Exodus 19 | Guest Speaker: Brad Respess

Well, Christmas Day at my house is very fun.

As you can imagine, we had a lot of fun with Santa.

I've got four kids, and they had a great time that morning.

We woke up early.

We said there's a limit.

We won't go downstairs until 7.30.

But at 6.30 they were in my bed, wheezy, ready to go down and see what Santa brought them.

We had so much fun.

We had the family all to our house.

We had a lot of food.

It was a great day for us.

And as the afternoon began to wear down, I thought, hey, Megan, let's go for a walk today.

And part of the reason for that is it's been raining every day, it feels like.

But another part is I had this, I had shoulder surgery about a month ago, so the week of Thanksgiving, and I cannot run, and I love to run.

And so I feel guilty because I'm like, I gotta go do something.

We ate all this food, we had Waffle House on Christmas Eve, and then all this food today.

I got to go do something.

And then part of that is I'm looking out at next week, and New Year's is coming, and it's time to set some resolutions and lose some weight and all that stuff.

I've had some post-surgery weight gain as I have not been able to do much.

And so I was thinking about New Year's resolutions and what that means for me and what that means for us.

And I went back and I looked for a survey that Nielsen did last year or early 2015 on the top 10 resolutions for New Year's.

And they were number 10, read more.

Number nine, travel more.

Number eight, learn something new.

Number seven, I like this one the most.

No resolutions at all.

I think that was 16%.

Number six, get organized.

Number five, spend more time with family.

Number four, spend less, save more.

Number three, enjoy life to the fullest.

Number two, lose weight.

Number one, stay fit and healthy.

So those last two kind of fit in with my wrestling.

We're on Exodus 19, and if you're like me when you were young and you went to church, you knew Exodus 20 was the Ten Commandments.

Like you could turn there easily.

You knew that your parents taught it.

And so we're getting up on not only Exodus 20, but the rest of this Old Testament is the next few books.

There's a lot of laws and commands that are coming.

They're like the ultimate to-do list, the ultimate set of resolutions.

If you could follow these things, if I could do these things in the new year, man, I'd be doing pretty well.

Well, we're about to go in there, and I go back because Russ has been talking through Exodus.

He's been teaching through Exodus for the last few weeks.

But Exodus kind of begins in Genesis.

And in Genesis, God made promises or covenants with Abram or Abraham.

And it starts in Genesis chapter 12.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

God made a covenant.

He said, I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

And he goes on in Genesis 15, and God says to Abraham, To your offspring I will give this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kennesites, the Cabmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Gergeshites, and the Jebushites.

And later in Genesis 17, God continues and he says, I'll give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God.

And here's a little twist on it.

He adds something.

As for you, you shall keep my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you.

Every male among you shall be circumcised.

So in Genesis 17, God's saying, I've promised that you will be a father of many nations, and I'll give you this land.

And now in Genesis 17, he's saying, and I want you to be part of this covenant, and there's something I want you to do.

And in Genesis 17, it was circumcise every male among you.

Well, Abraham then has a child, Isaac, and Isaac has Jacob, and Jacob has 12 sons, who are the twelve tribes of Israel.

And one of those, the youngest one, is Joseph.

You remember Joseph and his coat of many colors, his brothers sold him into slavery.

And Joseph ends up in Egypt, and there's a famine in the land, and Joseph, God provides through Joseph so that Egypt would have enough food for Egypt to survive, but also for Abraham's offspring to survive.

So this offspring is part of God's, I mean, this provision is part of God's promise and his covenant that I will make you a father of many nations, and he fulfills that through Joseph in Egypt.

And this is kind of what Russ has been talking about when he says this word anticipatory providence.

That's God's provision that we'll receive the reward of redemption, that God will fulfill his covenant with us.

So now here we are in Exodus 19.

The nation of Israel is in Egypt, and God provides a way through Moses, all the plagues, and Pharaoh says, get out of here, and they leave, and then God provides a way for them to go to the Red Sea.

It's kind of weird that he would direct them that way instead of straight to Israel, but he does.

And he parts the Red Sea and takes out Pharaoh's army.

And then when they're thirsty, God provides water.

When they're hungry, God provides bread.

Then he provides quail at night.

And here they are at Exodus 19.

They're still moving towards the promised land.

And God's preparing them to provide this law or this framework, these set of commands for them to structure their nation and to structure their personal lives around.

These are the Ten Commandments of the law.

And when you read back in Exodus 19, he says, to start that, he says, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples.

To me, this reminds me some of the Christian life and of my Christian life.

Here I am, somewhat in darkness, like they were in Egypt, kind of lost.

And God provides some hope, some life, some light, and that being this Christian faith, this Christian journey, calls me on a journey.

And through that journey, God provides and provides and provides.

And then it's, He gives me this life that's healthy and good for me.

