Get Real

So Arthur Tunn was an author, and he told of an overnight guest to the White

House during the Coolidge administration.

Calvin Coolidge was not one of the warmest people to be around.

People talked about him being very abrupt and cold toward people and calculating

and just kind of reserved in his nature.

Seated at breakfast one morning with the president, the visitor determined to

attempt to be as invisible as possible by imitating everything the president did,

and thus avoiding any possible digressions of etiquette.

All went well until Coolidge began to catch on that the guy was mimicking him

or copying everything he did. And so reaching for his coffee,

the president poured some of it into a saucer.

The visitor followed suit.

Then Calvin Coolidge repeated, reached for the creamer and poured a generous

amount of creamer into the coffee that was in the saucer.

The visitor did exactly the same.

And then Coolidge bent down and placed the saucer in front of his cat.

There's a difference between those who merely get by, who copy,

who imitate and fake it, and those who are real or authentic about what they believe and do.

Before we read this story that we're going to be reading, this passage,

I want to tell you about something coming up.

This is what's happening in the life of the Israelite people.

They have been in the wilderness. They've been wandering through the wilderness.

And prior to this story now, God had called Moses up to the mountain to give

him the Ten Commandments. And you remember that story.

God gave him the Ten Commandments, and then God said, you need to go back down to your people.

There's some sounds that aren't very good coming from them.

And Moses went down from the mountain, and as he was coming down,

he saw that the Israelite people were in a party celebrating a golden calf that

Aaron had fashioned out of all the gold that they had gotten.

And the story tells us that Moses got so angry, and God too,

but Moses got so angry that he threw the tablets of stone out of his hand,

broke them on the ground,

broke them into pieces, went down, took the golden calf.

Burned it in a fire, took the ashes from that, the soot from that,

mixed it with water and made the people drink it.

So, this is where we are. We come to Exodus chapter 34, verses 27 through 35.

Exodus 34:27–35

Then the Lord said to Moses, Write down these words, for in accordance with

these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.

Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread

or drinking water, and he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.

When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the covenant law

in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord.

When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, his face was radiant and they were afraid to come near him.

But Moses called to them, so Aaron and all the leaders of the community came

back to him and he spoke to them.

Afterward, all the Israelites came near him and he gave them all the commands

the Lord had given him on Mount Sinai.

When Moses finished speaking to them, he put a veil over his face.

But whenever he entered the Lord's presence to speak with him,

he removed the veil until he came out.

And when he came out and told the Israelites what he had been commanded,

they saw that his face was radiant.

Then Moses put the veil back over his face until he went in to speak with the Lord.

So this is the second time Moses has gone up to the mountain to get a second

copy of the Ten Commandments for the people to live by, and it tells us that when he was up there,

that his face shone because of being in the presence of God.

And then whenever he went into the presence of God in the Tent of Meeting, it was as well.

So some of the things we want to learn is this. First is, Moses is an example

of someone who got real with God and with others. Remember Cecil B.

DeMille's movie, The Ten Commandments? It's probably some of you younger ones

don't. There was, it starred an actor by the name of Charlton Heston.

Have you ever heard that name?

So Charlton Heston appeared as Moses in the meeting.

And you recall how Cecil B. DeMille changed Charlton Heston's look to show God's glory?

You see, Heston's hair and beard began to turn white.

Isn't that great? And his face appeared wiser and more mature.

Well, on one part anyway.

By today's standards of film wizardry, it looked really odd.

But it was still effective in communicating what God did in Moses' life.

Now think hard about it. In the movie, when did Heston undergo this transformation

to a wise old man? Do you remember? Remember?

It wasn't at the Ten Commandments, it was when he first encountered God at the burning bush.

Well, that's not exactly what the Bible tells us. It didn't happen at the bush.

Moses took on God's glory after the second giving of the law,

after he had trekked up the mountain a second time to receive a copy of God's

commandments to replace the one that he had broken earlier.

This change took place at the second giving of the law, not the first.

And why would Moses change then?

Well, I believe the difference took place because Moses had changed from an

attitude of getting by to one of getting real.

Consider this. At the burning bush, Moses was a reluctant emissary or messenger.

Remember, he questioned, why me, Lord? I can't even speak. Surely you don't talk about me.

And when he stood before Pharaoh, he was just following God's order.

As he led the people in the first days of their desert trip,

Moses was always asking, what am I to do with these people?

Up until this point, this whole thing wasn't his idea.

It was God's. It was common knowledge that kids from Christian homes often will

leave home and go to college, and when they do, they often lose their faith or walk away from it.

