Apostle John wrote, this is love for God to keep his commands, and his commands are not burdensome. When obeying God begins to feel like a burden to us, we need to remember the alternative, which is bondage to destructive habits and separation from God. God gave these commands because he loves us, because he wants to spare us the hurt and destruction that sin causes, because God wants to draw us into relationship with him. And if you think about it, if we will keep God's first command to worship him only, we will naturally keep all the others too. Every sin begins with our violation of that first commandment.

If we steal, it's because we have put our desire for certain things above God in our hearts. If we commit adultery, that is what happens when we put our own sexual gratification above the place of God in the now. As we walk through the story of God, there are a number of different questions that it prompts along the way. One of those questions, it occurs to me right here in the story, is do we honor God as God by obeying his instructions. I mean, it's great to come together and sing songs to him or sing songs about Him.

But if we're going to call God our Lord, we can't treat his commands as optional. Jesus is either Lord or He's not. Do we honor God as God by obeying his instructions? God's commands to Israel were clear. And yet they, like us, they just had short memories.

In Exodus chapter 32, while God was up on a mountain receiving these commands from God, the people down below got bored and they decided to take the gold jewelry that the Egyptians had given them when they left Egypt and, and recast it into a calf shaped idol. I mean, even after God had clearly and miraculously rescued them, the people made something else to worship. They traded trust in God for worship of an unholy cow. And it's easy to look at ancient Israel and think, what a bunch of morons. I mean, how could they possibly forget God's faithfulness to them?

And I would suggest that that tendency is always easier for us to spot in others than it is to see in ourselves. But I think we all have that tendency. We may not bow down before golden statues. We may feel a little more sophisticated than the ancient Israelites for that reason. But when we look to anything other than God to give us our identity or our worth or, or our peace or our ultimate satisfaction, our career or our bank account, our popularity, our accomplishments, our relationship status, our addictions being right theologically or politically, when we look to any of those things, instead of God to give us peace and purpose and to ground us, we're committing the same sin of idolatry.

See, idolatry is placing anything other than God on the throne of our heart. Anytime we ignore the one who has rescued us and blessed us, and we give our focus to lesser things, we are worshiping idols. Nothing that is not God can bear the weight of being our source of hope or our source of peace or purpose. Now, God judged Israel's rebellion and idolatry pretty dramatically and pretty painfully. But he also established a system of sacrifices that allowed sinful people to still approach him every day.

As a part of this sacrificial system, priests sacrificed animals as a temporary covering for sin. And these sacrifices served two purposes. Number one, they were a constant reminder to Israel of God's holiness and our inability as sinful people to approach God on the basis of our own righteousness. The other purpose these sacrifices served was that they taught Israel to be disgusted, to be repulsed by sin.

If you think about what that would have been like if any of you who've grown up on a farm, around livestock or have been a part of the slaughter of animals could just imagine that the blood and the noise, the smell of those ongoing sacrifices would have been a regular, daily confrontation to the Israelites of the cost of sin. Every animal sacrifice reminded them that my sin causes death. Every time I sin, something dies. And that would lead me to ask us, do we recognize how destructive to us and how offensive to God our sin is when we knowingly, intentionally, willfully sin? That's not just a bummer, that's not just a lapse in judgment.

It is a form of rebellion against God. And the Apostle Paul reminded us last week in Romans that the wages of sin is death. Sin is a big deal. Hence all the sacrifices. Those daily sacrifices were an important reminder to Israel, but they could never fully remove Israel's sins.

So God also commanded a yearly day of atonement. We read about the day of atonement. It'll show up as Yom Kippur on your calendar sometimes in Leviticus chapter 16. And Leviticus 16 describes the roles of two very specific goats in this day of atonement process. The first goat was offered as a sacrifice.

Israel's place of worship, which was called the tabernacle, had an inner room called the most holy place, sometimes called the Holy of holies. And that was where the Ark of the Covenant, that golden box that housed the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, was kept. Now, on the day of atonement, the priest would take the the blood of that slaughtered goat, that sacrificed goat, and would sprinkle the blood on the lid of the ark, which was called the mercy seat, as a way of signifying that God's wrath had been deflected from his people and placed on that goat instead. Now, the second goat, interestingly, was not killed. The second goat, the priest would put his hands on the head of that animal and would symbolically transfer the people's sins to that goat and then release the goat.

It was called the scapegoat. That's where that expression comes from. That scapegoat was released into the wilderness to carry the people's sins away. Now, those sacrifices allowed Israel to continue in fellowship with God, but they also reminded them that they could not cleanse, they could not rescue, they could not purify themselves. That bloody system of sacrifices was never intended to be God's permanent solution.

