April 16, 2023 / Your Past Need Not Define You

Welcome to Walk in the Truth podcast.

This season of messages takes us through some of the great comeback stories in the Bible.

Pastor John Metter of Cross City Church will show us how God can take any situation in

any life and bring hope and victory out of hardship.

These messages will inspire you to trust God in your own challenging seasons.

I am so glad that you're with us today.

I want you to take your Bibles and turn to the book of Exodus, the second book in the

Bible, Genesis and Exodus.

Today I want to talk to you about your past need not define you.

Man, isn't that a good word that you don't have to be defined by your past?

How many of you in the room would say, I've got some things in my past I don't want to

define my future with?

Would you raise your hand?

I guess most of us in the room.

God's Not Done With You is our message series and it goes by the same name as the book that

we're releasing today.

I just want to make that available to you.

If you're a guest, in particular a guest, let me just say this to you if you're a first

time guest, please come to our guest reception room.

We have a free book for you.

We have books available at discounted price for everybody in the room.

But for guests, we want you to be able to have a free one so we've made that available

to you and I hope that you'll come by.

And I hope that you'll commit for the next eight or nine weeks as we walk through this,

God's Not Done With You.

Because every week we look at a different character, a different person that thought

God was done with them because of something in their past or because of circumstances

that they were going through or some trial that they were going through.

In the end, they look back on their lives and said, God was not done with me.

My great surprise, he wasn't done with me.

And today we're going to look at a very important figure in the Old Testament by the name of

Moses, who was defined by his past for about 80 years until God broke through in his life.

You know, I love the testimonies of people in this church present day because so many

of us have testimonies like that where we have a past and now Jesus Christ has intervened

in our life and now we have a whole different future because of the presence of God, the

presence of Jesus.

Now, one of my favorite guys is a worship leader in this church.

His name is Brad Riley.

And I have his permission to share intimate details about his life.

So Brad leads with joy.

He leads with contagious enthusiasm, with excellence.

He's a young man that I just really love to be around.

I remember an office conversation about two or three years ago.

And for some reason we were talking about 2006.

I came to this church in 2006 and some of those that are on staff now were there back

then, some were not.

And Brad was not.

And so I said, Brad, where were you when I came in 2006?

And his answer was, I was in jail with my father.

And I thought, how'd you get on staff?

I mean, did I miss that part?

Did I not interview very thoroughly?

But what God did in Brad's life was so significant that he was not defined by his past.

That whatever happened in the past had been forgiven and redeemed to such a significant

way that he leads worship for hundreds and thousands of people every single week.

I mean, I can just give glory to God for something like that, can't you?

That is such a big deal.

However, not everyone can say that yet.

Everyone has the opportunity to have their past redeemed and changed so that their future

is not defined by their past.

But not everybody in the room can tell that story yet because they haven't yet seen how

God can do that in their life.

And that's what today is all about.

I want you to consider the life of Moses today, the life of Moses.

When you think of Moses, you think of a great leader.

You think of perhaps the Exodus, maybe the parting of the Red Sea.

You think of Moses as being this great, great leader whom God used in a powerful way.

But what you don't see is 80 years of living before God started using him in a significant

way with lots of bad things in his past.

And a short look at Exodus 2 and Exodus 3 will tell us that story.

I want you to stand with me as we read Exodus chapter 2, verses 10 through 15.

Exodus 2:10–15

Now, the first nine verses have some detail about Moses' life that you will remember.

He was a baby that was under the threat of the Pharaoh who wanted all Hebrew babies to

be put to death.

His mother preserved his life because the Bible says he was a beautiful child.

And of course, every mom thinks her child is a beautiful child.

And reality is God rescued him in a unique way.

She put him in a reed basket and put pitch around the bottom of it, put him in the river

Nile and Moses was discovered by Pharaoh's daughter.

As soon as he was discovered, Moses' sister runs up and said, can I find a nursemaid for

you to help?

And of course, that nursemaid was Moses' own mother.

So he was miraculously delivered and raised in Pharaoh's palace.

Verse 10, however, takes a turn in his life that we'll pick up the story with.

Verse 10, the child grew and she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter and he became her son.

And she named him Moses and said, because I drew him out of the water.

Now it came about in those days when Moses had grown up that he went out to his brethren,

that would be the Hebrew people who are in bondage to the Egyptian people.

And he looked on their hard labors and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his

brothers.

