God at the Centre: Seeing Yourself Clearly - Nov 17, 2024 (Myles Holmes)

Hello, and welcome to the Redemption Church Podcast.

We're a church in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada that exists to glorify God through the fulfillment of the Great Commission and the spirit of the Great Commandment.

Thanks for joining us today.

Nehemiah chapter 9.

Nehemiah 9 · chapter mention

We're going to read this together as we read God's Word.

Would you stand with me?

And we've got a significant chunk of scripture to get through here.

And so I trust you'll follow along, and God will speak to you through his written and infallible word.

Here is what he says, Nehemiah chapter 9.

Nehemiah 9 · chapter mention

Now on the 24th day of this month, the people of Israel were assembled with fasting and in sackcloth and with earth on their heads.

And the Israelites separated themselves from all foreigners and stood and confessed their sins and the iniquities of their fathers.

And they stood up in their place and read from the book of the law of the Lord their God for a quarter of the day, and for another quarter of it they made confession and worshiped the Lord their God.

On the stairs of the Levites stood Jeshua, Bonnie, Khadmiel, Sheboniah, Buni, Sherubiah, Boni, and Shannon.

And they cried with a loud voice to the Lord their God.

Then the Levites, Jeshua, Kadmiel, Bonnie, Hashaboniah, Sherubiah, Hodiah, Shebaniah, and Pethehiah, said, Stand up and bless the Lord your God from everlasting to everlasting.

Blessed be your glorious name, which is exalted above all blessing and praise.

You are the Lord, you alone.

You have made the heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their hosts, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them.

You preserve all of them, and the host of heaven worships you.

You are the Lord, the God who chose Abram, and brought him out of Ur of Chaldeans, and gave him the name of Abraham.

You found his heart faithful before you, and made him the covenant to give him his offspring, the land of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizite, the Jebusite, and the Gergeshite.

And you have kept your promise, for you are righteous.

And you saw the affliction of our fathers in Egypt, and heard their cry at the Red Sea, and performed signs and wonders against Pharaoh and all his servants, and all the people of his land, for you knew that they acted arrogantly against our fathers, and you made a name for yourself, as it is to this day.

And you divided the sea before them, so that they went through the midst of the sea on dry land, and you cast their pursuers into the depths as a stone into mighty waters.

By a pillar of clouds you led them in the day, and by a pillar of fire in night to light for them the way in which they should go.

You came down on Mount Sinai and spoke with them from heaven, and gave them right rules and true laws, good statutes and commandments, and you made known to them your holy Sabbath, and commanded them commandments and statutes and a law by Moses your servant.

You gave them bread from heaven for their hunger, and brought water for them out of the rock for their thirst.

And you told them to go in to possess the land that you had sworn to give them.

Verse 16 But they and our fathers acted presumptuously and stiffened their neck and did not obey your commandments.

They refused to obey and were not mindful of the wonders that you performed among them, but they stiffened their neck and appointed a leader to return to their slavery in Egypt.

But you are a God, ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and did not forsake them.

Even when they had made themselves a golden calf and said, This is your God who brought you out of Egypt and had committed great blasphemies, you and your great mercies did not forsake them in the wilderness.

The pillar of cloud to lead them in the way did not part from them by day, nor the pillar of fire by night to light for them the way by which they should go.

You gave your good spirit to instruct them, and did not withhold your manna from their mouth, and gave them water for their thirst.

Forty years you sustained them in the wilderness, and they lacked nothing.

Their clothes did not wear out, and their feet did not swell, and you gave them kingdoms and peoples, and allotted to them every corner.

So they took possession of the land of Sihon, king of Heshbon, and the land of Og, king of Bashan.

You multiplied their children as the stars of heaven, and you brought them into the land that you had told their fathers to enter and possess.

So the descendants went in and possessed the land, and you subdued before them the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, and gave them into their hand, with their kings and the peoples of the land, and they that they might do with them as they would.

And they captured fortified cities and a rich land, and took possessions of houses full of all good things, cisterns already hewn, vineyards, olive orchards, and fruit trees in abundance.

So they ate and were filled and became fat and delighted themselves in your great goodness.

Nevertheless, they were disobedient and rebelled against you, and cast your law behind their back, and killed your prophets, who went warned them in order to them to turn them back to you, and they committed great blasphemies.

Therefore you gave them into the hand of their enemies, who made them suffer.

And in the time of their suffering, they cried out to you, and you heard from heaven.

And according to your great mercies, you gave them saviors who saved them from the hand of their enemies.

But after they had rest, they did evil again before you, and you abandoned them to the hand of their enemies, so that they had dominion over them.

Yet when they turned and cried to you, you heard from heaven, and many times you delivered them according to your mercies.