The New Testament book of Hebrews explains this. Hebrews says, the law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming, not the realities themselves. For this reason it the law can never by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. Otherwise, would they not have stopped being offered if they'd come to a place where they actually got the job done, wouldn't they have stopped? For the worshipers would have been cleansed once for all and would no longer have felt guilty for their sins.

But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins. It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. See, animal sacrifices, as important as they were to the way that Israel worshiped and operated, they could never permanently take away their sins. They could never permanently preserve fellowship with God. A savior was needed whose blood would have a more powerful and more lasting effect.

And that's why God himself, later in history, in the person of Jesus, came and presented himself as the perfect sacrifice for our sins. Hebrews chapter 10. Just a few verses later goes on to say, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. Everything about the day of atonement anticipated Jesus at the cross. Jesus body took the punishment that our sins deserve and his blood became a perfect once and for all, covering for all of our sin and unholiness.

And we remember Jesus body and blood every time we celebrate communion like we did together just a few moments ago. Like we said last week, all of scripture points to to God's deliverance. Through Jesus, Moses led Israel out of slavery. He delivered God's law to them, and he took them to the land of Canaan that God had promised their ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob would eventually be their home. Now, along the way, Israel's ingratitude and their lack of faith delayed their entrance into that new land by an entire generation.

But 40 years later, the Israelites were finally ready to move into their new home. But the problem was, when they got there, Canaan was already occupied by some very corrupt nations. So God promised that he would honor his covenant with Abraham and that he would punish the wickedness of the Canaanite people by going before Israel to conquer this new land. And to lead them in that next chapter, God raised up a new leader whose name was Joshua. Now, Joshua was one of only two of the adult Israelites who escaped Egypt, who lived long enough to see this new home.

Joshua was a bold and courageous leader. We know that about him from scripture. But it would be God's power and not Israel's military strength that would allow them to conquer Canaan. And God made that clear from Their very first battle against the heavily fleet fortified city of Jericho in Joshua chapter 6. As Israel approached Jericho, God laid out a highly unconventional battle plan.

Israel was to take the Ark of the Covenant and seven priests playing Trumpets and march around the perimeter of the city daily for six days. I will confess I am not a military veteran. I know we have a number of military veterans among us here, and we are grateful for each of you. But could I just ask you if you've been a. A part of the military at any point in your life, could you confirm for me this hunch that when you're trained for the military, you're equipped with a weapon and not a musical instrument?

Could anybody just say yes or no to that? I assume that's a fair statement. You typically get a rifle, not a clarinet. But God's instruction to Israel was march around the city playing these trumpets. And on day seven, they were to encircle the city seven times.

And when the trumpets blasted, the walls fell and Israel took the city. It was an amazing victory, and it was one that Israel could take zero credit for. It was all God working on their behalf. And God continued city after city to hand Canaan over to Israel. They moved in and took possession of the land that God had promised to Abraham and to his son Isaac and his and to his son Jacob and their descendants.

Israel at this point was no longer just a people group. They were now a nation. We read in Joshua chapter 21 that the Lord gave Israel all the land he had sworn to give their ancestors, and they took possession of it and settled there. The Lord gave them rest on every side, just as he had sworn to their ancestors. Not one of their enemies withstood them.

The Lord gave all their enemies into their hands. Not one. Of all the Lord's good promises to Israel failed. Everyone was fulfilled. And as Israel got settled, God reminded them of all he had done for them.

Joshua 24. God said, I gave you a land on which you did not toil, and cities you did not build, and you live in them and eat from vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant. So Joshua, their leader, commanded, not now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your ancestors worshiped beyond the Euphrates river and in Egypt, and serve the Lord God kept, and God keeps his promises. And our response to God's faithfulness to his promises should be to love and obey him, to identify the counterfeit gods in our lives and get rid of them and worship him alone.

And that leads me to ask, do we recognize and honor God as the source of every good thing in our lives.

I think for many of us who live in a prosperous nation like the one that we're a part of, this is a really difficult thing to wrap our hearts around, because our tendency is to attribute our blessings to. To our own intelligence, our own work ethic, our own education, our own ingenuity and diligence. And when we do that, we begin to take credit for things that God has blessed us with. And that makes us less inclined to worship God as the source of all of it. Israel made that mistake repeatedly, and we see that played out in the time of the Judges in the Old Testament.