So he looked this way in that and when he saw there was no one around, he struck down

the Egyptian and hit him in the sand.

He went out the next day and behold two Hebrews were fighting with each other.

And he said to the offender, why are you striking your companion?

But he said, who made you a prince or a judge over us?

Are you intending to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?

Then Moses was afraid and said, surely the matter has become known.

When Pharaoh found of this matter, found out, that's this matter, he tried to kill Moses,

but Moses fled from the presence of Pharaoh and settled in the land of Midian and he sat

down by a well.

Father in Jesus' name speak to us today, show us what part of our past needs to be forgiven

and redeemed.

Help us to believe by faith that our future is not defined by our past.

I ask this in Jesus' name.

All God's people said amen.

Please be seated.

You know, life is often lived in seasons.

I've noticed this about Moses' life.

He lives in three seasons of life.

He has three 40-year seasons.

The first 40 years is a 40 years of privilege after Pharaoh's daughter discovers him in

that reed basket and basically adopts him.

He gets the benefit of being raised intimately or one-on-one by his mom, but also in the

palace of Pharaoh.

And he is excluded from the hard labor that all the other Hebrew people are enduring.

So he's got an adopted status in Pharaoh's palace.

He's positioned to make an incredible difference in the world.

He's positioned in leadership-wise to be able to help set the Hebrew people free.

They've been under bondage for dozens and hundreds of years.

And so Moses has all that potential about him, but with one angry moment, just one moment,

that's in verse 12.

He throws all that feature away.

On that one moment in verse 12, he strikes down the Egyptian oppressor, even though everything

that was happening was unjust, even though in his mind he could reconcile all that, he

still killed a man.

He murdered a man and others saw.

And all of a sudden he had to flee.

One devastating act of personal revenge that sent him fleeing to the backside of the desert.

Now, as you enter into the second 40 years of his life, because he was about 40 at that

time, how many of those days and weeks and months do you think he spent in regret?

And I would say almost all of them.

I wouldn't think that the backside of the desert was a place where you could forget

much.

You remember all those other things.

He probably entertained ideas like, I will never see my family again.

I'll never be around my people again.

I'll never be able to lead again.

God will never use me again.

I'll never know what it means to be used by God or spoken to by God.

And for at least 39.9 of those next 40 years, everything was silent as far as we can tell.

God is not speaking to him.

He has no clue of what God is going to do in his life.

And all of a sudden at the end of that second 40 year period of time, which I call 40 years

of darkness, by the way, something happens that's beyond his wildest dreams and imagination.

God reveals himself to Moses and all of a sudden Moses enters into a brand new, the

last 40 years of his life, which we know as the Exodus, where God uses him in an amazing

way.

So what happened to Moses to make his path so redeemed and so changed that God can use

him so powerfully in the future?

You're going to want to know.

And we find it in Exodus chapter two and Exodus chapter three.

And Moses' life is going to remind you that your past, no matter what it is, does not

need to define you.

I know some of you in the room today are thinking about your past.

I hope you are.

I hope you're thinking about something you said, something you did, something you didn't

do that you should have done.

I hope you are thinking about some way that you betrayed someone.

I hope you are thinking about something that may even be criminal, something that is always

a smear on your life story.

I hope we're thinking about that for just a moment.

And the reason I hope you're thinking about that, it's because I hope you can see that

that God can take even that and redeem it

for his good in the future.

Your past does not need to define you.

You can look forward to a new kind of future.

So what is it about Moses' life

that helps us know about this and how to do it?

It's really very simple.

In fact, it's so simple that it's just a couple of phrases

that help us know the things that help us

not be defined by our past.

First of all, in the life of Moses,

you're going to learn that like Moses,

you must listen to God.

You must listen to God.

Now we're gonna read chapter three, one through five there,

and those five verses, we'll learn

that God is going to speak to Moses.

Now the reason that I want you to pause for a moment

before we read that text is,

Moses has done things out of his own mind,

out of his own heart, and that's what's messed him up.

So for the first time in his life,

he needs to stop and listen to God.

He wasn't listening to God when he killed

the Egyptian oppressor, he was listening to his heart,

he was looking at the scenario

and doing what he thought he needed to do,

but it wasn't what God wanted him to do.

And now it's time for Moses to listen to God.

After 80 years of life, it's time for him to listen to God.

Look at chapter three, look at the first five verses.

