Exodus: My Grace, My Sovereignty

Good morning.

How are you guys?

Good?

Okay, so we're gonna head into Exodus chapter 7 this morning.

Exodus 7 · chapter mention

If you haven't been with us, I'm so tempted to just re-preach everything because this is a story.

The book of Exodus is a is a story.

So I feel like jumping in in the middle of a story a little bit.

And so perhaps if you're new to church, maybe you want to go and read Exodus 1 through 6, or maybe you want to go online and listen to the sermons uh leading up to this one because I'm gonna attempt to not re-preach, um, although it's so very tempting.

So there is this uh movie when I was about 10 years old or so, it came out, it was called Three Men and a Baby.

Anybody see this movie, Three Men and a Baby, right?

Uh and so it was Tom Selleck, you know, uh really short shorts is back when he was real, really uncomfortably short shorts.

And I was about 10 years old, and uh basically in this movie, uh he and his roommates, two other guys, bachelors, they end up with this baby, and they end up sort of having to raise this baby.

And so, anyways, my neighbor, Michael, he had uh they had HBO, and so uh they had a VCR, and so they would illegally just like record like every movie that came on.

So we had this huge, like, you know, just shelves and shelves and shelves of movies.

And so this was actually one of the few movies that that my sister and I we would agree upon to watch.

So we watched this movie, my sister and I, over and over and over and over and over again.

A hundred times we watched this thing.

We we've heard we had heard these words spoken, we had seen every scene so many times.

Not particularly because I love the movie or she loved the movie, but just because we could agree upon this movie.

And so then it so there's this one scene, and a friend told us about this, and we we had never seen this before.

There's this one scene in the movie, and maybe you don't even know, maybe you've seen that movie ten times, you don't you don't even know this.

And a friend told us, said, Hey, in this scene, you know, the camera pans across their apartment, and there's these curtains on the windows, and it's kind of like translucent curtains that you can see through, and the camera pans across, and you see the curtains, and the camera comes back across, and there's a little boy hiding behind the curtains.

Does anybody anybody know this?

Anybody remember this?

It was like a big deal, like late 80s, like if you found this, you know.

And it was like kind of spooky, like who's the little boy?

You know, and it's like some cameraman's kid or something, probably.

But all right, so very, very silly example.

And here's my one point out of that whole example is this.

Um, you know this feeling where you have seen something a hundred times, but you never saw that.

I had seen that scene a hundred times.

I'd never seen that little boy hiding behind that curtain.

Or maybe you've heard something, you've heard it a hundred times, but you've never heard that.

Right?

I mean, your your wife, your significant other, your mom, or whoever says, you know, sweetheart, you've got to eat less cholesterol.

You've heard it a hundred, a doctor tells you, you hear it in health class, you've heard it a hundred times, and then all of a sudden, at some point in your life, at some day, you finally hear it.

Or you're reading scriptures, like you read a particular scripture, you have read this passage a hundred times.

And then one day, for whatever magical reason in the universe and in spirituality, all of a sudden, it's like I've never read that before.

How have I missed that?

I've read this a hundred times.

How have I never seen that?

How have I never heard that?

It's like all of a sudden, this time with this viewing, with this word spoken, now it's different.

Now you see it, now you hear it.

This is where we come in in Exodus 7 is this exact feeling.

This is what Moses is about to experience.

Because Exodus 1 through 6, it's all these conversations, God and Moses, God kind of keeps saying the same thing over and over again to him.

And it's like he's hearing it, but he's not hearing it.

And then all of a sudden in Exodus 7, he hears it.

Something changes.

And so, up until this point, what we have from Moses is we have sort of like hesitant movement.

We have sort of like he hears it and he sort of does it, and then he complains and he whines, and he's all about like his inability and his speech, and he, and God's saying, no, no, like I'm I'm with you, like that doesn't matter, like I'm going before you, and then sort of Moses like has like sort of hesitant obedience, but then he's not confident in that at all, but he kind of does it, and he comes back and he whines and complains.

