The Exodus

Welcome to Gateway Churches Podcast.

Wherever you're tuning in from, we hope you're encouraged by today's message.

We are in a series called Jesus BC.

I uh kind of held the the idea of that until the end of the message last week, and that is obviously Jesus before Christ.

And that doesn't make very much sense, but as we're seeing, Jesus was actually there, involved.

He was present in the Old Testament much more than maybe we have previously thought or anticipated.

So we're going to continue on in that this week.

I do need to make one other comment to you.

Last week I talked about my fear that I've never heard of an old Josh.

So I thought maybe we had an expiration date.

Maybe all Josh's die young.

I'm not sure.

I've already made it past Jesus' age, and his name is a derivative of the name Joshua.

So I'm feeling kind of good about that, you know.

And then I got like a million messages from you all, all pointing out that you found an old Josh.

All right.

I'm not trying to call him out.

It's Josh McDowell, though.

I'll just say it, all right?

Um, but I won't actually say his age because this is what I was trying to avoid.

You did this to me.

You all emailed me about Josh McDowell.

I won't actually say his age.

He's 82 years old.

But if, anyways, you let this is the thing, is though, you actually proved my point.

Good for you.

You found one old Josh in the world.

Not one person sent me a name other than Josh McDowell.

So way to go.

You found one old Josh.

He beat the odds, and we're all really proud of him.

Way to go.

He will never see this, so it doesn't matter.

No, that's great.

So keep sending me old Josh's if you can find them, challenge accepted.

But uh so far, you guys are not doing so great.

You found one, all right?

So I believe that this person that we looked at in the Old Testament, who ate lunch with Abraham, who talked with him, who was described as a man, yet also described as God, I believe this was Jesus.

You could describe him as a son of man and yet still be the son of God.

This perfectly describes Jesus.

And today, the the instances that we're gonna see in the Bible, uh, he shows up in a different form, uh, a little bit of a different form than how he had ever shown up in the story of Abraham.

So, first, I just want to cover something that we talked about last week.

I'll do it really briefly, but we start in John chapter 1 in verse 18.

John 1 · chapter mention

It says, No one has ever seen God, but the unique one, that's Jesus, who is himself God, he's part of the Trinity, he is God himself, but he is God the Son, not God the Father, is near to the Father's heart, and he has revealed God to us.

So when the scripture says no one has ever seen God, what they're saying is no one has ever seen the full manifest glory of the ancient of days, the one who is God the Father.

No one has ever seen them, but in order to make God accessible to us, Jesus removes the glory that is placed on him by becoming a man, coming to the earth, being born through a woman, and living as a man.

And it made him incredibly approachable.

We'll see that in the story of the Exodus today that that in times where God's glory or Jesus' glory is showing through, men and women are not able to approach him or to see his face.

Otherwise, the glory would devour us and we wouldn't be able to live through it.

In John chapter 5, verse 37, this is Jesus speaking.

John 5:37

He says, And the Father who sent me has testified about me himself.

You have never heard his voice or seen him face to face, and you do not have his message in your hearts because you do not believe me, the one he sent to you.

This part is really important because he says, No one has ever heard his voice or seen him face to face.

Yet in the story of the Exodus, Moses on Mount Sinai, it says very specifically that he spoke to God face to face.

What this means is that as Jesus is saying, you've never seen God, the Father, face to face, it does not negate that we have seen Jesus face to face.

Moses did on Mount Sinai, they spoke face to face, whether he could actually visualize his face or not, maybe it was covered up with the light that shines from Jesus' face, but but he had a face-to-face encounter with him.

That means it could only be Jesus, because that would not have been possible with God the Father.

So Jesus is the one who spoke to Moses there uh on that day.

So Jesus is God, he's a member of the Trinity.

The best way to think about that is uh the Trinity, God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three individual persons, but they are one.

The best way to describe the way that they function is in the form of a divine dance.