Israel failed repeatedly to take faith in God and pass that on to the next generation. After Joshua and his contemporaries died, Scripture says that another generation arose that had no personal memory of God's faithfulness to Israel. They angered God by worshiping the idols of the surrounding nations instead. So God allowed enemies to come in and raid and plunder them. And because of their sin, God refused this time to go with them into battle.

And Israel was defeated again and again. Still, God saw his people's distress and he heard their cries, and he raised up military leaders called Judges to save them. And we want to think more Judge Dredd and less Judge Judy here. Most of these Judges were pretty tough cookies. The Judges would defeat Israel's enemies.

But after each Judge died, Israel would plunge again, even more deeply than before, into corruption. And that cycle kept repeating itself over and over. God would deliver on its promises, and yet over and over, Israel would turn their backs on God. They would imitate the pagan peoples around them, and they would drift back into idol worship immorality. So over and over, God disciplined Israel through attacks from enemy nations.

And then over and over, God showed compassion to Israel by raising up leaders to rescue them and call them to repentance. But rather than turn to God for good, Israel just kept seeking answers elsewhere. Eventually, they decided that what they needed, that just the ticket, would be for them to have a king like all the nations around them. And that leads me to ask, do we ever look to politicians for peace and for hope that only God can provide?

It seems to me, in my observation, that as election cycles recur and as election day draws near, there's often a tendency for us to place way too much hope in the names on that ballot and the person who will eventually occupy that office. You know, this past week, we've experienced a lot of violence, a lot of turmoil, a lot of outrage in our country. The murder of Charlie Kirk a few days ago has obviously sparked a strong avalanche of emotions and opinions that are all over the charts. But I would present that the very fact that Charlie Kirk was killed and the way that we as a nation in many cases have reacted to it, all of those are indicative of the fact that we tend to put our confidence in the wrong place. We tend to feel threatened by people we disagree with.

We tend to idolize those that we do resonate with. And none of them, none of them are God. So I would ask all of us, when we speak out, and don't get me wrong, there are times when we ought to speak out. But when we speak out, what do our thoughts, what do our words, what do our posts reveal to a watching world about where our hope is? Any loss of life is a tragic thing, but our hope cannot be in a human leader.

No human leader will ever be able to do for us what Jesus alone can see. God warned Israel that having a king was not going to be as great as they thought it would, but they insisted. So God sent the prophet Samuel to anoint a young man named Saul, and Israel became a kingdom. Now, scripture tells us that Saul was tall. He was handsome.

I mean, he looked like a king. Saul had moments of courage and wisdom. But Saul also had a tendency toward insecurity and people pleasing and impatience and arrogance. And there were a couple of really critical instances of that. First, Saul presumptuously offered a sacrifice himself rather than wait for Samuel the prophet to do it.

And next, after God instructed Saul to completely wipe out an enemy nation, Saul decided instead to capture the king and keep the best livestock as plunder. And because of Saul's disobedience, God rejected him as king. God declared that Saul would be succeeded not by his son, but by but by someone from outside his family. And God chose a young man by the name of David as Israel's next king. Now, David was the youngest son of a man named Jesse.

And when Samuel the prophet showed up with instructions from God to anoint one of Jesse's eight sons as Israel's next king, Samuel naturally assumed that the oldest son, Eliab, who had that same handsome kingly bearing that Saul had had, was the guy. But the Lord said to Samuel, do not consider his appearance or his height, for I've rejected him. He is not the one. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart, which I think raises another really important question for us, and that is at the end of the day whose approval do we care more about other people's or God's?

I have a pretty strong people pleaser streak in myself. This is a question I identify with. I mean, we can say and we can do and we can buy and we can wear and we can drive and we can post all the things that we expect to impress people. But God looks past all of that and he sees our hearts. And God cares so much more about our hearts than he does about the Persona or the image that we project.

David didn't become king immediately. At the time when God had Samuel anoint him, David probably wasn't ready for that role. At that time, he was just a boy. So David was chosen not because of his looks, not because of his popularity, not because of his political experience, but because he had within him a heart for God that Saul did not. David spent the next several years of his life serving Saul as a musician and soldier.

And David later became Israel's greatest king. He wrote a number of prophetic things that predicted numerous details of Jesus life and ministry a thousand years ahead of time. And we're going to say more about David in a couple of weeks after serve day. But for now, let me hit pause and let me just ask this question up to this point in time. What can we learn from this episode in God's story?

We've seen from the very beginning that God has had a plan. And have you noticed as we've traveled this journey the last few weeks together, have you noticed what has been the most consistent obstacle to God's plan? It wasn't the serpent in the garden talking trash about Him.