You warned them in order to turn them back to your law.

They acted presumptuously and did not obey your commandments, but sinned against your rules, which if a person does them, he shall live by them.

And they turned a stubborn shoulder and stiffened their neck and would not obey.

Many years you bore with them, and warned them by your spirit through your prophets, yet they would not give ear.

Therefore you gave them into the hand of the peoples of the lands.

Nevertheless, in your great mercies, you did not make an end of them or forsake them, for you are a gracious and merciful God.

Now, therefore, our God, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who keeps covenant and steadfast love, let not all the hardship seem little to you that has come upon us, our kings, our princes, our priests, our prophets, our fathers, and all your people, since the time of the kings of Assyria until this day.

Yet you have been righteous in all that has come upon us.

For you have dealt faithfully, and we have acted wickedly.

Our kings, our princes, our priests, and our fathers have not kept your law or paid attention to your commandments and your warnings that you gave them.

Even in their own kingdom, and amid your great goodness that you gave them, and in the large rich land that you set before them, they did not serve you or turn from their wicked works.

Behold, we are slaves this day.

In the land that you gave to our fathers to enjoy its fruit and its good gifts, behold, we are slaves, and its rich yield goes to the kings whom you have set over us because of our sins.

They rule over our bodies and over our livestock as they please, and we are in great distress.

This is the word of the Lord.

You can take a seat.

Statistically, most of us in our lives will face some sort of physical problem at some point that doctors just cannot explain.

Maybe that's you this morning, maybe that's a friend you know, but for whatever reason, bouncing around from doctor to doctor, often there are these physical problems that you just have no answer for.

Friend of mine, many of you would know him, an exceptional athlete, lived with constant knee pain for nearly 30 years.

He'd been to doctor after doctor, and many suspected some form of arthritis, but the overall consensus was that they did not know what was causing this pain.

Recently I was with him, and he told me that he had visited a new doctor and they had taken x-rays again of his knees where most of the pain was happening, and they had found in the x-ray that for decades he had broken knees.

You could see it in the pictures, little fragments of bone at the end of his knee.

He was living with this pain for decades.

It's amazing to me that even with all of our medical advancements, the complexity of our bodies often leaves us in the dark.

Now, if that is true of our physical bodies, let me ask you this.

Do you fully understand what is happening inside your own heart?

Inside your own soul?

Have you, like me, ever been confused by the thoughts and emotions and longings that you have?

Why do we battle constant anxiety and stress and cravings for approval and success?

Why do we chase achievements and success and things that we believe will fulfill us, even we know, even though we know that in the end they just keep us emptier and emptier?

As we reflect upon the complexity of ourselves as human beings and our souls and our hearts, I want you to understand that the Bible meets us in this complexity.

In fact, it's the prophet Jeremiah who said this the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.

Who can understand it?

Jeremiah looks into his heart with you and I this morning and says, I do not know what is going on in there.

Paul admitted this, he said this, I do not understand what I do, for what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate I do.

Or mysteries to ourselves.

And yet, if we have a hope to understand ourselves, then you and I have to admit this morning that the person who can tell us about ourselves indeed is the Lord alone.

This is why when you and I assemble furniture, we consult the instructions because we're interested in what the creator has to say about how to put this thing together.

And what's happening this morning is we're coming to God seeking an understanding of our heart.

And what I want you to understand is that because God has created us, he can help us look inside of ourselves and understand who we really are.

C.S.

Lewis came to understand this, and in his book, Mere Christianity, he wrote this: I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen.

Not because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

In other words, what God does when you stand before him is he shines a brilliant light on your life, so that standing face to face with him, you can understand who you truly are.

I love what John says in 1 John chapter 3, verse 2 to 3.

1 John 3:2–3

He says, Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared, but we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, because we see shall see him as he is.

And what I want you to taste and experience this morning is just a glimpse of what we will taste in heaven for all of eternity when we stand before the Lord and his exposing light shines on us and shows us exactly who we are.

In EMI 9, the Israelites experience this revelation.

They encounter God's glory and they gain a deeper understanding of themselves.

And this is exactly what God wants us to do this morning: to have an encounter with Him which shines light on ourselves, showing us who we truly are.

In other words, if you want to take one thing from this message, okay, this is the one thing, the main thing.

Someone nudges you this afternoon and says, Hey, what was the message about?

Here it is, okay?

The only way to truly know ourselves is by seeing God for who He is.

The only way to truly know yourself is by seeing God for who He is.

In light of that, in Nehemiah 9, I first want you to see this that the glory of God reveals our faithlessness.

The glory of God reveals our faithlessness.

Now, Nehemiah 9 begins on the 24th day.