If you've ever seen two dance partners that are very in tune and in sync with each other, they move as if they are one person because every stride and every step is in balance or cadence with each other.

So they move as if they are one, but they are two distinct people who have two distinct jobs or roles within that dance.

That's the best way to think about this Trinity, this trifecta of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, three individual persons, each having their own role in the lives of the earth and the people on the earth, but yet at the same time they are one.

Jesus or God is so powerful in all of his glory that the Bible describes to us over and over again that if you were to see him or be in his presence, you would be burned away because of the sin in our lives.

So what was needed for us to be able to make contact with God was a mediator.

That's what the Bible describes Jesus as, as the mediator over and over.

The passage we just read says that Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God.

If we want to see God, we see God through Jesus.

And in fact, the opposite is true.

If God looks at us, he looks at us through the lens of Jesus, because that is where we obtain our righteousness, is through Jesus.

So Jesus came in a non-glorified body as a man, laying down his divinity as he stepped into the earth.

And we talked about that in the humanity series.

And he did that so that mankind could approach him and know him without being devoured by his glory.

Since we'll be talking about the Exodus story, we'll see lots of examples where they have to hide, where there's thunder, lightning, clouds on the mountain, he has to hide his face from them.

This happens because he is in a glorified form.

Becoming a man, laying down his divinity, allowed him to be accessible in a way that he had never been before.

So the general idea is in the Old Testament that if he appears as a man, uh like he did to Abraham, then he is actually in the Holy Land.

He is in the Holy Land and he appears as a man.

General rule if he appears as some other object or an angel or something like that in a glorified form, then he is outside of the Holy Land.

And so when we see these experiences, as we will see on Mount Sinai, this is in a glorified form.

Still the same person that we were talking about last week, but now in a glorified form.

So before we get to the Exodus, I just want to throw in just one interesting thing.

I'm seeing Jesus now in every part of the Old Testament.

I'm I'm I'm beginning to read with eyes that show Jesus in every single facet or aspect.

And we talked a lot about how uh the Jewish belief is that God the Father has no form.

He is shapeless and formless.

Uh, he's this spiritual being, the ancient of all days, that has always existed.

And he and so the form, a physical form, we would not be able to see.

So whenever we see Jesus in a human form, he is the mediator.

He has taken on the form that we would recognize and relate to.

And as he does that, then we know that when we see him in the form of a human, that most likely this is Jesus that we're talking about.

That got me interested in the creation story where we see that Adam and Eve are walking in the garden with God.

And God in the Old Testament here is many different names throughout the Hebrew Old Testament.

But uh what we see there then is that they're walking in the garden with God.

This means they were walking with him, talking with him, communicating with him.

So I got to wondering, could this actually be Jesus that Adam and Eve were walking with in the garden?

And what did Jesus' role look like in creation itself?

How was the world created?

Well, when we look at Genesis, we know that it was created, as anybody will tell you, it was created with what?

The spoken word.

It was the word that God spoke everything into existence.

Then we look at John, the book of John, it starts with, right at the very beginning, it says, in the beginning.

Well, there's another passage in the Bible that starts with in the beginning, and that's in Genesis.

Genesis 1, when it describes creation, starts with in the beginning.

John is making a reference back to creation and saying in the beginning.

So he's describing creation, he's making this reference.

Everyone would recognize this as a reference to Genesis 1.

And let's see what he says about Jesus' role in creation.

This has been here right in front of us all along, yet we have failed to see it through the proper eyes that would show Jesus to us.

So John chapter 1, starting in verse 1, says, In the beginning, the word already existed.

John 1 · chapter mention

Word is capitalized here.

It's not talking about your Bible, all right?

It's talking about Jesus.

Jesus is the Lagos, the Word, the spoken word of God.

Jesus is the word made manifest to us.

So he's describing, John is describing, in the beginning, the word already existed.

The word was with God, and the word was God.

He existed in the beginning with God.

God created everything through him.

Through Jesus, all of creation was created.

And nothing was created except through him.

