Exodus: Remembering Who We Are | Guest Speaker: Bryan Robinson

My name is Brian Robinson.

I'm one of the elders here at Christ the Redeemer.

And first of all, I'm just grateful you're here.

Thankful for Jessica and Kevin coming.

I'm just reminded often in this little church that we've been here for two years.

Just so thankful how good God has been to us through bringing us people like Sam, like Jessica.

Just so easy and wonderful to worship with them.

So if you were here a few months ago, Brad Respus, one of the other elders, mentioned that the reason why we have elders teaching is we believe the Bible says that elders, one of the rules is for elders to teach.

So that's why I'm up here, and that's the only reason.

There's a lot of other fruit that comes with elders teaching, such as some rest for us, which I think is great.

But the main reason I'm here is because Scripture says for elders to teach.

So if you'll bow your heads, I'll pray and then we'll start.

Heavenly Father, I'm just grateful for this time.

Um grateful for what you're doing in Marietta.

Um I pray for First Pres.

Um that church is going through a hard time, and I pray that you would be with them and that your name would be glorified in all the events that are happening there.

I pray for us this morning.

I pray that your name would be glorified and uh that you would give us grace this morning and that you would show us Jesus.

In his name I pray.

Amen.

Um so first I want to give a little background.

I'm gonna be talking about Exodus 5 today, and uh a little background that Russ has been preaching through Exodus, um, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about um God's promise with Abraham, um with Moses after Abraham too.

So God had established a covenant with Israel 700 years prior with Abraham.

He said, I will be your God and you will be my people.

And he told Abraham that for a time you're even gonna be slaves in a nation, and eventually I'll deliver you.

And so that's kind of where we pick up in this story is the Israelites are a slave nation under Pharaoh.

Pharaoh is the leader of Egypt, and the Israelites live in Egypt, and they are slaves.

And Moses is the leader of the Israelites, Moses and Aaron.

And so God tells Moses, You I want you to go to Pharaoh and tell him to let you people go.

And Pharaoh says, No, I'm not doing that.

I'm dependent upon you for our economy.

Um And then he says, Actually, I think you guys are lazy, and now I want you guys to make they were making bricks, that was one of their requirements as slaves.

And he said, Now I want you to make bricks, but we're no longer providing you with the straw to make the bricks with.

And you have to make the same number of bricks.

So you can imagine the people of Israel were not really happy with Moses because he had made their lives much more difficult by negotiating with Pharaoh.

And that's kind of where we pick up in these verses.

Um the Israelites were very frustrated with Moses.

And the foreman of the Israelite workers said this, and this is Exodus 5, 21 through 23.

I'm going to read it.

And they said to them, The Lord look on you and judge, because you have made us stink in the sight of Pharaoh and his servants, and have put a sword in their hand to kill us.

Then Moses turned to the Lord and said, O Lord, why have you done this evil to this people?

Why did you ever send me?

For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has done evil to this people, and you have not delivered your people at all.

And that's the word of the Lord.

So my talk today, Moses is very much having a why me moment.

And I think all of us have these moments in life where we're like, God, why did you do this to me?

And it's basically anger at God.

Um so if I had to title this talk, it would be Remembering Who We Are.

Um and I was thinking about in my life things that I have a hard time remembering, and one of them is my age.

I have a hard time remembering my age.

I always see myself as much younger than I actually am.

And this reveals a great deal of pride to me.

So some of this is a little embarrassing, but please laugh at me because it is funny to me.

So the first experience I had with this is when you young people don't know this, but when you graduate from college, like for the next 10 years, you will always feel like you just graduated from college.

And this hit me very hard when I went to Georgia Tech and I was in a fraternity there, and we had a chef that I was good friends with, a cook.

His name is Gene.

And uh someone called me up from the fraternity and said, We're having a big dinner to honor Gene.

We want some of the old guys.

I was like, who's the we want some of the old guys to come?

And uh so myself and ten other guys went, and we walked into the fraternity house, and I walked in and I was like, they must be having like some sort of high school event here.

What's going on?

All the high school guys, and my buddy tapped me on the shoulder and said, These are the guys in college, Brian.

And I came to a very stern realization that I no longer was this age.

Um, so I I came to grips with that, and then recently my wife and I went to a shower, a wedding shower, which I'm not totally in favor of.

Baby shower, but but a wedding shower in which the males were invited to.

So Mandy and I went, there's a bunch of young people there, like 20s, I'm considering young.

Um so we're talking to these young couples.

They're some of them are engaged, some of them are married, they have young kids, and I'm like, this is fun.

We're kind of hanging out, fitting in, feeling good.