The Christian life is good.

And then I start reading Scripture and I see all these commands and all this law, and I wonder, what's the value of this?

And so I begin to question and ask, what does that mean for me as a Christian?

And I want to talk about that some today.

What's the value of the Old Testament commands and the law for us today?

And even what are sort of the value of some of the New Testament imperatives that God gives to us?

So when I read Exodus 19, I picked out six things I learned real quick.

And so I'll just tell you them because maybe you'll write them down, but probably not because these are going to be real fast.

The first thing I learned is God is God.

He's big, he's supreme, he's to be feared, he's holy.

He says, the earth is mine.

And so this is a God who's got a lot of power, a lot of possession.

He's not some fairy tale.

He's not like, hey, let's be saved by some faraway something.

This is a real, living, large, powerful someone who's mighty and massive.

God is God.

The second thing is God loves his people.

He looks out for his people.

Then I learned, number three, that they, and God wants them to wait on him when they are in difficulty so that he can rescue them.

And then God provides these rules.

I learned this, God's law is good.

There are three things, A, B, and C, that I thought that God's law is good when I think about what they're for.

First thing, A, is God gave his law for society to function well.

So he set up rules for the nation of Israel for how they should survive.

And if you think about it, if you go back and you read through the Old Testament, you'll see there's something where they would, if you had debt, the debt would be forgiven every so many years.

Like it was little details like how debt was handled, how financing would go, how to plant your fields, how to handle transactions.

God provided a law for society to function well.

That's A, B, the law was given to teach people what's best for them.

The law is given for us to have wisdom.

This is God's best for us, his wisdom for us.

And lastly, I think that God gave his law so that we could know and so his people could know what is required of them to be holy.

The covenant was conditional.

If you'll do this, then I'll give you this.

Is that me?

Oh, falling down there.

Oh, is this?

Oh my, it's my handicap.

Sorry.

But this is the covenant was, so if I do that, just yell at me, I'll quit.

The covenant was conditional.

If you'll do this, if you'll obey my voice and follow my commands, then you'll be my treasure possession.

And so the law was a way for God to say, here's what's required, here's what is that you have to do to do that, to be my treasure possession.

If you do this, then you'll get this.

And we we watch in the Old Testament, the nation of Israel, they would do well and God would bless them.

And then they'd walk away from God.

They do poorly, and he would exile them.

He would let them be taken into captivity and they would be exiled.

Holiness is required to be in God's world.

It's a qualification that's required for us.

So here we are as Christians.

Me, you, we're thinking, man, what does the law mean for us?

What does that mean for us?

What do these old commands mean?

On one side, we almost want to say, I'm a Christian now, let me do what's best, let me do what's right, let me make sure I'm honoring God by my actions.

Or even more, this is a requirement for me to be a believer.

On the other side, we might say, hey, that's Old Testament.

That's old covenant.

That's not good anymore.

That applied 3,000 years ago.

This doesn't apply to us anymore.

Nothing of that applies.

We should just dismiss it.

So then what is the purpose of a law?

We're about to get in these Ten Commandments.

What is it all about?

Well, Matthew chapter 5, Jesus is very clear.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

He didn't come to abolish it, he came to fulfill it.

And I'll quote from that do not think, this is verses 17 and 18, do not think that I've come to abolish the law or the prophets.

I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.

For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until it is until all is accomplished.

Jesus did not abolish the law.

The law is still there as a requirement for us to be perfect, to get into God's world.

Jesus goes on to say, whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.

In other words, if you teach people that it's not that important for you to follow God's commands, then you'll be considered least in the kingdom of heaven.

But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

So the law that God gave in Exodus was crucial for that covenant to be fulfilled.

If you do this, if you hear my voice and obey my commands, then you will be my treasure possession.

And Jesus goes on to say, that's still in place today.

That standard of perfection, it's still for you and for me, it's still for us.

But what's fascinating to me about the law is what that does, is that those commands that law reveals to us.

It shows it, it's like a spotlight that says when we look at it and we compare our lives to it, we cannot get there.

And so I read through the Ten Commandments and I see, I mean, shoot, this morning, if uh there's a command, don't, don't, thou shalt not murder.

And Jesus says, if you look in your heart, you have anger in your heart towards your brother, you've murdered.

That hasn't happened for me since this morning.

And so I don't know about you, but these commands are hard when we look deep into our hearts and we compare ourselves with what perfection is and where we are, we see very quickly there's a big gap between us and perfection.

And we see quickly how flawed we are and how we don't qualify to be a recipient of the reward of God's covenant based on what we do.

And it goes on, and I've thought about this so often because it applies to my work life where I spend so much time or to me as a parent.

We talk a lot in this room about law.

And law, a lot of times for us, is beyond just God's law.

It could be a law, it's something that makes that's a standard for us to qualify for something.