If you were with us last week, you'll remember that they were currently celebrating the Feast of Booths, and so they began that on the fur after the first day, and for 22 days they celebrated this feast.

Feast of Booths was a yearly celebration of God's people, in which they would, in a sense, take themselves out of the city to live in the wilderness, to set up shacks for themselves, to remind themselves that they had been delivered to exile and they were going home, but they were not there yet.

It was a time for celebration, and so after Nehemiah ate, as Ezra had read from the word of the law, the people were broken with sin, and yet you'll remember that Nehemiah said, Do not weep, but rejoice, for today is a day of rejoicing, and for twenty-two days then they rejoice.

But all the while, as they see God's glory, as it is manifested through the feast of booze and proclaimed as they read the scriptures, there is this building sense of something happening within them.

Something deeper is exposed.

And as they behold God's holiness, their unfaithfulness becomes glaringly evident.

So that what we find in verse one to three is that the people of God are now gathered together again, and the Israelites have separated themselves from the foreigners, and they're standing before the Lord, confessing their sins and confessing the waywardness of even their fathers.

We're told that there were fasting, they were wearing sackcloth, pouring out their heart physically and spiritually to the Lord, confessing their sins.

Verse 3 tells us that for three hours they simply read from the book of the law, but notice in verse 3 that for another quarter, that is about three hours, they made confession and worship to the Lord.

Reading God's word, just as it had done in Nehemiah 8, again led to this sense of both confession and worship.

And my question is this: why when we stand before the Lord, whether it is in our personal reading or right now, as you and I have God's word open before us and we're seeking to understand what God has said to us, why when we hear God's word does it evoke this sense of confession and worship in us?

Well, it's because of this.

It's exactly what we're talking about this morning, that it's because when we truly see God for who he is, inevitably we see ourselves for who we truly are.

And the Israelites had spent this condensed time seeing God in his holiness and his glory, and the outcome of that was as though they were looking in a mirror, they saw themselves for who they truly were, and in the light of God's pure holiness, they saw their great depravity.

This is what God's word does.

This is why Hebrews, Hebrews chapter 4, the writer of Hebrews says this, this will come up on the screen.

Hebrews 4 · chapter mention

It says, For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

Loved one, listen now to what God's word does whenever you allow yourself to be exposed to it.

And no creature, says the writer of Hebrews, is hidden from his sight.

But all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give an account.

In other words, when you and I with humility stand before the Lord, the word of God pierces our defenses and exposes the truth of who we are before him.

It uncovers everything.

And yet, what we find here in Nehemiah 9 is that it does not leave us in despair because what the word of God does is it exposes us, causing us to stand in front of the God who is steadfast in love for his people.

We stand in front of the God who is infinitely glorious.

This is what God's word does.

I love what John Piper says.

Such a fitting illustration he gives to us.

He says, the Bible is a window through which we see the glory of God.

And when we look through it, we are meant to behold God's glory and be changed by it.

The Bible's a window.

I wonder if in your house you have a window that you particularly love to look through.

Anyone have a window like that?

We have a window like that in our house, and this week has been perfect for me because I sit at that window and the sun rises and I get to see these brilliant displays, just as my time of personal worship is ending, the sun's coming up and the sky is orange, and it's casting this beautiful rays of sunshine over the farmer's field that's back there, and it's beautiful.

I love looking out this window.

But over our time at this house, there has been this real sense of expectation that's built around this window because we have seen so many phenomenal things out of it.

One time I was looking out there and I saw what I think.

I mean, some bird watcher for sure is gonna correct me on this, but I saw what I think was a peregrine falcon swoop down, catch a bird, and fly off into the forest.

And I was like, this is amazing what I just saw.

Other times we've seen deer coming through the yard.

One time we looked back there, there was 18 turkey.

All that to say there's a certain suspense built around that window where you sort of look out it and you expect to see something.

And a regular occurrence in our house is that people are at the window saying, Come here, you gotta come see what's happening out this window.

God's word is meant to be a window like that that is infinitely more glorious.

It is a window that we look through and it illuminates our hearts and it reveals to us both the beauty of who God is as well as the brokenness of who we are.

This is the dual response that happens in our hearts whenever we truly see God through his word.

We see his beautiness, we react in an understanding, a profound understanding of our brokenness.

Love one, do you remember Isaiah 6?

Do you remember?

Dennis, is that your iPad up here?

That is crazy.

That is something only a senators fan would do.

This is the dual response.

See the beauty of God, the brokenness of ourselves.

So what's what the Israelites see, and as they turn to God both in confession and worship.

And I want you to remember that when Isaiah sees God, he beholds God's glory.

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

And then what does he do, church family?

What does he do?

He cries out, Woe is me.