The word gave life to everything that was created, and his life brought light to everyone.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it.

I believe it was Jesus, who was the spoken word of God that created the earth.

I believe it was Jesus who was walking in the cool of the garden, uh, the cool of the evening in the garden with Adam and Eve.

It was Jesus who was there.

And this passage alone would be enough for me, but look at what Colossians chapter 1, verse 15 says.

Colossians 1:15

For through him, God created everything in the heavenly realms and on earth.

He made the things we can see and the things we can't see, such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world.

Everything was created through him and for him.

He existed before anything else, and he holds all of creation together.

Christ is the one who, through the power of God, creates the world and partners with mankind, and he even adds mankind to the deed for the earth.

And he says, I want to run this place with you.

And yet Adam and Eve then then give that deed over to Satan through the fall.

And the story of Jesus continuing to show up, working through his family, the Israelites, is so that he can take back what mankind lost in the fall.

So Jesus keeps showing up, partnering with mankind again.

He partners with Abraham and David and Noah and Jonah and all of these people to begin to bring his order back into the world.

And he's trying to undo what was done at the fall.

And all the appearances of Jesus that we look at in this series are the times where Jesus is breaking back into the world that he was expelled from and working to partner with mankind again to create an avenue for him to restore creation to what he originally intended.

And so now we come to the part where he made a covenant with Abraham.

He was multiplying the Israelites and they were growing into a mighty nation.

So Satan decides to put them under the control of a maniacal leader named Pharaoh who oppressed them.

And now Jesus needs to partner with mankind again to free the Israelites so he can get them to the land that he has promised them.

So it was Jesus who met with Moses and told him how to deal with Pharaoh.

It was Jesus who gave him the power to confront Pharaoh, and the miracles of Jesus caused the plagues to happen on the Egyptians that were holding them as slaves.

And it was Jesus who spoke to Moses from the burning bush.

Moses, I don't know if you know this, but he didn't speak to a burning bush.

It says really clearly that he spoke to God himself.

In fact, let me let me just show you something here in Exodus chapter 3, verse 2.

Exodus 3:2

It says, There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire from the middle of a bush.

Moses stared in amazement, though the bush was engulfed in flames, it didn't burn up.

Okay, so it says that the angel of the Lord appeared to him.

You might say, well, this is just an angel sent by the Lord.

And that would make sense.

It says the angel of the Lord, that would make sense.

The actual Hebrew word here is angel Yehovah.

So the angel Yehovah appeared there in that mo if a if any translation actually describes him as the angel Jehovah, whenever they translate it, they'll say the angel of the Lord.

That will make you sound like it's an angel that comes from the Lord.

The actual word here is two words put together, angel Jehovah.

Jehovah means God, and this is in angel form.

What it's describing here is a mixture between something that looks like an angel, but who is God.

In Hebrew, it's the mixing of two words, uh, the way that we we have the word foot and we have the word stool.

Put those together, it's footstool, it becomes its own meaning right there.

Angel Jehovah means in angelic form, God is showing up.

And we know that it's God because if we just go two verses down to verse four, it says, When the Lord saw Moses coming to take a closer look, God called to him from the middle of the bush and said, Moses, Moses, this is God in the midst of the burning bush.

He's not speaking to a burning bush, it is God in the midst of the burning bush.

And so this is always how Jesus is described in the Old Testament when he shows up in a glorified form.

It's the angel Jehovah.

But he speaks as God, he's worshipped as God, he's acknowledged as God.

And he even says here in this encounter with Moses, this is where he says, I am that I am.

He's describing himself as God.

And he says, say this to the people of Israel, I am the God of your ancestors, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

So if this is Jesus as angel Jehovah, he's clearly stating, I'm the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Just as his references are in the New Testament that we looked at last week, where he refers back to being the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and he says, even in the New Testament, I am that I am.

He's claiming to be God, but he is also inferring that he was there.

And so in Genesis, he's called a man because he shows up to Abraham in the form of a man.

