"Then Faith of Moses" - Hebrews 11:23-28

Amen. You be seated. If you've got a Bible, Hebrews 11.

If you don't have a Bible, there's one on the table. I always encourage you

to grab that. Read along with me.

I'm not asking you to give us money or change your life a little bit or just change your Sunday.

I think when we open the Word of God, what God is asking us to do is to give

us our whole selves to Him.

Everything that we have, every second that we own belongs to him.

And so when we read the word, when we get in the word, I always want to encourage

you to read along and make sure nothing I'm saying is crazy because that's always

possible. It's in the realm.

Whenever you get into kids sports, one thing you realize, especially when they're

young is they can only handle one thing at a time.

And so like if I remember I was coaching little dribblers the first year and

every time I've coached pretty much. I've not planned on coaching.

It's like you show up to the draft, they're like, hey, we need a coach.

And it's like, if you don't coach, they're going to get coached by like a high school kid.

And I've got nothing against high school kids, but I was a high school kid and

I was an idiot and I was one of the better ones.

And so you're like, yeah, I'll do it. And so they taught me into coaching like

kindergarten basketball.

And I love basketball. I played basketball all the way through high school.

I know it didn't look like it, but I actually wasn't too bad.

And so I got real excited, you know, and I have these practice plans that I've

looked up and all the things we're going to do.

And here's the drills and here's, and you realize five or 10 minutes in,

all they know is get the ball and don't let anyone else have it. That's number one.

They run around with it like a football and they're trying to get it in the

hoop. And so if you say like, Hey, we're going to learn how to set a screen.

They're like, well, that doesn't involve the ball and we're not putting the

ball in the hole. And so I don't see the point in that.

And you're like, well, maybe try dribbling. And you're like, no, no, that's too hard.

I can carry it a lot easier. And so I'm just going to do that.

If you do T-ball, I remember when we started T-ball instructional,

it's like you tell them to hit the ball and then run to first.

They hit the ball and they usually look at you like, now what? Now where do I go?

And then they learn how to run to first. You got to teach them how to run to second.

It's just because one thing at a time is all they can handle.

And God bless them. They're probably better for it.

And I think a lot of times when we read our Bibles again, like I was saying

earlier, this is kind of how we think.

If we're not careful, We tend to be one thing at a time people.

And we forget that there's this grand narrative playing out around us.

Just like if you were a kid playing basketball or baseball or any sport,

you don't realize when you start that there's a million things going on around

you that are happening all at the same time.

In t-ball, you try to get the ball and tag the kid out. And then as you get

older, you realize everybody on the field is doing something.

They're backing up somebody, or they're playing a certain position,

or they're in charge of a certain thing.

And when we drop ourselves into these stories in the Bible, whether it's Abraham

or this morning we're going to talk about Moses, it's easy to zero in on,

well, I just want to know about Moses.

That's all I want to know. We can forget at times that, man,

God's doing millions of things all at the same time.

Moses is the one story we get here. Moses is the one we zero in on because that's

what moves the story of the Bible forward. That's what gets us closer to Jesus.

But God is always doing something. He's always at work.

And from Abel onward in this chapter, as we zero in on specific stories,

every story has a purpose in human history, advancing its way ultimately to Christ.

Again, this morning we'll look at Moses. I think the best way to introduce you

to Moses is to give you his epitaph, what is said about him as he's getting ready to die.

Deuteronomy 34, 10 through 12 says about Moses, since then, no prophet has arisen

in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.

But in all those miraculous signs and wonders,

the Lord sent him to do in Egypt to Pharaoh and all his officials and his whole

land for no one has ever shown the mighty power or performed the awesome deeds

that Moses did in the sight of Israel. That's one heck of an obituary.

Been to a lot of funerals, never heard one like that.

And especially to these Hebrew listeners, Moses was a massive deal.

He was their number one hero. I've used this before, but he was like their Chuck Norris, right?

He was the guy that everything that was said about him, they believed.

He could drive, you know, if you would have said, you know, Moses used to drive

nails with his bare hands, people would go, sure, why not?

Why wouldn't he be able to do that? He does everything else.

But the writer of Hebrews wants them and us to know that.