Out on their own at college or in the workplace, they find themselves in an

entirely new world that challenges many of the standards they had grown up with,

and their faith faltered.

Why would that happen? Well, frankly, it's because the faith that they exhibited,

the faith that they lost, wasn't theirs to begin with. It was their parents' faith.

These children had obediently gone along with the morals and beliefs that ruled

their home while they were at home, but once they moved away,

when they didn't have the shackles of their parents guiding them,

since the faith wasn't theirs to begin with, they began to lose it.

In order to survive, they needed to change from the faith of their fathers and

mothers to the faith of their own.

Many of us experienced that when we were growing up, when we were going from

high school into college age or even into adulthood.

We had this crisis of faith, almost, that we began to realize that what we did,

what happened to us, was based on our own faith with God.

For Moses, something like that had taken place. He changed in his faith,

and this change took place just before his second trip up to the mountain.

As I said, Exodus 32, verses 19-20, tells us when that change took place.

Exodus 32:19–20

It says, when Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing,

his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to

pieces at the foot of the mountain.

Up until this point, Moses' faith in God was not his own.

It was the faith of his fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

You remember he talked about that faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,

the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But it was at this point when his

faith became real, and he realized he was not in this alone.

He was fighting for his God's.

Faith he was standing up against

a people that hadn't they he wasn't worried about

them violating him he was more worried

about them violating god and what they had done wasn't destroying him it wasn't

hurting him it was hurting his god and it says in verses 19 or 21 it says and

he took the calf that they had made and burned it in the fire then he ground

it to powder scattered it on the the water and made the Israelites drink it.

Yuck. He said to Aaron, what did these people do to you that you led them into such great sin?

So apparently Aaron's faith wasn't very good either.

No one told Moses to smash the tablets. No one told him to melt down the idol

and grind it into powder.

Nobody told him to spread its powder on the drinking water and force the people

to drink That was all Moses' idea.

You don't see anywhere in Scripture where God said, do this,

Moses, so they'll learn a lesson.

And then Moses turned to Aaron. Up until that point, Aaron had been Moses' mouthpiece,

and ever since the burning bush, Aaron had been Moses' support and his faith, but not anymore.

Moses had learned he couldn't lean on Aaron's faith anymore,

and for the first time in their relationship, Moses rebuked his older brother, and put him in his place.

After that confrontation, we see Moses really began to care for his people in Exodus 32,

11 to 12, and then 31 to 32, tells us that of Moses making intercessory prayer.

For his people, for God's people, the Israelites.

He offered to substitute himself in the punishment that God was wanting to wreck

on the people to avert God's anger.

God was ready to destroy the people, in fact, that God was ready to start over with just Moses.

There had to be a Mosafina, too, but anyway. But that's another story.

But God was ready to start over, and Moses stood in the gap for them.

So we see that Moses is an example of someone who finally got real with God.

This is also such a pivotal event in Moses' life, and God used it as an example.

2 Corinthians 3, write these verses down.

Don't write the verses, write the reference. 2 Corinthians 3, 12-18 tells us this.

Even to this day when Moses' read a veil covers their hearts but whenever

anyone turns to the lord the veil is taken away now the

lord is the spirit and where the spirit of the

lord is there is freedom and we who have with unveiled

faces all reflect the lord's glory are

being transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory which comes from

the lord we are in the spirit notice in verse 18 of that that we're told that

we as Christians can reflect God's glory as Moses did. It says, from glory to glory.

We are going from glory to glory. We can reflect God's glory.

Up until now, Moses did not reflect God's glory because he hadn't seen God's glory.

He had watched him pass by, and he had seen some of the punishment that God

was wanting to wreck on the people, but he really had not seen the glory of God.

In other words, this change in our lives takes place bit by bit,

little by little, step by step.

We don't usually change overnight, but instead it's a gradual change that takes

place as we continue to walk close to God.

We begin to get closer and closer and closer to God, and as we take on our faith.

I've done some funerals where somebody, a loved one who is a glorious follower

of Jesus, has passed away, and

everybody else wants to kind of take their relationships and tie it to the.

Coattails, shirttails, of that person has passed.

We can't do that. Our faith has to be our own, and that's what Moses was finding out.

This is an important part of the relationship with God, that we don't want to

be caught faking it, like the pompous church member who visited a young boy's Sunday school class.

Standing up there all pious, at one point he asked, why do people call me a Christian?

After a pause, one little boy raised his hand timidly and asked,

is it because they don't know you?

Good question. Instead, we should be like the man who inspired one of our favorite

hymns back in the 1800s. A famous preacher was holding an evangelistic campaign in a nearby city.