He's like, I can't do it, I can't do it, and God calls him again.

No, I can't do it, I can't do it.

And this is sort of what's going on in one through six.

And Moses, for Moses, it's just all this like shame and fear and disobedience.

I mean, clearly he's this hesitant, ragamuffin leader, and he's just he's just insecure and he's afraid.

And then something changes in chapter seven.

And not that he becomes perfect, by no means does he become a perfect leader, but there's a hinge point that occurs in chapter seven in terms of how he moves forward from here on in the story, in terms of some measure of confidence to lead.

So we're gonna see two points uh this morning.

Actually, there's three points.

There's a third point, I'm not gonna tell you the third point until we get to it because I think it'll throw you off.

So I'll tell you the first two, we'll work our way through them.

Uh, the two points is this.

Number one is God gives unrelenting grace to stubborn people.

Amen.

We need it, amen.

You're like, oh, thank you.

That's what I can leave.

I can go ahead and leave because that's me.

Um and that's Moses, that's the story we've been seeing.

This is what God has been pouring out to Moses.

We've been seeing the last few weeks.

Number one, God gives unrelenting grace to stubborn people.

Praise the Lord.

Number two, God has unexplainable sovereignty in the created world.

That's a little more difficult to grab hold of.

So let's talk about these two things.

Um, first, let's kind of review what uh Janine read for us.

Uh, Exodus 6, 10 through 13.

So the Lord said to Moses, go in, tell Pharaoh, king of Egypt, like mighty powerful guy, to let the people of Israel go out of his land.

And so, you know, to kind of just remember a little bit, Pharaoh would not have been inclined to let the Israelites go.

They were his slaves.

They were the manufacturing force of bricks to build the kingdom.

So he's not really inclined for this.

Moses says to the Lord, Behold, the people of Israel have not listened to me, like my own people hadn't even listened to me.

How then shall Pharaoh listen to me?

For I am of uncircumcised lips.

This is a poetic way of him saying, like, I can't talk.

Like, I just can't get the job done.

But the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron and gave them a charge about the people of Israel and about Pharaoh, king of Egypt, to bring the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt.

So here's what we see: Moses is called again, Moses is resistant again.

At the end of chapter 6, going through chapter 6, we get this really long genealogy, and maybe it's for historical record, perhaps to remind us that Moses came from these people.

Like these are his people.

And not only these are his people, I think when we talk about history and these stories, we can lose fact, like, these are people.

Like moms and dads and sons and daughters.

Like these are real people in horrible slavery.

And maybe that's what this genealogy could be about for us.

Just to read the names and go, oh, these are like, these are people, individuals that are in this, that are in this horrible, horrible, belittling, horrific life.

And yet Moses still won't help.

He's still hesitant.

That's how much of a stronghold fear and shame has on him.

Moses is still living in his inability and his shame and his disobedience.

He just doesn't get it.

He doesn't get that this isn't about him.

That's what God keeps trying to say.

Like, like, hey, I understand you have inability.

Like I get that.

But this is actually about my ability beyond your inability.

And all Moses wants out of this is he wants his inability to turn into ability.

Right?

That's how we are, right?

Like, like we are like, I'm I'm all for God being a part of my life as long as he just turns all my inabilities into abilities.

But for God to actually be my ability, though I am still unable, I'm not sure if I'm interested in that.

And that's the situation here because God's not all of a sudden transforming Moses' speech.

God's just saying, hey, I'll work with you.

Like I'll work through you.

I'll give you Aaron, but you still, you're not going to be a great orator.

Moses isn't there.

He's just not there.

He doesn't quite have this place of freedom where we allow God to be for us what we're not.

Right?

I mean, that is a humble act of surrender to allow God to be for you something you are not.

And so Moses is just moping around, he's obeying at times, and then he's whining.

It's just not clicking.

It's like he's hearing this, right?

It's like he's hearing it, but he just doesn't hear it.

Right?

Like you've seen the movie a hundred times, and you never saw that spooky little boy behind the curtain.