That it was not Moses' inherent greatness. It wasn't Moses that made Moses great.

It was the God that Moses knew that made Moses great.

That's what the writer wants us

to again do this morning, like we did with Abraham. And so let me do this.

Let me go ahead and give you, this is basically five ways that Moses' faith

is shown in this passage.

Moses is preserved. Moses is

identified by his faith. Moses is separated from the world by his faith.

Moses is delivered and Moses is saved.

So let me just read this passage from Hebrews 11. We'll jump into it.

This is Hebrews 11 verse 23.

Hebrews 11:23

By faith, Moses, when he was born, was hidden for three months by his parents

because they saw that the child was beautiful and they were not afraid of the king's edict.

That's such an interesting phrase. They saw the child was beautiful.

I've seen a lot of babies, some of them more beautiful than others.

Yes and no, but I've never seen someone have their own baby and call it ugly, ever. Never seen.

My mom called me cute my whole life. And it wasn't until somebody was like,

hey, maybe you're not the cutest thing in the world that I was like,

no, my mom has told me my whole life that this is true.

And so we get this picture, first and foremost, of Abraham's parents,

of who he is and what he's like.

So you have his parents. I'm going to try these names. I know I'm going to butcher

the first one, but Anarim and Jacobed.

Now, when you first read that, who's the dad? It's Anarim.

All right. So they also had another son. His name was Aaron.

Aaron ends up being the high priest.

They also had a daughter. Her name is Miriam, and she ends up being essentially

a prophetess in Israel. This is quite the family.

Both of these parents are from

the tribe of Levi. We learn all of this in Exodus chapter one and two.

And so the first thing we see about Moses is that Moses was preserved,

not because of himself, but because of his parents, the faith of his parents.

You may have heard before that now is not the greatest time to start a family.

You maybe hear people say, well, I don't want to have kids because bringing

kids into this world, what would that be like?

Every statistic you read, birth rates are on the decline.

And I would just say, this is a worse time than that.

This is the worst time to bring kids in the world. Why? Because in Exodus 1, we learn this.

First, the Pharaoh had commanded that Hebrew midwives would murder all of the

males immediately upon birth.

So the midwives would go to these babies that are being delivered.

And if it was a male, they were commanded by Pharaoh to murder this baby, right?

Pharaoh sees his power at stake. And so this is his command.

Now there's faithful midwives in Israel.

And so they don't do that, right? They would say things like,

well, you know, these Hebrew women, they're just popping out babies quicker than we can get there.

That was a real excuse, which was great.

But when that didn't work, his command became more crude.

And honestly, probably more effective, it's that all the newborn baby boys were

to be tossed into the Nile as food for crocodiles.

So whether the midwives got there first or not, it didn't matter as long as

they found a baby that was a male,

every Egyptian had a right to take that baby from their Hebrew mother and father

and throw it into the Nile.

Didn't matter who it was, didn't matter what they came across.

That was the situation in which Moses was born into.

I told you earlier, it's hard to imagine that God's in control of certain situations.

And I can imagine if you were a Hebrew mother or father, that this would be

one of those moments, right?

How can we see the hand of God working in this moment? How could God ever be

doing anything in this moment?

This foreshadows exactly what happens when Jesus is born. Remember,

Jesus is born and what is Herod do? Herod does the exact same thing.

He sees a threat to his power, so he tries and kills off every single male kid

that might be around at the time.

So much so that the Bible tells us that there was weeping that you could hear

for miles around at that time when Jesus was alive.

But again, we don't make decisions based on what the world is doing around us.

Neither did Jacob and Anarim. They do what God has called them to do because

they know that God is sovereign over the world in which they bring kids into.

He's sovereign over the world that they see. He is in control of the things that are going on.

Even the things that we think, there's no way that God could have his hand in this at all.

There's no way that God could be working through this terrible thing that's

going on. There's just no way.

Faithful people look at the world around them and go, this looks terrible,

but God knows what's going on.

He says, beautiful child. Your Bible may say no ordinary child.

The Hebrew is literally beautiful child, but it's not really a remark on Moses'

appearance. I don't know that you've ever seen a, I've held both my kids when they were newborns.

And the first time I held them, it's like, yeah, it's a baby.