But here in Exodus, he's referred to as the angel Jehovah because he's showing up in this glorified form.

Now, here's an instance where uh the people are gonna go up on the mount, on Mount Sinai, and they're gonna have an encounter with God.

And I love this encounter so much.

It's Exodus chapter 24, verses 9 through 11.

Exodus 24:9–11

It says, Then Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and the 70 elders of Israel climbed up the mountain.

Seventy-four people go up the mountain.

There they saw the God of Israel under his feet.

He had feet, so he was in human, in some form of human form, and there under his feet seemed to be a surface of brilliant blue lapis lazuli, that means sapphire stone, basically, as clear as the sky itself.

And though these nobles of Israel gazed upon God, he did not destroy them.

In fact, they ate a covenant meal, eating and drinking in his presence.

This is classic Jesus.

Classic Jesus.

Here they they climb up to the top of the mountain and they meet with God.

And what does he do?

He says, I'm gonna make a covenant with you.

Let me serve you a meal.

What does Jesus do all throughout the New Testament?

He eats with prostitutes, tax collectors.

The way that he institutes the new covenant that we as Gentiles have entered into is through a meal, the Last Supper, the celebration of the Passover meal.

That is the way that he institutes the new covenant and gives us a sign.

At every campus today, we received communion.

When we receive communion, we remember that it was through that meal that he established his covenant with us.

This is Jesus establishing a covenant.

And how does he do it?

In the same way that he's always done it before with a meal.

Even after his resurrection, he continued to do that because on the road to Amazus, he meets two people who he ends up walking with.

They end up sharing a meal, and the Bible says that it's in the breaking of the bread that they realize that he is Jesus.

I don't know if they had that same realization on that day that in the in the moment of eating the meal, they didn't know who Yeshua was.

They didn't know that he would be the Messiah who would save the world.

So that part of him was hidden from them, but there he sits and he eats a meal with them in classic Jesus style.

This is Jesus who shares this meal with them.

And so uh when he is in this uh glorified form, we can't see his face.

It's common that when Jesus is presenting himself in all of his glory, we wouldn't be able to see his face.

We remember that Moses so badly wanted him to turn his face towards him so he could see it.

That's when God put him like in the crevice of a rock and he said, I'm gonna pass by.

Sometimes when you read stories like that, it's like the weirdest stuff.

Like I like it when uh Jesus uh says to Abraham, Hey, why did Sarah laugh in the tent?

And uh I think like from the tent, maybe Sarah's like, I didn't laugh.

And he goes, Oh yes, she did.

She did laugh.

He's like arguing with Abraham.

This is one of those weird things where Moses is like, please can I see your face?

And he's like, I don't know, dude, just get in that rock right there.

I'll pass by and I'll kind of look back and you can get a little glimpse.

Is that will that work?

You know, it's like always these ways that we negotiate with God.

And this is Jesus revealing that he can't show his entire glory.

His face is glowing with brilliant white light in this instance.

And even when Moses comes off the mountain, after getting that little glimpse of Jesus, it said that his face was glowing, just shining and radiating light.

That is the power of Jesus' full glory, that the light would overwhelm us and overtake us.

And that is why my favorite prayer, if you know, if I've ever ended a service in this uh uh congregation, you know that the very last thing that I do is pray the ironic blessing over you.

And and and it's such an important prayer to me, but thinking about how you cannot see God's face, the brightness, the glory would consume you and kill you, you would not be able to handle it.

Now, let me read what the ironic blessing is to you and see if it stands out to you in a different way than normal.

May Adonai bless you and keep you.

May Adonai, God, Lord, make his face to shine on you and be gracious to you.

May Adonai the Lord turn his face toward you and grant you peace.

When we have been purified through the redemption that Christ offers us through the death and resurrection of the cross, we get the profound opportunity.

It must have been unbelievable for Moses to bargain with God over and over just to get a glimpse of his face.