So, point number one: God gives unrelenting grace to stubborn people.

We just keep seeing this with God's actions toward Moses.

That he just stays with Moses.

He just does, he never gets tired of them and walks away.

But a little bit of reflection, we go, thank you.

Thank you for that.

Thank you that you are that sort of God, that you you have unrelenting grace towards stubborn people.

And then what we see, and what we'll continue to see as we go through Exodus, is then God speaks the law into creation.

The standard of righteousness, of right and wrong, and then he speaks the sacrificial system in.

So the law condemns us.

It shows us how far we fall short, and then there's the sacrificial system of how do we how do we get back to God?

How do we have this justification?

All of this weird Old Testament stuff that if you're not used to the Bible, you read this, you're like, what is this?

All of this is to help us understand the person of Christ.

All this is for us to understand to have a framework of an incarnate God in this world who puts himself upon the cross, our sins upon himself and his righteousness upon us.

You want to know the richness of that.

We start to understand the law, we start to understand the sacrificial system and the purpose, the mission, the work of Jesus gets bigger and bigger and richer and richer and richer.

And the cross is it's the absolution of the cross.

The fact that we are absolved of who we are, and all of the right judgment that God might have toward you, like in all your inability, all your whining and complaining and disobedience and all those mistakes, all of that is put upon Jesus.

And you are absolved.

This is God's unrelenting grace to stubborn people.

Exodus 7, 3 through 5.

But I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, Pharaoh will not listen to you.

Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and bring my hosts, my people, the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great acts of judgment.

The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord.

When I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the people of Israel from among them.

And so that's point number two.

God has unexplainable sovereignty in the created world.

So sovereignty, big word, big theological world word.

What it means is it means that God has absolute control.

It's not in question.

There's no surprises.

There's no evil that surprises him.

Everything is under his reign.

And this is perplexing to us.

And I don't suppose to be able to solve this this morning.

And this has been theologically debated, theologically a difficulty for humanity for all time, and yet it doesn't mean it's not true.

What it means is we have a very hard time with it.

And part of this is because we're creatures of time and God is outside of time.

Part of this is because we think we're the center of the universe and our self-centeredness, and we're not.

God is the center of the universe.

Our importance and glory is not the center of the universe.

His importance and glory is the center of the universe.

All of this is what creates our just difficulty when it comes to sovereignty over all things.

And when I look at this, this reference, this story, what he's doing with Pharaoh, like this is hard.

Like, why would you do something, uh, why would you do this when you're trying to do something good?

Why would you stop something good from happening?

And I just wonder that in this story, maybe it's just as simple as he's reminding Moses there's a larger reason at play here.

Like I like I have a larger reason playing out for Israel, for Egypt, for Pharaoh, and for my glory than what you can see.

That's just sort of like maybe a pastoral question from me to you would be are you willing to consider that perhaps there could be larger reasons beyond what you see?

Like with that difficulty, with that wound, with that with that abuse, with that confusion?

Could there be a larger reason you don't see?

Moses has built this great construct of self-sufficiency.

I mean, it looks like uh defeatism and pity, right?

I mean, that's what it comes off as, is he's always whining back to God, I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't talk.

I mean, that's what it looks like.

But but in essence, it it is a love of himself and his self-sufficiency.

It's quite pitiful, but it uh it's it's still self-reliance.

And what what I've been I've been thinking about chapters one through six and what's going on with God and Moses, and what it feels like is it feels like uh you ever gotten like a candy bar out or like a you know a breakfast bar or something, and you you know you go to open it and you just can't quite get it to tear, and you're sort of like struggling, and you start to go back and forth, or um, I thought a banana was even better.

So, like, you know, with a banana, uh, if it's just not quite ready, like a little too green, you know what I'm talking about?

And you go, I'll go for it.

You're like, okay, you know, you're you have like a little judgment period where you look at it and you're like, yeah, I really want a banana, so I'm gonna go ahead and go for it.

And you pick it up and you go to break you go to break it open, but it just won't, it's just bends, right?