I don't, you know, they didn't strike me like Zoolander or something.

When I held them, they were just babies. And all I could think of the time was

like, probably need to clean this thing off for a little bit.

Like we need to do some work here.

But obviously God has revealed to these parents that Moses has a special purpose in life.

And we don't have that story in the Bible. We don't know that,

but there's something about Moses that God has revealed to these parents about

what he's going to do for God's people. And so what do they do?

They hide him for three months.

Then they have this moment where he's placed in a basket where Pharaoh's daughter bathed.

Miriam's hiding in the weeds and Pharaoh's daughter finds this baby floating

in a basket and Miriam pops up, basically convinces Pharaoh's daughter that

she should take this baby in.

And her grand plan is, you know what you should do? You should hire a Hebrew

mother to be the surrogate mom of this baby.

And who else would you hire than Jacobin?

So Jacobin gets paid to nurse her own baby and to raise him during his early years.

Now, again, everything that's going on at this time, we don't get any other family stories.

We don't get any other look into what it's like to live there other than this.

But you can imagine how awful every day probably is for the Hebrews.

Literally Egyptians walking through their slave camps, trying to find baby boys

to throw into the Nile. And yet in the midst of that.

God has Moses, and God preserves Moses, and God allows Moses to be raised by

his mom, even though the person that does that has no idea that that's what's going on.

The Egyptians, the most powerful nation in the world at the time,

think that they're going to be able to stop whatever God is doing.

That's what they think, and they're going to be able to do it by killing all

of these babies so that there's not going to be any males for multiple generations,

and ultimately they can control the Israelites to do exactly what they want to do.

And the problem is they're not up against the Israelites. They're up against

the God of the Israelites.

To which the God of the Israelites says, this is not a problem.

There is no issue here. There is no country or power or Pharaoh or king that's

able to get in the way of what God would want to do for his people.

And so not only is he preserved, but he is nurtured.

Moses is raised half in the palace and half in a Hebrew slave hut.

Yet in the palace, he has taught all of the godless things of the world.

And in the slave hut, he has taught who God was and what God had done and how

he should live in relationship with him.

And what an encouragement for parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles

that regardless of what the world is doing around you, regardless of what you

look at and go, how can that be? Or how can that be happening?

Or what kind of evil things are going on around us that we have these opportunities

to raise our kids in the admonition of the Lord,

to let them know who God is and what God has done and how they can live in relationship with him.

That's an incredible honor.

So Moses is preserved by faith, the faith of his parents, number one.

Number two, Moses identifies himself by faith.

He identifies himself by faith. Let me continue to read verse 24.

It says, by faith, Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son

of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God

than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.

So about 40 years pass in these two sets of verses.

Moses is an adult now. He's grown. Again, he's half Egyptian royalty and half

Israelite slave. and there becomes a moment where Moses has to choose whose side is he on.

On one side, he could be Egyptian royalty and he can have all the things that come with that.

He can have comfort in a palace. He could have money to do what he would like to do.

He could have power to do what he would like to do.

He can align himself with his Egyptian adopted family, and turn his back on

the Israelites and say, it's just easier to do this.

But that's not obviously what Moses does.

Number one, Moses turns from the world. He turns from the world.

Again, Moses was known by this royal designation, the son of Pharaoh's daughter.

And compare that to the plight of his brothers and sisters, the Israelites.

They own nothing. They have no worldly comforts. They have zero prestige.

And the Egyptians are trying to kill all of their baby boys.

Moses has a choice here, and I think a much harder choice than we give him credit.

Because at 40 years old, Moses has probably lived with a foot in both camps at this point.

He's seen the way the Egyptians treat his brothers and sisters,

the Israelites, but he's also seen how lavish and, again, comfortable the Egyptian life would be.

I think for a lot of Christians, this is where they find themselves often is

trying to have their foot in both camps and say, you know,

I want to follow the Lord and I want to do what God wants me to do,

but the world also has some pretty neat things over here.

There's some pretty big advantages to doing what the world wants me to do,

to thinking how the world wants me to think, to acting how the world wants me to act.

I want to go to heaven and I want to know the Lord, but I also want to be comfortable.

I also want to align myself in such a way that my life isn't ever going to be that hard.