And then uh I think someone asked Mandy, so how long have you and Brian been married?

And kind of the room, I felt like the room got really quiet.

And Mandy said, 17 years.

And then the record player kind of scratched.

And how many kids do you have?

We have four, our oldest is 13, like whoa, you know, everyone's kind of blown away, and they kind of moved away from us.

I felt like after that.

Um but then most recently, uh, I'm a dentist and I've been practicing about 13 years, and uh people used to come up to me when I would walk in the room, they're expecting like a 55-year-old man.

So I would come in and they would look at me, and some of them would hide their emotions pretty well, like, oh my gosh.

And then some of them would just say, like, are you the brief person?

Are you really do I trust you, someone that looks like you, to work on my teeth?

And I remember complaining about that to an older dentist, kind of my mentor, who was about 55 at the time, and uh he said, One day you're gonna wish that they did that, because they used to do that to me.

And I was like, They used to do that to you?

Like, you, no way.

And so, fast forward to about a week ago, I was work I was checking this little girl, she's about seven years old, and I was looking in her mouth, and she said, What are those funny glasses that you're wearing?

And I said, Well, these have magnification, so I can see your teeth really closely.

And she said, I said, Would you like to look at them?

And she said, sure.

So she put them on, and I I was showing her her hand, and she was like, Whoa, you know, wow, look at that.

And uh she said, No, no, no, I want to look in your mouth, I want to look in your mouth.

And I was like, good for you, no one has ever asked me that.

Like, check me out.

So I'm like, bring it on, what you got?

And so I open I opened my mouth and she's looking and she goes, What are those cracks on your tongue?

And I was like, I don't, I don't really know.

What do you why do you think I have cracks on on my tongue?

And she said, it must be because it's so old.

And I was like, maybe it is.

So now I'm a little self-conscious about my shriveled up old 40-year-old tongue.

Um, but I'm coming to grips with the fact that I'm 40.

Um, so back to Moses.

Um, remembering who we are, and I have three points to this to this talk.

The first point is discouragement is real and understandable.

So back to the verses.

Let's go back and look at verse 22.

Moses, it says, Moses turned to the Lord and said, so it's clear that Moses is not just walking away from the Lord, he's turning to the Lord and looking, uh, looking to him for an answer.

Um the commentary, one of the commentaries I read said Moses' condition would be described as dismayed and discouraged.

As I said before, he's asking, why me, God?

Why are you having me go through this?

Dismay literally means concern or distress caused by something unexpected.

And my wife, Mandy, likes to say, expectations kill relationships.

So Moses was expecting something entirely different than seeing his friends and family go through these trials and be slaves.

And he was admitting that to God, and he was going to God with his concern.

Um I think that that honors God.

One of the quotes that I read to prepare for this was a man named G.

Campbell Morgan, and he said, Happy is the man who, when he cannot understand the divine movement, and indeed doubts it, has yet enough faith in God Himself to tell him all about it.

So Moses was turning to God, the one he represented, and questioning God.

He freely poured out his heart to God, and I think the reason why he was so shocked at what was happening is because these were his family, these were his people that were suffering in the midst of all this.

And I think we shouldn't belittle that.

I think it's easy to look back from our perspective and see the story of Moses and say, yeah, but but God promised you, remember that.

Like, I think it's important for us to not have this us the mentality towards Moses, because I do this all the time, and I'm sure you do too.

Um, but having said that, Moses' problem is he's forgetting what the Lord had told him.

And that brings me to my second point, which is discouragement in the face of difficulty often comes from forgetting what God has already said in his word.

I'll read that another time.

So discouragement in the face of difficulty often comes from forgetting what God has already said in his word.

And if we go back to what Russ taught a few weeks ago, Exodus chapter 3, I'm just going to read some verses that God has promised to Moses.

Exodus 3 · chapter mention

In Exodus 3.12, God says, I will be with you.

In Exodus 3.17, he says, I will bring you up out of the affliction of the land of Egypt.

In Exodus 3.19, he says, The king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand.

And then in Exodus 3.20, God says, I will strike Egypt with wonders, then he'll let you go, which really hasn't happened yet.

And one of my favorites, Exodus 4.11, Moses is complaining about, I don't want to be the spokesperson.

I'm not that guy.

I stutter, I'm not good, my mouth doesn't work.

And these words just jumped off the page to me.

God says to Moses in Exodus 4.11, who has made man's mouth?

Which I think is powerful when the creation, us, are telling God, wait, you don't understand, I'm not good.

And God says, Who made you?

Um and the point of all this, and I think it's really reassuring, is that God is sovereign.