Now Moses was pastoring the flock of Jethro,

his father-in-law, the priest of Midian,

and he led the flock to the west side of the wilderness

and came down to Horeb, the mountain of God.

This is Sinai or Horeb,

both words describe the same mountain,

far, far south in the land of the children of Israel.

And the angel of the Lord appeared to him

in a blazing fire from the midst of the bush,

and he looked and behold, the bush was burning with fire,

yet the bush was not consumed.

So Moses said, I must turn aside now

and see this marvelous sight.

Now the word marvelous in the Hebrew is a word

that defines what this looks like a little bit better.

Some translations use the word great, but it means massive.

It means intense, the fire is intense, the bush is massive.

This is not a little tumbleweed that's smoking.

That's not what it is.

It's a big blazing fire,

this huge bush out on this mountain.

And Moses saw this.

He said, the bush was burning with fire,

yet the bush was not consumed.

So Moses said, I must turn aside now

and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up.

And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to look,

God called to him from the midst of the bush

and said, Moses, Moses.

And he said, here I am.

And then he said, do not come near here.

Remove your sandals from your feet

for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.

Now let me just tell you today,

as I've done a study of all these characters

in the Old Testament that God used in such big ways,

such great heroes of faith,

I've learned they all have something in common.

And one of those things is that God took a past

that was checkered at best and transformed it

into something that he could use in a glorious way later on.

And number two, every one of them had an encounter

where they had to listen to God.

They had to listen to God.

Because until they listened to God,

their life would not change.

They had already had the opportunity to live life

the way they want to live it.

And you have too.

All of us in this room have had plenty of opportunities

to drive behind the wheel of the car of our life,

going wherever we want to.

At some point, that's not good enough.

At some point, that's not healthy enough.

At some point, we want something better than that

and we have to take our hands off the wheel,

start listening to God about our lives.

So Moses and you, we must learn to listen to God.

And let me just say, God may not speak to you

the same way he speaks to Moses.

You may not encounter a burning bush

that's 20 or 30 feet tall with intense heat

and an angel speaking out of it.

That's not what you probably should look for.

I mean, I'm just seriously giving you advice.

Don't look for a burning bush.

But I will also say this.

God is able to speak to you in a way that's undeniable.

It may or may not be undeniable,

it may or may not be audible, but it's undeniable.

You may not hear his voice with your ear,

but you can hear it with your heart.

And you know when God speaks to you,

you will never forget that he's spoken to you,

that he's led you in a certain way,

that he's allowed the words of scripture to jump out at you.

There's a million ways God can speak to you.

But the important thing is you must listen to God.

So let me tell you some things about listening to God.

First, let me just say that God can interrupt us

to bring change in our life,

to bring us to the point of being willing to listen.

If you look in verse two again, it says,

"'The angel of the Lord appeared to him,

"'this big burning bush experiences,

"'large, intense, and loud.'"

Sometimes God interrupts us in loud, intense ways.

Sometimes he interrupts us in ways that make us miserable.

And sometimes he interrupts us in ways that are marvelous,

ways where we're just so stunned by what we're seeing,

we have to stop and pause and wonder what's going on.

Sometimes we call those situations

where we are encountered by God, come to Jesus moments.

You familiar with the phrase, come to Jesus moments?

Anybody in here ever had a come to Jesus moment?

I mean, sometimes it's just the seriousness

of the situation is a come to Jesus moment.

What am I gonna do?

Or sometimes something completely out of our control

confronts us in the face,

and that's a come to Jesus moment

because we can't get through that.

We don't know the answer.

So God uses interruptions like these come to Jesus moments

in order to help people not be defined by their past.

Moses had a come to Jesus moment, if you will.

I mean, we're talking about the whole Bible here, right?

Hezekiah had a divine interruption

when he was given the death sentence

and said he was gonna die.

David had a moment where his life was interrupted

by the confrontation with the prophet

because of David's sin.

Jonah had one of those moments

where he was swallowed by the whale.

I don't know what you call a moment

where you're swallowed by the whale,

but it ought to be come to Jesus or something like that.

Paul had one of those moments.

Peter had a lot of those moments.

Those moments where everything halts

and God has our undivided attention.

You know, it's really important.

You won't listen to God

until you have an interruption sometimes.

Sometimes we just don't listen.

We're not on his wavelength.

We don't spend time.

We don't open ourselves up to what God may say or do.

And those divine interruptions

that God allows to happen in our lives

are designed for him to speak into our hearts.