He doesn't say, Hey, listen, come, everyone, come, look how awesome this is.

This is awesome.

Because he doesn't have such time.

The holiness of God is so overwhelming to him that he is broken.

And he cries out, Woe is me, for I am lost.

I am a man of unclean lips.

You see, the realization, the sight of God's holiness, it leaves you broken.

Loved one, when was the last time you saw God in such an overwhelming and clear display of his glory that you could not help but cry out at your own faithlessness.

See if you and I don't have a constant and honestly at times even a debilitating sense of our own unfaithfulness, let me suggest that you have never, or at least not recently, seen the glory of God.

Many of us struggle to see God in this way because we honestly we neglect to read his word.

And when we do read his word, which at times is few and far between, we kind of read it ritualistically without this expectation that what we see there will be glorious.

And I want you to understand that when our view of God is minimal, our appetite for change will be small.

And so, loved one, can I ask you this question?

Do you regularly sit at the window of God's glory, which is his word, and look out expecting to see something life-changing?

This gets back to the heart of what we saw in Nehemiah 8, that if we want to be changed by God, we've got to come to God with a sense of expectancy that He can change our lives radically.

Listen, that doesn't mean that every time you come to Scripture, your life is going to be dramatically changed, but it means that you come with this expectancy where you say, Lord, show yourself to me.

And this understanding that if God shows himself to you, you will be on the floor weeping.

Loved one, when's the last time you wept?

And so we pray for the spirit to move according to his word.

And we ask, do we sit at the window?

How do you know you're sitting at the window?

Here's a quick test.

Let me ask you this right now, okay?

A test to understand if you are a Christian who regularly sits at the window of God's word to see his glory.

Here's a test.

Do you have a verse right now that you are feasting on?

If I asked you to stand up and share a verse that you are like you're just, it's a sponge you are squeezing out right now.

And every time you squeeze, you are seeing more of the glorious God that that verse points to.

Do you have a verse?

Now I'm not talking about like your, you know, Jeremiah 29, Proverbs 3 verse that you saw on a mug four years ago.

What I am talking, and those are great verses, by the way, but what I am talking about is this.

Do you have a verse from this week, from today even?

Let me show you how this worked for me this week.

Right now, in a few weeks, spoiler alert, we're gonna get into the Gospel of John.

I'm so excited for what the Lord's gonna do in us as we work through the Gospel of John.

And so in my personal times of worship, I have been reading John 1 to 7 every morning, just trying to get a sense of what's there and prepare myself in an act of worship for preaching that.

And in John chapter 5, I was struck by this that Jesus says, do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out.

John 5 · chapter mention

And I found myself over days standing in awe of the power of the voice of God, that one day I will be long and dead, and yet the power of God's voice is so strong that he will just speak and we will be brought back to life.

And I know that all of us have read that verse, and I've read it so many times and just and just kind of gone by it, but for whatever reason, the Lord, I just could not get my mind off of this voice that I will one day hear, that will bring me back to life.

And it kept infusing me with hope for what's happening even right now, that what the power of what God can do as you hear his voice through his word this morning.

And all the while I'm I'm meditating on this and squeezing out the sponge, and uh, then I'm listening to a sermon on Revelation 1, and and in Revelation 1, John in his vision, he sees a voice.

He sees a voice.

You remember that in Revelation 1?

John turns around and he he he actually hears someone first, but he turns around to see the voice that he heard, and it is one standing in the midst of the churches.

It's Jesus Christ Himself.

How do you see a voice?

Because the word is God.

And God has been squeezing out this sponge, showing me the glory of who he is.

And I have come here this morning in light of that, humbled, saying, This, God, I don't want any of my voice to be heard.

My voice is wimpy and does nothing for you.

I want the voice of Jesus Christ.

See, the word of God, it always humbles.

And that passage has been a window which I have looked out, and the radiant display of the sun has just kept getting brighter and brighter and brighter.

And I know that if I kept sitting at that window, the sun uh of the glory of God would only get brighter.

So, what's your verse?

What's your verse?

In fact, let's just do a test today.

This is gonna be incredibly uncomfortable, and some of you might leave the church because I've commissioned us to do this homework.

But after the service, when we're fellowshipping together, why don't you ask someone, hey, what's your window verse this week?

And listen, if you don't have one, there's no shame.

There's only nothing but grace and mercy from God's hand.

But next week you're gonna come back with one.

You're gonna sit at the window this week and gaze at the glory of God.

Now, if you do have a verse and he has spoken to you, we praise him.

But you need to recognize that our continual need is to keep sitting at the window and keep beholding his glory.

And this is exactly what the Israelites do in verse five.

They they say to Israel, Stand up and bless the Lord your God from everlasting to everlasting.