And what you find in the story of Moses is that ultimately you cannot live that way for very long.

You cannot live that way for very long because true faith will announce itself

whenever God calls for it.

Believers can love their culture and there is a lot to love in a lot of cultures,

but they will refuse to be identified

with any of the godlessness that the culture might bring at them.

Again, know that this will happen if you were to follow the Lord rightly,

that there will be moments in your life where you will have to either say,

I'm with this family or I'm with this family.

I think this or I think this.

And that time will come when you have to decide if Christ is worth losing a

comfort or a power or a position. It will happen.

Again, we say this every week, but we live in East Texas, and so the chances

of that happening here may not be as great as other places, but don't think

for a second that people still won't think you're a little bit weird if you do things a certain way.

East Texas is a great place to love Jesus and go to church, but that doesn't

mean it's an easy place to actually do what God calls you to do.

Every single one of us has probably been in a situation at some time where we

thought what was going on was on the up and up.

We thought the people that we were around were honest and true.

And yet we find out that that's not the case. And being honest and true and

what God has called us to be is going to cost us some comfort or it's going

to cause us to be in some sort of conflict with those around us.

But again, true faith does not hesitate to separate itself from the world when needed.

The word the New Testament uses for this is repentance. repentance.

Repentance is turning away from your sin.

Turning away from your sin. This is what we see Moses do is Moses has this decision

and he goes, I'm going to turn from the Egyptians.

I'm going to turn from the comfort and the prestige and power that they offered.

I'm going to turn to the people of God, the people that God has called me to.

But that's not all he does.

He doesn't just turn away from something. He turns to something.

We would call this believing.

Repent and believe is the call in the gospel over and over again.

You do not see words like accept Jesus into your heart or walk down an aisle.

We don't see those things.

I'm not necessarily saying those things are bad. I'm just telling you that's

not what the Bible says. The Bible says, repent and believe.

And you see Moses do this. repent, he turns, believes, he trusts.

He turns to the Lord.

This, again, is a lesson for us. It's one thing to say what's wrong.

It's quite another to double down and do what's right.

It's easy to sit around and say, man, that should be different or that should

change or we really shouldn't be doing things that way.

It's quite another to say, we are going to do it the right way.

We are going to do it the Lord's way.

Whether it's in our families or at our jobs or at our church,

we are called to do things a certain way.

And those ways will not always be the easiest thing, but if we have repented

and believed in the Lord, that's what we're called to.

And when those things get hard, we consider how, why does Moses do this?

How is he able to do this? It says in verse 26, he considered the reproach of

Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt.

When it gets hard, like it did for Moses, the Bible tells us that he considers

the reproach of Christ. Now, Moses would not have known who Christ was.

He would have known that there was a Messiah coming. He would have known that

there was a Savior that had been promised.

He would have known that one day there was going to be someone from Abraham's

family that's going to bless the nations.

That's what he knew. And he trusted the promises of God.

And he said, listen, to trust God is to be rewarded with an everlasting reward.

That's what it says. that he was looking to the reward.

All the sinful comforts the world puts in front of us will tempt us and they

will tempt us with temporary rewards.

If you would be tempted to sin for a billion dollars today, you would think,

man, if I had a billion dollars, I would be set for life.

And yet you would still be receiving a temporary reward because every single

thing you can put your hands on, every single thing you can see today will one day no longer exist.

God has promised you an everlasting reward. And I would just encourage you,

as I try to do for myself every day, don't settle for less than that.

Consider Christ and the reward that he's offered, that he's prepared a place

for you, that he is coming back to get you, that you will be with him for eternity

when the life of faith gets hard.

This is how Paul encourages his churches. In Romans 8.18, he says,

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory

that will be revealed in us.

Now, the Romans' present sufferings were persecution and death and splitting apart families.

And so if you rephrase that, you go, I consider that our present situation of

families being split apart and people being killed and murdered and slaughtered

and forced to leave their homes,

I consider that those things are not worth comparing with the glory that is to come.

You keep reading in Romans 8, you get the verse that most people know.

And we know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him,

who have been called according to his purpose.

For those God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness

of his son, that he might be the firstborn among many believers.

Those he predestined, he also called, and those he called, he justifies.