And let me just tell you,

it's not just us sitting in this room,

but when you are around people

and they have crossroads moments,

somebody dies in their family, a loss of a job,

the loss of a relationship or a marriage,

or they're extremely disappointed

by the way life is going for them,

those are great crossroads moments

for you to step in and pray for them and encourage them

because they're on the verge of having a moment

where God is interrupting their lives

and wants to speak to them.

This is happening in Moses' life.

It happens to all of us.

And Moses in verse three says,

I must turn aside to this marvelous sight.

The second thing about listening to God

that's important is that God will speak

when we're ready to listen and not a moment before.

I'm convinced that God is speaking all the time.

We're just not always listening.

So God will speak very loudly, very clearly.

When we're ready to listen to him, we will hear him.

Verses three and four, I must turn aside now,

see this marvelous sight.

While the bush is not burned up,

God called to him from the midst of the bush.

Now, I must confess that if I saw a burning bush,

that I would be ready to listen to God,

just like Moses was.

But there are other things besides this burning bush

that makes Moses ready to listen.

He's now been living on the backside of the desert

for 40 years.

He has no solutions.

He has no future, no plan.

He's got a different family than he did when he started.

He has no idea exactly how God might use him in the future.

He knows that the children of Israel are still in bondage

and he's still burdened by all that,

but he has nothing to offer God.

He's at the place where he's saying,

I've got nothing here.

So I'm gonna spend the rest of my life

on the backside of this desert,

just doing what I do, just living life

with whatever meaning I can squeeze out of it,

missing what I could have had

back in the day if I had listened to God.

It was a land of regret in every way.

And so Moses is finally starting to listen.

I've written this down for myself and for others.

He was alone, he was listening, he was ready,

he was humble, and that's why he could hear God.

There's a really interesting verse

in Numbers chapter 12, verse three.

Numbers 12 · chapter mention

I love to point it out.

It says, now the man Moses was very humble,

more than any man, he was on the face of the earth.

Don't you think that's an interesting statement,

especially when you realize Moses wrote that verse?

Let that sink in.

When you look at the context,

and there are some commentators that say

that couldn't have been Moses that said that himself,

but if you look at the context,

you realize what's going on there.

Moses is being accused

and he's not willing to defend himself.

He was willing to let God defend him,

and that's exactly what God did.

So Moses is basically saying, I'm modest, I'm meek,

I'm not gonna get into this argument at all.

In fact, I'm so humble that God has humbled me

to the place where I can't imagine

anybody more humble than me.

It wasn't a prideful statement,

it was just a statement of fact.

I'm as low as a man can be.

And sometimes humility is exactly where you need to be

in order for you to hear God.

If you're prideful, you'll never listen to God

in the first place, and God will never speak to you.

You know what it says in James chapter four, verse five,

God is opposed to the proud.

But you know the rest of this verse,

but he gives grace to the humble.

I don't know about you,

but I don't think I'm ever gonna win any battle

where God is opposed to me.

I don't think there's any hope.

No hope for me, no hope for you.

But if I could have God's grace, that's where I wanna be.

And the humble place is the place where grace comes.

And that's where it was in Moses' life

and that's where it'll be in our life.

God will speak to us when we're ready to listen.

The word humble means to be modest, to meek,

poor in spirit, easily led by God.

Now the interesting thing about this phrase, to be humble,

is that Moses was on the opposite side of the spectrum

when he put that Egyptian to death.

Because what happened was he was prideful enough

to think that he could get away with it.

That being raised in Pharaoh's palace was enough

for him to murder a man

and still be able to move forward in life.

He was also so prideful that he didn't think

he needed God's approval or God's permission

to do what he did.

He just took matters into his own hands

and the result was 40 years on the backside of the desert.

So yeah, Moses is talking about humility now

because it's his pride that kept him waiting so long

for God to speak to him again.

Sometimes we wonder like Moses,

why we're not hearing God

and why our situation hasn't changed.

Why doesn't God help us?

Why are we oppressed?

Why do others have it better than we do?

Why is my life as it is?

Sometimes we can get really angry about things like that.

And I can tell you that one season of my life

was defined by my anger and my anger, I believe,

was rooted in the fact that I'd lost my hearing

as a young boy and I just didn't think it was fair.

I didn't think it was fair that I had such a hearing loss

and such a struggle to communicate, a struggle

to make grades in school, embarrassed by words

that I would try to pronounce that I'd never heard before

that came out funny.