In other words, we saw God's glory in the feast of Booths, but it wasn't enough.

And so what we then read in the prayer is that the Levites then are going through all of the history of God's people with this emphasis: God has been good.

If you think God is good from what he revealed over the 22 days of the Feast of Booths, just wait till you study all of the story of redemption and you see that God has not only been good to Israel, but he has been good to you.

Which leads us to our second point.

If the glory of God reveals our faithlessness, the goodness of God reveals our forgetfulness.

So that from verses 5 to 31, the Levites are recounting the history of Israel with one aim to put God's goodness on display.

And what we will see along with the Israelites is that just as God has been good to his people throughout all of the ages, he has been good to you and I.

So they command, bless God.

And then they give every reason for us to do that.

What's happening here is imagine you sat down with a blank sheet of paper, and on the top you wrote the goodness of God, and then underneath that you just wrote every reason for why you have known that God is good.

Sadly, I think probably most of us would not have too much to write about.

And that's because we don't reflect deeply on God's acts with his creatures, but the Levites have, and so as they begin to praise God through this prayer for the goodness of God, the list goes on and on and on and on.

It's why I felt compelled to read the whole thing because God's acts with Israel just become sort of overwhelming.

He keeps on pursuing them even while they are wayward.

Levites do this, they recount the good works of God.

It's not the only time throughout church history that this happened.

In fact, Stephen Sharnock is a Puritan writer, and he did that once.

He has a large two-volume, uh, I want to call it like a tome, called The Existence and Attributes of God.

And two huge books, but if you open it up, like in today's font, you know, where the books are often wide print for us and double spaced, it would probably be like four books.

And when he gets to the goodness of God, he spends 145 pages, and again, small fonts, so we're probably talking like 300 pages here, expounding how God's goodness abounds and overflows to his people.

Here is what he says about the goodness of God.

He says, All the good, all the acts of God are nothing but the effluxes, which I had to go to the dictionary to understand what that meant.

And I went to the dictionary and it said effulgences, which I had to go to the dictionary again to understand what that meant.

And I came to understand that means outpouring.

All the acts of God are nothing but the outpourings of his goodness, distinguished by several names according to the objects it is exercised about.

All our streams from this fountain.

God could be none of this were he not first good.

When it confers happiness without merit, it is grace.

When it bestows happiness against merit, it is mercy.

When he bears provoking with provoking rebels, it is long suffering.

When he performs his promise, it is truth.

When he meets with a person to whom it is not obliged, it is grace.

When it commiserates a distressed person, it is pity.

When it supplies an indignant person, it is bounty.

When it secures an innocent person, it is righteousness.

When it pardons a penitent person, it is mercy, all summed up in one name of goodness.

And the purpose of Nehemiah 9 is to point Israel's eyes to all the streams of goodness that are flowing from the fountain that is God himself.

And so, over these next few minutes, what I want to do with you is I don't really have any application here.

I feel like kind of weird as a preacher.

I don't really have any illustration here.

Okay, like my homiletics professors, if they were here, they would be in the front row probably, then you know, doing shame at me.

But but what I want to do with you is for a next few moments, grab the sponge of God's goodness and just begin bringing it out.

And what I think you're gonna find is that supernaturally, God's goodness, every time you bring out the sponge, it keeps overflowing with displays of his goodness to us.

Notice in verse six, loved one, how God's goodness is revealed in his role as the creator says, You are the Lord, you alone.

You have made the heaven, the heavens of heavens with all their hosts, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them, and you preserve all of them, and the host of heaven that worships you.

Loved one, God created you.

He created this world and think for a moment about all the joys that his created worlds have brought to you.

Think about the the smile of a baby.

Think about the joy of listening to your favorite music.

Think about the deliciousness of digging into your favorite food and the way that the flavor melts into your mouth.

Think about the warmth of friendship.

God has created all of these wonderful gifts for you to enjoy.

He has fashioned these breathtaking wonders at the very bottom of the ocean that we may never even see about.

He upholds these brilliant displays of stars that are galaxies and galaxies away that you and I will never see with the most powerful of all telescopes.

He created it so that we would know that he is good.

And if those things aren't in our face enough, then every morning the sun rises and casts a brilliant, beautiful ray across our sight.

Loved one, has God not been good?

And yet, he not only creates, we're told in verse 6, you preserve them all.

He creates and he preserves.

Paul echoes this truth in Colossians 1.17, where he says of Jesus, he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

God doesn't simply just create and step away.

God, for every moment of every day, has been sustaining your life.

Well, he simultaneously upholds the universe by the word of his power.

Every star is kept in place because of his sustaining power.

Apart from him.

Your heart has never beated once, apart from his sovereign.

Okay.