During the messages, he couldn't help noticing a man who sat toward the front

of the congregation with particularly radiant expression on his face.

The message that night was on the return of Christ,

and the man in the pew got caught up

so much caught up in the excitement of the

moment he jumped to his feet and shouted out yes

yes and that will be glory for me after

the meeting the evangelist asked the deacon who the man was

man deacon said oh that's old glory face replied the deacon he's a christian

who always seems to be on the mountaintop the impression of that one One man's

face impressed him so much on that preacher that Charles Gabriel wrote this

popular gospel song that we know as.

Oh, that will be glory for me.

When all my labors and trials are o'er and I am safe on that beautiful shore,

just to be near the dear Lord I adore will through the ages be glory for me.

Oh, that will be glory for me, glory for me, glory for me. when by his grace

I shall look on his face, that will be glory for me.

Second verse says, when by the gift of his infinite grace I am accorded in heaven

a place, just to be there and to look on his face will through the ages be glory for me.

Now, you guys know the song. Let's sing the chorus.

Oh, that will be glory for me,

glory for me, glory for me, When by his grace I shall look on his face,

that will be glory, be glory for me.

I wonder if that will be glory for us.

I wonder if we have those times when we express and we look at who we are and

who we are in Christ and how we are acting and how we are living,

and are we expressing the glory of Christ in all that we do?

Do we have the veil covering our face? Are we putting on a front for people

so that they don't see that the glory of God really is fading from us?

Or are we in presence of God so much that our faces and our countenance and

everything that we do say and think shines with the Shekinah glory of the Father of God.

Do we represent Jesus well?

How then do we grow from glory to glory? 2 Corinthians 4, 1-3 tells us that

it is when we are zealous for the things of God.

Verse 13-15 tells us it's when we care for people.

Tell me, do you know how to tell the difference between counterfeit and real diamonds?

The real diamonds can cut glass. The reality of true diamonds is seen in the mark that they make.

In the same way, real Christians reveal themselves in the marks that they make on society and others.

So this is the reason it's so important for us to reflect His glory.

2 Corinthians 4, 2-6 tells us that there's a veil over the eyes of the world.

They don't see clearly.

And if somehow the world is to succeed in having the veil removed, who will they look to?

What will they see? When the veil of their eyes is removed, what kind of things

are they going to see, and who are they going to see representing Christ?

If somehow the world were to see us as followers of Jesus, would they say like

the little boy, well, probably because they don't know you?

Or would they look at us and see they have the glory of Jesus?

Something about them is shining. What is it and what do we want to know?

Jesus said this, let your light so shine before men that they may see your good

deeds and praise your Father in heaven. It wasn't for us to get the praise.

It was for our Father to get the praise, for him to have the glory.

German artist Dannecker was known for his painstaking work on his sculptings.

For two years, he worked on his famous Statue of Christ.

When he felt it was finished, he called to some children playing outside his

studio and asked one of them to come in and evaluate his work.

He called them in and he said, Who is that pointing to the statue?

You. The little girl promptly replied, that's a great man.

That reply stuck in his heart, for he wanted a work that declared the power

of a risen Christ, a risen Savior, not just a great man.

So he took up his chisel, and for the next six years, he worked at recreating his masterpiece.

When he was finished again, he asked the child to come into the studio and asked, Who is this?

The child replied, It's Jesus.

And at that, Dannecker knew that his powerful work was declared ready for the world.

A sculptor later confessed to a friend, Dannecker later confessed to a friend,

that during those long, weary days of working on the sculpting,

Jesus had come and revealed himself to him.

He had only transferred to the marble the vision that he had seen of Christ,

the glory he had seen in Christ.

Sometime later, Napoleon Bonaparte, desired to commission Daniker to sculpt

a statue of the goddess Venus for the Louvre.

The money was good in the employment, sure, but the painter refused,

and the sculptor refused.

He said, a man who has seen Christ can yet never use his gift in carving a pagan goddess.

One who has seen Christ can never do anything that's not consecrated to Christ.

Friends, if we have seen the Christ, we can never do anything again.

If we have truly seen Christ, if we've truly seen him face to face,

if we've experienced his glory, we can never again do anything that's not glorifying to Christ.

The question is this, are you getting it real and reflecting God's glory?

Are you all up in God's face for others?

Better yet, are you all up in others' faces for God?

Are you representing Christ? Are you the glory of God? When people see you,

do they experience the living Christ?

Boy, that's a question we should all be asking ourselves daily,

continually, because Paul says, I die to self daily.

Am I being the glory of Christ?