Not funny, ha ha, but funny, embarrassing.

And I can just remember angry at God, being angry at God,

being angry at people because they wouldn't accept me.

And everything I did in that anger turned out bad.

It never worked.

God had to get me ready before I would listen to Him.

He had to get me over my anger

and get me to a place of humility.

And one of the things that God really convinced me of,

and it's something that I live for this day

in so many different ways,

God convinced me that if I could hear or not hear,

it didn't matter, but if I could hear God,

it was infinitely more important

than being able to hear anybody else.

I'm gonna just tell you today,

it's more important that you hear God than anything else.

And God brought me to that place of willingness with that,

even though I couldn't do anything about it anyway.

God will speak when we're ready to listen.

He wants you to be humble and willing to listen.

And then something else about listening to God,

one word from God can change our entire lives.

If you jump down to verse 10 of chapter three,

God gives Moses a command.

He says, therefore come now and I will send you to Pharaoh

so that you may bring my people, the sons of Israel,

out of Egypt.

Couple of things here, first of all,

think about the fact that the God of the universe

is speaking to a mere man like Moses

with that kind of background, with murder in his past,

running from all those things.

Now God is gonna talk to Moses.

He's gonna speak to him.

Please, please listen to me.

No matter how bad your past may be in your eyes,

God still loves you, God still has a word for you.

Listen to him.

Secondly, it's amazing to me that God sends him

all the way back to Egypt to the scene of his crime,

to the place where he was foolish,

to the place where he actually committed murder.

He had to go all the way back so that God could show him

when you walk through life by yourself,

there's one outcome, but when you walk through life with me,

there's a total different outcome.

This time, Moses goes back with the Lord.

That's always better with the Lord, isn't it?

It's always better with him.

So you've got God speaking one word that changes his life.

God often walks us back before allowing us to walk forward,

and sometimes the hardest things we ever have to do

is walk back to the most awful thing we ever experienced

in order to overcome it.

Has God ever walked you back to the scene of your crime,

so to speak?

Has he ever walked you back to your most embarrassing moment?

Have you ever had to go back through that time of life,

maybe that angry outburst or that embarrassing act?

Whenever God's taking you back where you've been before,

he's at work, he's at work.

He's gonna redeem it, because you're different

when you go back this time when he tells you to go back.

So, so important that you recognize that.

Corey Tenboom has this amazing testimony.

A concentration camp survivor

during the Nazi oppression years,

when all of our Jewish brothers and sisters,

most of them were put to death.

Corey Tenboom tells of an encounter

with one particular soldier that embarrassed

both she and her sister,

stripped them naked in front of everybody,

humiliated them in every possible way.

And after she was miraculously delivered

from that concentration camp,

she began to write of her deliverance

and of the forgiveness that God required of her

for all those that had hurt her so bad.

And as part of writing about that, she began speaking.

One day, Corey Tenboom was speaking

about the power of forgiveness,

and at the end of the meeting,

a man walked up to her that she instantly recognized

as that oppressor that stripped her naked.

And he said, is this forgiveness you speak of true?

Because wouldn't it be marvelous

if God could forgive all of us of our sins?

And she had that moment where she had to say,

that forgiveness is real,

and I grant that forgiveness to you by the power of Jesus.

See, those are not easy moments, are they?

But those are moments that God sometimes walk us back through

so that we can have incredible victory,

because we're different when we come back to those moments

than we were when we first went through them.

God's going to go with Moses this time,

and this time it's a much better outcome.

Moses will have different results,

and he wants to do that with you.

He wants you to have different results

because you're listening to him.

So first of all, you must listen to God.

Second of all, secondly, you must trust God.

If God speaks to you, you can't just listen to move on.

You must trust him with what he says to do.

So in verse 11 of chapter three,

we see Moses responding to God's command.

I'm gonna send you back to Egypt.

He said, who am I that I should go?

So Moses is about to make the first step

into the greatest season of his life,

and he'll become known as the leader of the Exodus.

I mean, whole books are written about Moses.

Movies are made about then, this man.

Everybody wants to be like in Moses,

but he doesn't know that yet.

He doesn't know what his future is.

He doesn't know what God is going to do with him.

So he's got objections.

What are you doing, God?

Who am I that I should go back to that place?

You know I'm wanted for murder.

So how does Moses learn to trust,

and how do we learn to trust God with what God says?

This is gonna be important.

This is gonna be important, so make note of this.