Not a particle of dust has landed around you in an unplanned way, apart from God's sustaining hand.

And as you look back over your life, isn't there this sense where you must cry out that you are here because he has sustained you.

Every trial that you have gone through, the fact that you are here means God has brought you through.

Some of you life, some of you life on the edge of sickness and death, and God has sustained you.

Every good thing he has brought into your life, every day, each a gift sovereignly given and handed to you by the one who sustains all things.

Loved one, has God not been good?

Verse 7, we're told he chose Abram, and Abram was a nobody.

His father and his grandfather were idol worshippers, and if it had stopped there, Abram would have been an idol worshiper too, but that he was called out by God, chosen by God to be his beloved child, and so it is with you.

Listen, were you the one who decided to be born into the Christian family that preached you the gospel?

No.

Were you the one that brought you to that point in your life where you were just at your wit's end and that you heard the gospel and then you believe?

Were you the one who did that?

No.

It's God.

God was the one who did that.

God was the one who called you out.

And he did it in his goodness.

It keeps going on here.

Notice that he not only chose you but accepts you through faith.

So then in verse 8, we find that he found Abram faithful and made a covenant with us.

And that is what God has done with you and I.

By our faith, he has given us his righteousness, and he didn't need to do this.

You know, he didn't do it with the angels.

When the angels felt condemned before God, they were immediately cast into eternal judgment.

Why?

For you and I has he allowed by his kindness for us to breathe air in order that we might turn into in repentance.

It is because, loved one, of his goodness.

Because he has been good.

Streams of his goodness flowing unceasingly towards us and continuing in verse 9, where he sees our affliction.

God sees your affliction.

In fact, sent Jesus Christ so that in Jesus you and I would have a high priest who sympathizes with us in our weakness.

So that you haven't faced anything that Jesus did not intentionally plunge himself into, so that he could face as well and sympathize with you in.

Loved one, God, every time you have cried out to him in distress, he has heard you every time, and every time you have prayed, he has given you what you have asked for or something better, so that in 10,000 ways, most of which will never realize he has responded to us with his care and provision and guidance.

Loved one, has God not been good?

Verse 11, God performs these signs and wonders against Pharaoh, decisively delivering his people from oppression.

And scripture says that you and I were once under a slavery that was even worse than Pharaoh.

We were enslaved to the prince of the power of the air.

But God, he acted powerfully through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

He struck a decisive blow against Satan so that we are no longer in bondage.

You say, well, I'm, you know, Jesus never performs any miracles, and yet the resurrection is the miracle of miracles performed on your behalf so that you can be delivered from your sin.

Having freed them, the goodness of God continues to be poured out on his people, as in verse 12, he leads his people by a pillar of cloud.

Powerful symbol of God's guidance.

And in Romans 8, you and I are told this that God, those who are children of God, are led by the Spirit of God.

I wonder, brother and sister in Christ, if you have seen the bleeding of God's Spirit in your life.

The fact that you are even here today.

Is it not that the Spirit has brought someone in your path to give you a word when you needed it most?

I talked to so many of you, and I know that the Spirit is at work in your life because as you're reading his word, as you're hearing his word, as you're worshiping him, as you're meeting with other believers, he is giving you such relevant words that you need to hear.

The Spirit is leading us.

We can affirm the goodness of God has been at work.

He has been present in the details.

Listen, listen, you know what should be happening right now?

If you're staying with me, stay with me here.

If you're focused here on the goodness of God, there should be this overwhelming sense of like, why do I deserve this?

Do you have that right now?

You have that?

Well, if you don't, let's keep going.

Because in verse 13, his goodness is exposed in that he comes from heaven through Moses and speaks to that to them.

Do you see that here in verse 13?

He says, You came down on Mount Sinai and spoke with them from heaven and gave them your right rules and true laws and good statutes and commandments.

And when Jesus came, the the thing that he proclaimed is this the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Jesus came to speak to us.

And every time we open up God's word, it is living and active.

We are hearing the voice of Jesus.

And so understand this, loved one, that the goodness of God has been so pervasive in your life because Jesus was unwilling for you to sit in silence.

He had to speak.

And even this morning, it is an extension of his goodness that you are here, and we have God's word opened.

And we are in Nehemiah 9, the very voice of Jesus speaking through his words of scripture.

Verse 15, God provides bread and water from a rock, meeting his people's deepest physical needs.

And in verse 21, we're told that he sustained them in the wilderness so that they lacked nothing.

God has been our provider.

You have had all the meals that you have needed for sustenance.

And he has not just given us what we need, but as you have walked through the wilderness that is his life, has he not so often met you with everything that was necessary?

Or did you provide it yourself?

Every breath, every provision, every opportunity?