And listen, those he justifies, he also glorifies.

If God has called you, he will keep you, and he will keep you until he will glorify you.

Last one, 2 Corinthians 4, 16 through 18. Therefore, because of that, we do not lose heart.

Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.

For our light and momentary troubles

are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.

For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

Therefore, we do not lose heart. We do not lose heart.

Our affliction, no matter what it is, is light and momentary.

Now, when Paul says it's light and momentary, don't hear me minimizing what

you're going through, what you've gone through, or what you're going to go through.

Paul is not saying to just get over it. Hey, just get over it.

Why are you whining all the time? People die, man, get over it.

Floods happen, get over it. People are evil, get over it. That's not what Paul's saying.

What Paul's saying is no matter how terrible,

how awful, how evil, how sinful the world is to you, how it affects you,

what happens to you, no matter what that is, in comparison to the eternal glory that awaits you,

It is light and momentary, temporary.

So in summary, how does Moses identify himself?

Well, he turns from the world, he repents, he trusts in Christ,

the coming Messiah, he believes.

And when that becomes tough, he considers the reward to come that far outweighs

Egyptian palaces and power and prestige.

Number three, by faith, Moses has courage Verse 27 says, by faith he left Egypt

Not being afraid of the anger of the king For he endured as seeing him who is invisible,

Listen, you will never have the courage to do what God has called us to do If

you are scared of the wrong things.

Proverbs remind us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

You may see shirts all the time that say like faith over fear and things like that.

And I think they're great, but it's not so much fear that's the issue.

It's fear of the wrong things that is the issue.

I find often that when I'm making poor decisions, when I find that there's more

sin in my life that I wish there was, when I'm lacking courage,

that's not because I don't know what to do.

It's not because I lack the information.

It's not because I'm not sure how I should act.

No, I just want to be liked, or I don't want to be alone, or I just don't want to go unnoticed.

I'm scared of something that's going to happen to me. I'm scared of someone

that can do something to me.

And so my decisions are based not on what I know and the God that I serve,

but on what I can see and the things that can hurt me today.

Faith enables you, as it says here, to see him who is invisible.

It says, Moses was able to see him who is invisible.

Now, I don't think what the author is doing here is trying to say, see, Moses was special.

Moses was special in this way, that he had faith to see what was invisible.

I think that the reason the author gives this encouragement is because every

Christian should have this experience.

Every Christian should be able to, by faith, see him who is invisible.

It's the normal experience of every believer to have faith in the Lord and by

faith, see him for who he is and have courage to do what God calls us to do.

There's a great story of Elijah in the Bible, and his prayer is just as relevant

for the church today as it was when he prayed it over his anxious servant.

It was in this moment back and forth where his servant's getting incredibly

nervous about what's going on around them.

He looks down at him and he prays for him. And he says, Lord,

open his eyes so he may see.

And the Lord opened his servant's eyes and he looked and saw the hills full

of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.

If you could see what God is doing for you at every second of the day,

if you could see how God has surrounded you by grace and mercy,

If you could see what God was working in your life, then all things would be well.

And the truth is, whether you can see them or not, they are truly happening.

Elijah's servant being able to see what God was doing didn't change what God

was doing. He was doing it anyway.

And us not necessarily being able to see exactly what God is doing doesn't mean

he's not doing anything.

And courage comes from the Lord opening our eyes to the things we can't see.

To courageously deal with the things that we can see,

the emotions that we can feel, the sadness that can wash over us,

the hard days that seem too much to bear, that courage comes from the Lord saying,

listen, I promise you I am working on your behalf. I know it doesn't feel like it.

I know it doesn't seem like it, but I am working for you.

Faith, Moses had courage. By faith, Moses is saved. He's saved.

Let me just continue to read here. This verse 28 says, by faith,

he kept the Passover and sprinkled the blood so the destroyer of the firstborn might not touch him.

So you find the last plague of the 10 plagues that Moses runs through in Exodus 12.

This last plague is that God will wash through Egypt and he will kill every firstborn male.

Now we'll go through Exodus one day and I can't wait, but don't miss that this

is the reversal of exactly what the King of Egypt had tried to do.

But the King of Egypt set out to kill every male in the Israelite household.