And so it might be, you know, to qualify as a good parent, my kids need to behave properly.

They need to be quiet on the front row and they need to pay attention, right, Wheezy?

But it means, you know, if I'm gonna be somebody to qualify as somebody in society, I need to have a certain car, or I need to have a live in a certain school district, or I need to have a certain set of clothes, or I need to have the right picture on Instagram, or my Christmas card needs to have, or I need to receive enough Christmas cards.

And for me as a little child, I'd tell you what made me feel qualified was I'll go in my closet and I would count, this is revealing, I would count the polo shirts I had hanging in my closet, which is crazy.

I don't own a polo shirt anymore.

But I would count them because I thought if I have enough, the two-button polo shirts, now we had a polo outlet in Valdasta, so it wasn't like we spent a bunch of money, but that was what made me feel good that I was somebody was when I had 10 or 11 or 12 polo, I was collecting them trying to be somebody.

And that becomes lawless, something that that we have to achieve to get qualified to be someone.

And that is what breaks us because we're shamed when we realize that I had the 13th and the 14th polo shirt, and I still wasn't cool enough, or I still didn't have enough, I still didn't feel comfortable enough.

I have I can have so much money and it still doesn't make me safe and secure.

I can send out the perfect Christmas cards this year and next year they come right back on me, and the the guilt and the shame keeps coming.

And like that, the law reveals that I cannot be God's treasure possession on my own.

So in the New Covenant, we ask, how then does God still require this?

And I say this because he's still holy.

He's still a big, big God.

He still requires perfection of us.

But what I love about the new covenant is that Jesus came and he fulfilled the law.

He said, I didn't come to abolish it, I came to fulfill the law.

And what that means is, is yeah, we all we became Christians because we died on the cross, because he died on the cross.

But really what happened was he lived life perfectly and he executed the law to perfection.

That means every requirement in the law, he did it perfectly.

It's not that he just didn't do sinful things, he fulfilled proactively the law.

And then when he died on the cross, he took our sin and he exchanged it for his perfection and it's perfectly executed law and gave it to us.

So now, as Christians, when God looks upon us, he sees that we have fulfilled it perfectly.

And now we can have the reward of redemption as God's treasured possession.

First Peter chapter 2, verse 4 and following says, as you come to him, a living stone rejected by men, but in the sight of God, chosen and precious, you yourselves, like living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

1 Peter 2:4

But you are a chosen race, you are a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people.

Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

And I'm not a grammar person, but all those you are means as a believer, you are that already.

You have that perfect, you have you have done because of Christ, you have held out your side of the covenant.

Jesus has done that for us.

We are a chosen race, and now we are a treasure possession.

Nothing we can do will change that.

Peter, when he's writing a chapter before, he's beginning to tell the Christians and that in the new church, here's what your life should look like.

He says, so he's about to give a bunch of rules about how to live.

Not even rules, but just guidelines.

He says, therefore, preparing your minds for action and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Again, Peter says, set your hope fully on the grace.

He doesn't say, hey, it's time for New Year's resolutions, it's time for you to be a great church, go out and work hard and be this great Christian.

It's required of you now.

No, he's saying, he's saying, this is how I'll show you how a Christian's life looks.

But what I want you to do is focus your eyes on Jesus.

Focus your eyes on Jesus and let his Holy Spirit come and live in you and live out these lifestyle.

It's not going to be something that you can do.

It's not something, these are requirements that have already been fulfilled.

You don't have to do them to be qualified to be God's treasure possession anymore.

It's already been done.

Now the Holy Spirit can come and live in you and live out this great Christian journey.

The law now becomes simply wisdom for us.

As Timothy writes, as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training and righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

So the law is good.

It's good.

It's not been abolished, it's not dismissed, but it's been fulfilled.

It's been fulfilled, and our hope is then on grace.

So, how do we deal with this year's New Year's resolutions and the weight of doing to be qualified?

Jesus gave his life so that we could put our hope fully in him.

Because his righteousness or his qualification was perfect.

And because it was given to us when we place our hope in him, we are God's treasured possession.

You are God's treasured possession.

The things which can become death are no more than wisdom for us.

They neither qualify us nor disqualify us.

So set your resolutions or don't set your resolutions, but set your eyes on Jesus because in him is the only place that we can be fully qualified.

Let's pray.

God, I thank you so much for a life that you gave in your son Jesus that would be lived perfectly.

As we learn the laws and the commands in Exodus, we walk through the Ten Commandments and think about what they might mean for us, we remember that only one man ever lived them perfectly.

Thank you that that was your son Jesus and that he gave himself for us so that we could exchange our sinful, flawed, and broken life, our hurts and our pains, our sadness, our sorrow, our weakness and our shame.

And we could take on his perfection so that we could find the reward of redemption, that being us called your treasure possession.

Amen.