It wasn't an elderly couple's infertility. It wasn't the Egyptians who enslaved and oppressed the Israelite people. And it wasn't the pagan nations who occupied Canaan when Israel arrived there. It wasn't the enemies who raided Israel after they settled in Canaan. And it wasn't the fact that Israel's government didn't look like everybody else's.

The most consistent obstacle to God's plans for us is our stubborn persistence in sin. That is the universal history spanning story of the human race. God created each and every one of us for a relationship with Him. God has given us life and he's given us instructions about how best to use it. He's also given us a choice in the matter and to a person.

We have all abused that freedom. We've all chosen in a variety of different ways. Your preference may not look like mine, which may not look like yours, but We've all chosen in a variety of ways to declare ourselves Lord rather than giving God his rightful place as ruler. And we have chosen to pursue our own pleasure over His. Scripture calls that sin, and the result of sin is corruption and brokenness and death, both in our world and in our individual lives.

And yet, because God loves us, this is the big picture story of Scripture. Because God loves us. He did not abandon us or leave us there. He pursued us. And that led God in the person of Jesus, to.

To put on flesh and offer his life in our place at the cross. And that perfect sacrifice makes it possible for us to be restored to God. And we respond to that gift in several different ways that Scripture lines out for us. It begins with trusting that Jesus death did something for us that we could never do for ourselves. That Jesus paid for our sins in full at the cross and he rose from the dead to prove it.

We respond to what Jesus has done for us by confessing, by telling the truth, both with our mouths and with our lives, that he alone is our Lord and Savior. We respond to what Jesus has done for us by surrendering to him in baptism. We got to celebrate that several times already this morning when we are baptized. We acknowledge that Jesus is Lord. We ask him to cleanse us of our sins, and we pledge to surrender to Him.

And that means repenting. That means turning away from our sin. Jesus broke sin's curse so that we can break sin's cycle in our lives. Repentance is an act of choosing the freedom and the renewed life that Jesus makes possible. And repentance is a choice that any of us who follow Jesus have to make over and over and over.

As we continue to identify sin patterns in our lives and turn away from. As we continue to recognize that we have wandered away from God and we turn our lives back toward him as we notice factors that have begun to distract us from Jesus and decide that we are going to lock those things out of our lives. The most consistent obstacle to God's plans for us is our stubborn persistence in sin. And that means that no matter where we are on our faith journey, whether you are just beginning to ask questions or whether you have professed to follow Jesus for years, repentance is an essential spiritual rhythm that we never outgrow. It's one we never move past.

So I want to ask all of us as we close this morning, where is God calling you to repent today?

Would you pray with me, Father God, you are a good and powerful God.

The breadth and the complexity of the Story of your work here among us, God, is. It's bigger than we can really wrap our heads around. There is so much about you because of your immensity, because of your limitless power that we just cannot fully understand. And yet, God, what we do see is your love, your holiness, your insistent pursuit of us, and the amazing sacrifice that you yourself offer to make it possible for us to be restored to you after all the damage that sin has done to our world and to our lives. God, we ask that you would help us to be people who are not content just to know the right things or to say the right things.

Father, help us to not be content just to come on a weekly basis and gather together and hear some things that we by and large may agree with. Father, more than all of that, we ask for your help in surrendering every part of who we are to you. And none of us in the moment when we pledge that, Father, none of us in the moment when we decide to surrender our lives to you in baptism, fully understand what complete surrender means. But we ask God that you would give us that desire and that intention and that through your spirit, you would continue to show us those pockets, those corners of our lives where we are still insistent on being in charge. God, we want you to be present.

We want you to be lord over every part of us. We want every part of us to reflect who you are. Our world is a mess right now. Our world is hurting and confused and angry and looking at a lot of the wrong places for solutions. And we ask, Lord, that you would help us to be people who, because of our connection with you, made possible through Jesus.

Father, because of your Holy Spirit's presence in us, help us to be people who take your presence and your peace and your hope and your character with us in every situation that we're a part of. Father, we love you and we thank you for the privilege of coming together in the name of Jesus this morning. And it's in his name we pray. Amen. Again.

It's always great to be together. And before we go, we always want to remind you that we would love nothing more than to help you take a next step as a follower of Jesus. And that next step could be all over the charts. But a couple of simple ways you could reach out to us would be, number one, to text the word next to 317-707-9997. You could reach out to us that way.

You'll also find several of us. I'm going to invite a few friends to come up.