And the last plague that God puts on Egypt is, I can do what you can't do and I can do it perfectly.

We'll get to that later. but God provided a way of salvation for his people.

Now, again, the instructions were strange and they were costly.

Find a lamb without blemish, sacrifice it and put blood on the doorposts,

have a Passover meal, right? This is the first time that's ever happened.

And it's a weird thing for God to ask them to do.

But in faith, they kept the Passover. They relied on the God who had spoken

to them through his servant, Moses.

It says in Exodus 12, 28, then the people of Israel went and did as the Lord

had commanded Moses and Aaron, so they did.

Often what God asks of you will not make sense. It won't feel right. It won't seem right.

Everything about you will be sitting there going, I'm not exactly sure how this should work.

When I grew up, told you multiple times, we were a construction family and I

could build walls and all kinds of stuff, build big buildings,

or at least tell someone else how to build big buildings by the time I was 20 years old.

But the first job I had as a youth pastor in Lindale, we went to camp one year

and this bus that I found out later, I was supposed to have a CDL to drive and I did not have one.

And so we just, you know, we took off with about 20 kids to Dallas, who cares?

And we get there and the bus breaks down. and I know nothing about cars.

And so I call this guy at the church who says he's a mechanic.

I'm sure he just works on cars.

And he's asking me all these questions, things to check. Well,

do this and do that, do this and that. And I'm like, man, I have no idea what you're saying.

Like, you might as well ask me to do open heart surgery because you keep telling

me to tap on things and do things.

And so he literally sends me a picture. He's like, hey, I think this will get it working.

He sends me a picture and a video of him tapping on the starter as someone's turning the key.

Some of you are not in your heads like, yeah, everyone knows that.

Well, I didn't know that. And honestly, when he told me to do that,

I'm like, this is the dumbest thing in the world.

It's 105 degrees outside. I'm laying on my back in the asphalt.

I've got a screwdriver and I'm tapping on this thing. And I'm like,

everyone's looking at me like I'm an idiot.

Well, of course, sure enough, I get under there. I tap on exactly what he tells

me to tap on. Somebody turns the key and guess what? The stupid thing starts right up.

Now, I had no clue that what he was asking me to do was going to work.

I simply just had to trust that this guy knew what he was talking about,

that he knew what was going on.

And in many ways, that's how we trust the Lord.

When he calls us to act in ways and live in ways that he calls us to,

it doesn't always make sense.

You can often look stupid doing that thing, you can find yourself like me laying

on the back of an asphalt parking lot in 105 degree weather trying to tap on

something that you don't even know what it is.

Craziest part about this whole thing is Moses doesn't just do one Passover.

The Hebrew here is in the perfect tense, or you could say in the continuing tense.

The phrase, by faith, he kept the Passover actually means that he instituted the Passover.

That Moses institutes the Passover as a lasting ordinance to be done year after

year. Moses didn't just believe the Lord was going to save them that night.

He believed the Lord was going to deliver them, and that they were going to

be able to do multiple Passovers over and over as they went forward.

Again, when God tells us to do something, we do it not because of what's around

us or what the world's telling us, but because he's asked us to do it.

And we trust that he will continue to serve us and to help us in our time of need.

Just another reminder, you serve the God who is in control of human history, human futures.

If he asks you to do something, you trust him.

Last thing by faith Moses was delivered

he was delivered verse 29 says by

faith the people crossed the Red Sea is on dry land but

the Egyptians when they attempted to do the same were drowned

we're going to stop there for now this week now again this is an incredibly

gracious thing to say about the people incredibly gracious this feels like a

grandpa retelling story about their grandkids because this is not really what

it seems is happening in Exodus.

In Exodus 14, this is the scene that we get as the people are right next to

the water and the Egyptian army's bearing down on them.

It says that the people groan, was it because there were no graves in Egypt

that you brought us to the desert to die?

What have you done to us bringing us out of Egypt? Didn't we say to you in Egypt,

leave us alone, let us serve the Egyptians?

It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert.

You read in Hebrews, by faith, the people crossed the Red Sea on dry land.

Now, the truth is many of these same people would later die in the wanderings

in the desert because of this lack of faith.

But what's truly going on here is Moses' faith rallied the people.