First of all, you must know who God is.

You know who you are, but you may not know who God is.

Moses said, who am I?

And God says, no, that's not the right question.

The right question God says is, who am I?

Who am I?

You see, you and God are gonna be a majority.

You're gonna have success.

So Moses said, who am I?

And God says, you need to know who I am.

And God gives him clues.

In fact, if you look in chapter three, verse five,

it says, for the place you are standing is holy ground.

God first of all says, I am the holy one of Israel.

I am the distinct, unique God.

There is none like me.

Now then in verse six, I am the God of your father,

the God of Abraham, Isaac, and the God of Jacob.

He's alluding to his eternal nature.

I mean, he's going back three or four generations here

right away, but the word I am is so significant.

The word I am in the Hebrew and the Greek means

I always have been and I always will be.

It's got an eternal nature to it.

Later on when Moses says, who should I tell the Pharaoh

that has sent me here, he's gonna say to him,

the great I am sent you here.

Tell him the I am sent you.

I think God says in verse seven,

I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in

Egypt, I am aware of their sufferings.

He says, Moses, I may be this holy, infinite,

all-powerful God, but I know everything about your life

and I know everything about the suffering of my people.

I have seen it.

I am aware of their suffering.

Never for a moment are you out of my sight, Moses,

even though you think you are.

And then he also says in verse eight,

so now I have come down to deliver them

and to bring them up and these statements are all

unmistakable.

God is introducing himself to Moses in a very personal way

and God is gonna show Moses how to get to know him better

in these days ahead than he ever did before.

Now you apply those statements to your own life.

Just take a moment to do it.

You've thought about your past for a few times today.

So God is standing before you today saying,

you're on holy ground if you're near me.

And he's saying, I'm the God of your father,

God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I'm eternal.

And he's saying, I'm aware, I'm fully understanding

of what you've gone through.

I know who you are, I know where you're at, what you need,

and I will come down and I will meet with you.

Those are the words of God to Moses.

Those are the words of God to people

who want him to change their lives.

So know who I am.

Also know what he does with your past

because for some of us, we need to know,

God, what are you gonna do with my past?

I mean, you say you can overcome it,

but what are you gonna do with it?

And God certainly redeems Moses' past.

But Moses just keeps bringing that, who am I?

What about me?

You know my past.

I mean, you say to you, God has a way

of taking care of your past to make it a non-factor

for everybody else and a lesson to you.

Amen.

Hallelujah.

Amen.

Hallelujah.

Moses will never go that same way again, not exactly,

because God is gonna show him how he's gonna redeem that.

Now one of my favorite verses is Romans chapter eight,

verse 28, which speaks later on in history,

back to everything God does, and here's what it says.

And we know that God causes all things

to work together for good to those who love God,

to those who are the called according to his purpose.

Don't you just love that verse?

Yes.

I mean, can't you look back in your life

and see so many times when God has caused things

to work together for good?

These words ought to be a life verse for all of us.

God causes all things to work together for good.

Now remember, that verse impacted me when I was so angry

at God for my hearing loss

and everything that accompanied that.

And I've told this story before,

being in my car in the parking lot on the college campus,

just fed up with life and kind of fed up with God

and fed up with people.

And really, I didn't have the acceptance of people

and that bothered me so badly.

At least I thought it didn't.

And I remember God coming to me

and meeting with me in that car.

And again, it wasn't a burning bush experience.

I didn't hear anything audibly.

But I remember being impressed so strongly

that God was asking the question,

is my love and acceptance of you not enough?

No.

Is it not enough?

Do you have to have everybody's love,

everybody's acceptance?

Do you have to check everybody's boxes?

Do you have to be everybody's cup of tea?

Is my love not enough for you?

Is my acceptance not enough for you?

My life changed from that moment on.

Because at that moment, I was forced to admit,

yes, God's love and acceptance is enough for me.

And it ought to be enough for anybody.

And the way you live life after you admit that

is different from the way you live life before.

You live life differently

when you know you've been accepted by God.

God takes care of our past by forgiving it and redeeming it.

That's what he does in our lives.

That's what he did in Moses' life.

But listen very carefully to me.

Your guilt and your inadequacies

are not any longer the ultimate truth about you.

It's who you were, but it's not who you are today.

And it's not who you're gonna be in the future

if you will walk with God.

Isn't that great news?

I mean, isn't that phenomenal?

That God can truly redeem your past.