Did that come from your hand?

Can you stand up here today and truthfully say, I did it my way?

No, like the Lord has provided.

Verse 23, he multiplies the people of Israel.

He takes what is small and makes it great, growing his people from a few to a mighty nation.

And the existence even of this church is proof of God's goodness and multiplication.

He has multiplied his disciples.

He is doing what he said he would do with Abraham, making his children as numerous as the sand on the beach, as numerous as the stars in the sky.

And you are evidence that the gospel has been multiplied.

Faith and commitment you'll be continue to be used in that as we see lost people saved, saved people matured, mature people.

Multiplied all to the glory of God.

God has been good.

Verse 24 God subdues Israel's enemies.

Again, we're soaking in the goodness of God.

The battles were not won by the strength of Israel, but by the power of God.

And so it has been with us.

Have there not been times where you have had no strength for the day, where you have woken up faint-hearted, where you have been weak, and yet what has sustained you?

Nothing but the fact that God gives power to the faint and to him who has no might, he increases strength.

There are enemies that you could not stand against that he opposed.

And in verse 27, God practically delivers his people from their enemies, showing his faithfulness not just in words, but in action.

He doesn't leave them to fend for themselves.

He has stepped in and brought them deliverance.

So that you and I have had trials, of course we have, and yet we are here because God has delivered us.

And just as we sang this morning, there is a day where we will stand at heaven's gates, and having had been delivered for all of eternity, we will enter into God's presence.

God is good.

Amen.

Listen, if you're if you're sitting here right now and you're thinking about what's for lunch, and you're thinking about, you know, the thing that you gotta do at work this week, and your mind is going to all these different places, and you're looking at your watch and you're thinking, when is this thing gonna be over?

Listen, can that just be a rebuke to you that you are not seeing the goodness of God?

It's a rebuke.

If we were able to see God's goodness with the clarity that the Levites, as they prayed, saw God's goodness, then at every moment of every day they would have a sense of how important it is to always turn to Him.

If we saw God's goodness this clearly, we would always run to the fountain.

This is what God's goodness does, it fixes our eyes on him, to the one who is the source of all creation, of all sustaining, of all power.

Since Halloween, our families had a bucket of Halloween candy in the kitchen.

And I'm really glad my oldest daughter was saying she wanted to sit in the service, and I see that she is not here because I'm about to make a confession to you that I have held up from confessing to them.

Although I'm starting now in this moment to feel a little pierced by it, so maybe I'll tell them after.

But I have found myself time and time digging into that Halloween basket of candy.

Why?

Because it's just out in the open.

And I look into this wide basket filled with candy, and I see the golden glory of a wonderbar shining through all of the other garbage coffee crisps and arrow bars and smarties.

And I cannot help but to reach my hand into that basket and grab the wonderbar and unveil its glory before my eyes.

And you're saying this is a really spiritual, worshipful experience.

It is.

It is.

And I pop it in my mouth and delight.

Delight.

There are other days where we hide the basket, and I don't even think about it.

It's, you know, isn't it?

That's a pretty powerful habit if you're pursuing health, right?

Get the things out of sight, out of sight, out of mind.

And so it is with God's goodness.

So long as you revel in the goodness of God, a spiritual principle here is you cannot turn away.

What is the problem, and the problem is that we, you and I, have spiritual amnesia.

We have gospel amnesia.

You and I have this sinful malfunction where we cannot remember God's goodness.

And so we need constant reminders.

You ever had someone in your family that's had Alzheimer's?

My grandma did.

It's a horrible, it's a horrible thing.

And yet the only way that we could kind of get through that time with her was to you you almost have to just laugh at the absurdity of forgetting absolutely everything.

And I want you to understand, you have spiritual amnesia.

Please, please, please believe it.

We have just marched through the history of Israel.

And isn't the astounding thing?

All the good things that Israel that God had done for Israel, but what did Israel keep doing?

They kept forgetting, they kept turning away.

And the story of God's people was so helpfully summarized in verse 33 where he says, Yet you have been righteous in all that has come upon us, for you have dealt faithfully, and we have acted wickedly.

So that even, you know, verses 5 to 15, he's exposing the glory of God and creating us and calling Abraham.

But then look what verse 16 says.

But they they and our fathers acted presumptuously and stiffened their necks and did not obey your commandments.

And he goes on to say they kept forgetting who God was, even though you kept pursuing them by your spirit, the pillar of fire.

And then in verse 22, it goes on into the judges and the king uh the Israel under Joshua and you gave them kingdoms, but then again in verse 26, do you see it?

Nevertheless, they were disobedient and rebelled against you and cast your law behind their back and killed your prophets who had warned them.