It was a lot of faithless people that received the reward of a faithful man.

Moses says to them after they complained in Exodus 14, Moses answered the people,

do not be afraid, stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring to you today.

The Egyptians you see today, you will never see again. The Lord will fight for

you. You need only to be still.

It's a pretty simple equation here. You've got a massive group,

probably millions of faithless people.

And yet it is the faith of Moses, the gift of faith that God gives to Moses

that saves God's people.

What effect can your faith have on others? Listen, those around you may be faithless.

They may be groaning and complaining. They may know of God.

They may even have seen him do some crazy things, seen some things they've done

in their life, but they don't know God. They don't have faith in him.

I would just say, if God has given you the gift of faith, don't be afraid to

call others to do what God has called them to do.

Don't be afraid to do and lead and step out in faith, even when everyone else

is saying, man, this is a lost cause.

Why would you bring us here? Why would you do that? Why would you have those things happen?

Everyone around you can be complaining that they just want to go back to Egypt

and serve Egypt and do those things, because even though they were slaves,

they weren't going to die.

And by the same coin, do not simply connect yourself with faithful people and

assume that you have faith.

What I mean by that is being a part of a faithful person's life does not make you a faithful person.

Having a parent or a grandma or a grandpa or someone in your life,

a pastor, a church leader that you're close to or that you're around a lot that

thinks well of you does not necessarily mean that you are faithful yourself.

An incredibly dangerous thing to go to church or to have friends or to be a

part of Christian organizations and to say, well, because I'm in this group,

I qualify for that thing.

The Israelites would have thought, well, because God delivered us,

because we walked across on dry land, we must be faithful.

We must be the people of God. And yet we see over and over again,

that's not at all who they were.

They complain and doubt God all throughout their lives, eventually dying in

the wilderness because they refused to trust him.

And they made the fateful mistake of saying, well, because we have Moses, we're in.

And while having Moses certainly brought them some advantages,

like being delivered from Egypt, walking across on dry land,

experiencing Mount Sinai, it did not make them faithful people.

So as we close, we turn to Christ and we receive the gift of faith.

God has given us eyes to see and ears to hear.

Don't just act like Moses. Don't try and go out and be Moses.

Go and know the God that Moses knows. Get to know the God of Moses.

Be preserved by God. Identify yourself with God. Receive the courage that God

gives, be saved by God and ultimately be delivered by God to an eternal promised land.

Be reminded that like the Israelites in Egypt, you are exiles in this land,

that the world is a hard place to live,

that there's tragedy upon tragedy and heartbreak upon heartbreak,

and people will be mean to you and they will betray you and they will hurt you.

Life rarely has favorites, and even when it seems like life has favorites,

that no one is exempt from the hardships that live in it.

But God has provided a greater Moses for you and me.

Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, has identified himself with us by becoming like us.

That we were slaves in a foreign land, and Jesus became one of us.

That like Moses, he was not scared of the worldly powers.

In fact, he stood toe to toe with Satan himself and did not give in when offered

all of the pleasures the world could offer him.

When we were faithless, he delivers us through the waters and crushes our enemies behind us.

He has saved us from everlasting destruction, and he has promised to go and

prepare a place for us to live with him for eternity.

We have a greater Moses.

If he's given you faith to see that, live that out If he has not,

ask him to do that I believe he is faithful to do that Let's pray.

Father, as always, thank you for your word God, just continue to open our eyes

God, give us faith to see the things that are unseen,

God, how Elijah prays for his servant We pray for one another That you would

give us eyes to see what you are doing around us even in the midst of the most

stressful or hard times in our lives.

God, I pray that you would do that for those that are affected by this flood

and those that are still searching for young kids and loved ones.

God, that even in the midst of that tragedy, you're working, you're moving.

Of course, we wish things like that did not have to happen, but we on this side

of heaven live in a sinful world, a world where evil things still take place.

And what we take solace in is not that evil things won't happen to us,

but that you will use those things for our good and your glory.

God, that you would give us eyes to see the reward that waits at the end so

that we would, like Paul, say that even the worst things that have happened

to us are light and momentary in comparison to what is to come,

what you've promised us.

In the name I pray. Amen. Amen.