Is that when Moses learned who God was

and how God deals with his past,

then his future was bright.

One more thing.

You need to know how he ensures the future

and he does it with promises.

If you jump down to verse 12,

God says something that I first read years ago

and thought, this is odd.

But God says when you have brought the people out of Egypt,

you should worship God at this mountain.

In other words, God is saying,

Moses, you're right here right now.

There's this mountain

where you've had this burning bishop experience.

Now, when you go all the way back to Egypt,

which was a long way,

and you bring all those millions of people out,

you're gonna come back, no matter how long it takes,

how many years it takes,

you're gonna come back to this mountain

and you're gonna worship me here.

Moses, I know what the future looks like

and you're gonna be back with the people

and you're gonna be back and worship me.

Now, this is Sinai.

This is where not only he saw the burning bush or horrib,

it's the second word for it,

but it's also the place where he went up on the mountain

and saw God write the 10 commandments on the tablet.

These are moments where Moses saw God

and worshiped him in a powerful way.

But God ensures the future by giving us promises now

that we have to wait on and walk in.

That's how we hope in God,

by remembering what he's told us

and continuing to follow him.

You know, I have promises that I haven't seen fulfilled yet

in my lifetime that I believe God has given me,

but I believe he will fulfill them in time.

I'm sure not gonna give up on them.

And I don't believe God will go back on his word at all.

What about you?

Have you got some promises that you've got

that you've got promises that you pray about,

that you think about, that you've read about,

that you believe God has given you

and are you holding on to the hope of those promises?

That's how God ensures the future.

What he says, he will do.

So listen to what he says.

Listening to God and trusting God

is our part of the abundant life he promises.

Isn't that the truth?

You know, I think this is all good news.

Do you think this is good news?

I think this is incredible news.

I've got something better for you though.

You know what's better than that?

What's better than that is you and I

are now on the other side of the cross.

Jesus has come, he's forgiven us of our sin

and all of our past is redeemed through the sacrifice

of Jesus on the cross and now God is not with you.

God is in you because of Jesus Christ.

Yes.

He's in you.

He's in you.

He will lead you, he will guide you,

he will convict you, he will do everything necessary

to give you the step-by-step instruction

you need to walk with him into the future.

Listen, you're on the right side of history

because you're on Jesus' side of history

and he can speak to you at any given moment,

including right now, including right now.

Your past need not define you.

Let God, let Jesus define your future

by placing your trust in him.

This is a significant moment for people

who are thinking about the life of someone,

taking just about 30 minutes to walk through someone's life

and thinking, wow, what are the high points?

And the high points are very simple.

He had to listen to God, he had to hope in God.

He had to trust God.

And if you wanna describe the Christian life,

that's what it is right there.

But in your faith and trust in Jesus

and then begin listening to him

and trusting him day by day, it's not complex.

But God is there to make a different future for you

and you are not defined by your past.

In just a moment, I'm gonna close this in prayer.

A couple of things I wanna say.

We have decision stations that are open today.

And I say on this side of history,

your next step is to put your faith and trust

in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

And he puts the Holy Spirit inside of your life

to dwell in you.

And God is not just with you, he's in you.

That's unbeatable, it's an amazing promise that God gives us.

On your way out today, stop at a decision station.

If you're a guest, I wanna invite you

to our guest reception room,

right outside the center exit doors,

across that hallway and that glassed-in room.

And I'd love to visit with you for just a few moments.

Thank you for coming today.

I'd love to give you a copy of the book.

We've also described that we have books available to you.

God's not done with you.

And we'll walk week by week in the next nine, 10 weeks

in that book.

It has 10 chapters, so actually we'll walk

through all of them.

And I wanna encourage you to realize that each week,

we can walk with more and more depth

as to what God wants to do in your life

through those resources.

So I'll encourage you to get a book today

and I'll be available to sign those in just a few moments.

Would you stand with me for a closing word of prayer?

Father, I am so thankful that you give us stories

of real men and real women

who go through incredibly challenging periods in their lives

but who learn to hear you and learn to trust you.

And Father, my heartfelt prayer for people in this room,

for all of us, is that we would realize we can hear you

and we can trust you.

And I don't know, Father, what you're doing

in different people's lives, but I know

that you're speaking to them by your Holy Spirit.

And I ask you to make it clear to them

that you have a plan and that they can trust you

and follow you.

So I ask that you do that in Jesus' name, I pray.

Amen.