And so what do you do?

You start going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until finally you, okay, finally you get it, right?

And like off you go.

Right?

A little banana.

And it's sort of like this is what's going on.

It's like like like Moses isn't quite ready, and it's like God's just working him in back and forth in chapters one through six and in the seven.

It's back and forth.

And the things, if you start to look at the text and you look at what God is communicating to Moses, the themes here of what he's communicating is over and over and over again, the same thing.

He's going, he's like, the things that he's bending him with is like my grace and my sovereignty, my grace and my sovereignty, my grace and my sovereignty is just over and over and over and over again, and finally he gets that appeal to crack that hard surface around that self-sufficiency and that heart that wants to just be reliant upon itself.

Finally, Moses gets it a little bit, and we get this short verse tucked quietly in chapter seven, and it's a hinge point.

And in chapter seven, verse six, it's so so small, and it just says, Moses and Aaron did so.

They did just as the Lord commanded them.

And it and something changes inside of Moses, and we don't know a lot about it.

I wish we got a lot more, you know, out of this, like what was going on inside of Moses.

I mean, I you kind of want a lot out of this, but there's some death that occurs within himself that this is this is a hinge point, not unto perfection, but like, okay, I'll move forward.

Like, I'll I'll I'm I I'm I'm not gonna be resistant every single step of the way like he has been so far.

There's some willingness that begins.

But what I love with Moses, and we see it here, and we'll even see it in the future, because he doesn't turn into a perfect leader by any means.

But what we see is that Moses' stubborn, slow transformation is a great gift because we learn and we are reminded that transformation is often just that.

And that's point number three.

I didn't want to say at the beginning, because some of you might have got upset, and that's this is point number three.

Transformation becomes really slow at times.

Like I have a friend who just built a house.

It took him a year to build his house.

You ever watch that extreme home makeover show?

They built a house in a week.

Like, that's not the house I want to live in.

Like, I want to live in my friend's house.

Like, it's like four-sided brick.

Like, I mean, it's it's like a good, it's not going anywhere.

Like, it's gonna be there a hundred years from now.

You're not a fast food restaurant, you're a garden.

Becoming a Christian doesn't mean that all of a sudden you become this perfect, joyful, perfect person.

Moses doesn't, you won't, I'm not.

What it means is you are forgiven of your mess while you're still a mess, while you're trying not to be a mess, while you're in a messy world.

That's what it means to be a Christian.

And yes, we put ourselves in positions to hear from the Lord and for the Lord to transform us, but ultimately the work of transformation is the work of the Holy Spirit in you.

Do you see it?

You see it with Moses?

God just keeps saying it to him over and over and over again.

Like, I'm here and I'm in control, I'm here and I'm in control.

He says it over and over and over again, and this is the very thing that causes transformation.

The thing that Moses is uh really good at is just whining and complaining and staying really complacent and still in all of his disobedience.

That's what Moses is good at.

I was walking at Kennesaw Park uh this week on some of the trails and just uh just prayer walking and praying and confessing over all of my sin and my brokenness and all my insecurity and my issues, which there are a lot, and my judgment and pride toward people, none of you, of course, just other people outside this room, and toward other churches, and what's wrong with those churches, you know, and all that you know junk.

And and then think about we had uh Christy's grandfather passed away and his funerals this week, and you know, and each each of us stood up in front of you know these great friends he had and talked about how great a man this was, and this is a man who had very little financial and material wealth.

I mean, he had very, very little.

And yet he had such wealth, such wealth of friendships and relationships and contentment.

And I'm just so discontent with like what I have and what I want and what I think I need and what that will bring me the contentment, and and and you know, this is what I have to confess over to the Lord.

And what I have to do is I have to appropriate the grace of Jesus' death and resurrection upon myself, that even while I live in that discontentment and I have not been transformed out of that, I have to appropriate the grace over myself.

Right?

I mean, this is that old saying, like I'm not really your preacher, I'm not your pastor, I'm not your preacher, you're your own preacher.