And here are the Israelites again saying, God, you gave us a good land, but instead of delighting in you, we delighted in it, and so you exiled us.

And loved one, here is you and I again this morning saying, We do the exact same thing.

The heart of our waywardness is a failure to remember.

If you could remember that man shall not live on bread alone, but by every word of God, you would never miss reading the scripture.

If you could remember the love of God that has been shown to you in your sinfulness, you would never be impatient with your spouse.

If you could remember the mercy that has been extended to you, you would never be angry with your children.

If you could remember that Jesus said, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God, you would never lust.

We have a great need to remember.

And it's interesting, it's exactly what the Levites do in verse 32.

They say this, now therefore are God, and they expose who God is again, which leads us to our next point.

The gospel of God.

The gospel of God reveals our forgiveness.

The Levites say this important word in verse 32, now.

Now.

Why does the work of Jesus Christ accomplished 2,000 years ago, bear relevance for you and I today?

It's because by this we know that He loved us and that while we were still enemies of Him, Christ died for the ungodly.

Every time we open up the story of redemption in the pages of Scripture, we're reminded that God's gospel is for today.

He was the same yesterday, the same today, and the same forever.

Whenever we sing songs of gospel truth, as we're about to do, we are reminded that the truth of these songs bear relevance for the week to come.

But notice that the Levites then make a transition in verse 32.

They say, Now, the the now, therefore, our God.

And what the Levites want to do in their prayer is show us this: that it doesn't matter if God has been good to a group of people that you don't know.

What matters is this.

Have you stepped into the stream of God's goodness?

Have you believed by faith that the goodness of God pours out towards you?

The question for us is this Is He your God?

Doesn't matter if he is God.

Having seen the goodness of God, do you believe that this is directed towards you?

This is what the gospel does.

By faith, we step into the stream of God's goodness, believing the work of Jesus Christ and the person that he is as the Lord of all creation.

Is he your God?

In light of that, I want you to see lastly the cure to our forgetfulness.

It's in remembering the gospel.

What do the Levites do in verse 32?

They expose who God is: the great and the mighty and the awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love.

The cure to our Gospel Alzheimer's is to remember that our faithlessness, our forgetfulness will not stop God from pursuing us in covenantal love.

So then in verse 33, he says, You are righteous in all that has come upon us, for you have dealt faithfully and we have acted wickedly.

In other words, God's righteousness is not dependent on your faithfulness, it stands firm despite your forgetfulness.

This is the very nature of God's love.

He's faithful even when you and I are not.

And what's necessary for us is that we remember.

In fact, it's of utmost importance.

And Jesus Christ knew that you and I had a propensity to forget.

And so he instituted in the early church communion.

And when he broke the bread and poured out the wine, he said this.

Do this in remembrance of me.

Do this in remembrance of me.

Why did he emphasize remembrance?

Because Jesus knows how prone you and I are, even this week, even this morning, to forget his love, to forget his sacrifice, to forget the existence of his mercy.

And so listen, communion is not just a ritual that is prescribed to the church, something that is another religious ceremony to do.

Communion is life.

You will not make it to the end if you do not remember.

And so here's what Jesus has done so practically for you and I this morning.

He has given us a commandment to remember.

As we prepare to take communion today, we stand in awe.

We have in our hands the bread and the cup, and if you don't have one, the ushers are going to come to the front if you didn't get one on the way in, and you can stick your hand in the air, and they will get the bread and the cup into your hands.

But as you hold these elements in your hands, you are reminded that Jesus is merciful.

Yes, in your honesty, you've forgotten.

And of course, in your confession, you've been faithless.

And yet he's provided us a way to remember him.

To remember his love and his righteousness that covers us in all of our forgetfulness.

And so you'll find there a cup with two layers.

The first will get you to the bread, the second to the juice.

We take this as an opportunity for us to remember him.

And there are two reasons why you wouldn't take this this morning.

If you're not a believer here, and the blood of Christ has not been shed for you, you haven't stepped into the path of God's goodness through faith.

And we just ask that you let this pass.

The second reason why you might not take this is because you're living in an unrepentant sin.

Not that sin is not present in your life, but there is sin that God has convicted you of that you are unwilling to change.

And Paul says that to take communion while we are in that state is to eat and drink judgment upon ourselves.

Let's take this cup together and hear the words of Jesus through Paul.

He said, For I receive from the Lord what I also deliver to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night when he was betrayed, took bread.

And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way, he also took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is my new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

Let's remember together.

Let's pray together.

Father, we bow in your presence, and our hearts are overwhelmed with a sense of your mercy and grace and goodness.

God, thank you for communion.

We thank you that you preach the gospel to us.

And we praise you for your grace and your mercy.

God is in the name of your Son that we pray.

Amen.