He knows all of these things are happening before they happen.

And I think that brings us instead of a why me, why is this happening to me?

It brings us to maybe the question of what is God teaching me in this trial.

Um, Scotty Smith is a pastor in Nashville and one of my favorite speakers.

He said this Dan Alander once said to me, Scotty, as long as your cry for relief is louder than your cry for a changed heart, you will remain a prisoner to your pain and a hostage to self-pity.

And that hit me at a time in my life where I had a lot of trials going on in my life, and I felt like my cry was for relief, like, remove these trials from my life so I can go on about doing what I want to do, instead of what is God teaching me in this trial?

Scotty also said, the very events that cause us the most pain in life can become the means by which we're equipped to love God and others with a depth we would have otherwise never known.

However, an unwillingness or failure to take this healing path can keep us strangers to God's affections and isolated in the world of relationships.

So remembering that God's purposes are being worked out in our lives, I think gives us courage when evil comes, and it will come.

There will be trials.

So where does that remembering lead us to?

And that's point number three for me.

Um we are secure in Christ, it brings us peace.

Supremely the gospel itself, what God has done in Christ for our sake, has to be brought daily in front of us because we forget it.

And Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, 1 and 2, Paul says, Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preach to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preach to you, unless you believe in vain.

So why do we preach this every week?

I think it's because we forget it every week.

I love it that Russ says every week we are more broken than we know, but we are far more loved than we can ever dare to dream.

And I forget that every week, every hour.

Um Martin Luther said, I preach the gospel every week because I forget it every week.

Um and so I chose these verses about remembering because in 2011 um my wife and I and Brad and Megan respus were feeling we're learning some new things about um we were all Christians, but we were learning that we didn't have to earn God's love, that that Christ was our identity, that we no longer had to work for his approval or the approval of other people.

It was finished, it had been done.

But I realized I would go back to my own, to my old ways of self-salvation projects and um all of those things, and I needed to hear this every week.

And I think that's why God had us help start this church.

Um, at least Fitzpatrick, author of the book, because he loves me, calls this spiritual amnesia.

And I think I still suffer from it.

I think it's easy for us to forget.

And that's why Tim Keller says the gospels are the A to Z of the Christian life, not the ABCs of the Christian life.

Um we go back to the beginning.

Um another memory I have of this church in the beginning was we had a new membership dinner or dessert at the respite's house.

And we were going around the room and we were talking about how this church had impacted our lives, or how we had found this church, or how what Jesus had done here.

And there were a lot of great stories.

I remember Mark Hermes in particular talking about a funny story, of course, as he does.

Uh, and but Charles Joseph is a guy who was with us in the beginning.

He and his family are in Denver for a year on a on a project, but he'll be back.

And he's someone I really respect, and I remember he stood up and Charles said, Do you realize what a rarity it is to hear Jesus preached week in and week out?

And I think that's that was powerful for me to hear someone that I respected that much say that.

So, how does this meet us, this remembering, and how does this meet us in our daily grind in Marietta, Georgia in 2015?

Um I think I would like to ask, where is it that you'll face this challenge of not remembering this week?

Do you have constant friction with a coworker, with a spouse?

Is your best friend moving away?

And that's hard for you?

You found out a loved one is dying?

Um, or just a relationship, your expectations of a relationship not being met.

Um God hears and he cares.

And I think he wants us to voice our emotions to him.

When our focus is on, this is so hard for me because I'm an action guy, but I do believe when our focus is on remembering and not doing, doing will eventually become a fruit of remembering who we are in Christ.

Moses had to remember God's covenant and his promise, and we have to remember that God sent his son for us, and we are his beloved.

I had a friend send me a text this week because he knew I was going to be talking, and this is not my most natural environment.

Um, but he sent me a text and he said, You are his beloved.

And that, I mean, just rest in that.

When we hear that, I'm astonished by that.

Um and I think the good news or the gospel is when we are in Christ, he loves you sitting in this chair, this version of you that no one else knows, not a future version of you.

Um I'm gonna conclude by reading Paul's powerful promise to us in Romans 8.

Paul says, uh, who shall separate us from the love of Christ shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?

For I am sure that neither life nor death, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Let's pray.

Lord, I'm so thankful for these words.

I I pray this week that you would remind us that we are your beloved.

And when we are quick to want to do and act in our own efforts and our own strengths, I pray that you would gently remind us I've already done it for you.

Um live in me, relax.

You are my adopted son and my adopted daughter.

And I just pray that we would remember that this week.

Thank you for what you're doing here, and um just grateful for your son.

In Christ's name I pray.

Amen.