You preach to yourself more than anybody else preaches to you.

Doesn't matter that matter how many podcasts you listen to, you are the greatest preacher in your life.

And you've got to learn to appropriate the grace of God over yourself.

And so I'm just walking those trails and appropriating the grace of God over myself because if I don't, I just fall apart and I get stressed, and then marriage doesn't work, family doesn't work, church doesn't work.

And then there's all this anxiety, right?

Like all the things I want to control in my life, that I want to control the outcome.

And then there's that side of it to have to remember that while I'll be faithful, while I'll be diligent, he is sovereign over all things.

See.

That's where the freedom comes, is in the grace and in the sovereignty.

But there's a death.

There has to be a death, but only in the death of my merit, right?

Like in the love of my merit and in the love of my control.

Only in the death of those things is there going to be a love and a need of grace and a freedom found.

Only when finally I bow, because I'm finished working, will the work of Jesus be enough?

This is what Moses points us to, because Moses frees these people, and these people are the family that Jesus comes out of.

And the only thing that makes change possible in you, any transformation, whether it's fast and quick at times, or whether it's really slow, is Christ's death and resurrection.

Because it frees the human heart from the need to endlessly justify itself.

That's why Christ's death and resurrection is the only way for transformation, is because it is the only thing that frees the human heart from the endless pursuit of self-justification.

In this life, you and I, we're gonna see flashes of transformation.

You're gonna see patience come where you were not patient before.

You're gonna see some kindness that you were not kind before.

You're gonna see self-control where there was no self-control.

You're gonna see, and then you're also gonna see some issues that you wish you were better at, and you just are just so upset that you just can't get over that.

And that's where you will have to appropriate the grace of God over yourself.

And even in that act, there's transformation because that's humility.

Maybe you're here and you say, I don't know, everything you just said scares me because I really think we can be better.

We can be victorious in all things.

No, you cannot be victorious in all things.

You're not.

Let's just look at your record.

We can sit down, we can write a few things out.

You cannot, and the people around you know, you cannot be victorious in all things, and you will not be victorious in all things.

Look at your mom and dad.

Well, we can be victorious in all things in Christ.

That's because he was victorious, and he's victorious for us, not because we are victorious.

We will have victory over some things, but we can have victory in all things in Christ, because he is victorious in all things, and he is our substitute.

Maybe you'd say, ah, I don't know, it sounds a little depressing, like it sounds a little depressing.

No, this is the freedom of reality.

Not just Christian reality, reality.

I'll tell you what's depressing.

What's depressing is to think that from every day, from here on that you have to wake up and be a little bit better than you are today in order to justify your Christian faith.

That is depressing.

It kills, it overwhelms, it creates fear, it creates depression, it actually limits the work of the Spirit inside of you.

It's paradoxical.

The most freeing thing you can know is that you're more flawed than you ever imagined, but but you're more loved by God than you ever dared to dream.

It's the most freeing thing you could ever know, and that Christ's work for you is enough.

Brothers and sisters, we are called to live better.

We are called to be holy, we are called to stop that mess, whatever that is, but our motive, may it be that we are rooted in our surrender of the core of our inner beings to the grace and the sovereignty of Jesus.

Would you see it again?

Would you see how good He is?

And may our self-protection open up to that great rhythm of God that we see in Jesus.

Grace and sovereignty.

Grace and sovereignty.

Grace and sovereignty.

Let's pray together.

Father, forgive us for being our own saviors, for refusing grace as to take control and to think that we can be righteous enough today to earn or maintain a position with you.

Would you give us the amount of courage to be honest with ourselves?

That we might come to a place of freedom of bowing before you and knowing the fullness of the work of Jesus for our behalf.

And those of us that are bound in anxiety, fear, would we find freedom in the great sovereignty that you have over all things?

That even in the things that we dread the most, that you are with us, that even while we don't understand you are with us, even while we have to face what feels like an absence from you, that you're with us.

Help our hearts to find greater rest, deeper trust in the great rhythms of the Savior, grace and sovereignty.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.