And when we have been made righteous through his blood, Adonai himself turns his face toward us.

Is there any better blessing than that?

For all we talk about, uh hashtag blessed, you know, I got a new car this week or whatever.

How much better would it be if God Himself allowed you to see His face?

That is the ultimate blessing and the ultimate thing that Moses desired as he stood there on Mount Sinai.

This gives a uh a whole new meaning to God shining his face on you.

Now remember on Mount Sinai, that is also where it says that the Ten Commandments were created and that God himself, that the very hand of God, carved the Ten Commandments on the stone.

Well, that's always been great and interesting.

All right.

So cool.

They were up there.

God showed up, he wrote the Ten Commandments.

Uh, you know, Moses comes down and he's like, guys, you broke all of these already.

And he smashes them and he breaks them.

He's like, You're doing a terrible job.

I can't handle this.

He wants to quit.

And God, God writes it again.

He says, Make two tablets of stone.

And the very hand of God himself writes the Ten Commandments and He gives the law to the people.

All right.

This, knowing that it was Jesus.

Again, we're talking about a human attribute.

The hand of God carves this into the stone.

This is the angel Jehovah.

It is the angel of Jehovah that shows up and writes the Ten Commandments into the stone.

Jesus' hand.

Okay?

In John chapter 8, people come to Jesus and they go, We caught this woman in adultery.

John 8 · chapter mention

The author and originator of the law is now trying to decide what to do.

He takes his hand and he bends down and he writes something yet again.

I don't know what he wrote.

I don't know what it said.

But it absolutely changed the hearts of every person who was standing there, ready to absolutely punish this woman for the adultery that she was caught in.

The lawgiver himself takes his hand yet again and writes something, and it changes the course of this woman's life.

And his response is go and sin no more.

No one here condemns you, but go and sin no more.

His response is so gracious and loving, he says, Don't do this anymore.

So what he's really saying is, to you, the Pharisees, don't condemn, and to you, the woman caught in adultery, don't sin.

Don't condemn, don't sin.

That's what he says.

If we live in a world or a version of Christianity where we take the gospel of forgiveness way too far, remove all absolute moral standards, then we end with, I don't condemn you, go and sin all you want.

But if instead we take the moral standards without forgiveness, then we we get to a pharisaic level of saying, you've sinned, you're condemned.

That's what they were doing to the woman caught in adultery.

Yet forgiveness without moral law leads to humanism and crime, and moral law without forgiveness leads to religiosity and condemnation.

Jesus, don't condemn, don't sin.

Grace, forgiveness, and justice all wrapped up in one.

You ever wonder about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount when he's on the Mount of Beatitudes there?

And he's talking about, you've heard it said, don't commit adultery, but I say don't even lust.

This seems in stark contradiction to what he just said to the woman caught in adultery, except that he was telling her not to sin, to go and sin no more.

On the Mount of Beatitudes, he says, you've heard it said, don't murder, but I say, don't even let angerness build up in your heart.

And I always thought it was a little bit strange that it seemed as if he was refuting everything that God the Father laid out in the Old Testament.

If I wrote a book and I published that book, there is only one person who could go back and make editorial changes that are properly approved to the book that I have written, and that is the author himself.

Jesus, the author of the law in the first place, shows back up and says, You've heard it said this, but here's how I'm modifying it.

And it makes perfect sense because this is how we raise our children every single day.

When they're young, we just say, don't run in the street.

As they get older, we start to explain this is why.

My dad has an incredible sermon series about how the Ten Commandments are really about relationships and not about rules.

This is what Jesus was communicating on the Mount of Beatitudes.

And all of that is summed up that on the Mount Sinai, he gives the law.

On the Mount of Beatitudes, he refines the law.

And on the Mount of Golgotha, he dies and fulfills the law and gives us grace for everyone.

This is the completion of Jesus' work from the beginning of time to the end of time.

It was Jesus all along.

So this is the way that Jesus works with this duality here where he says, of course, don't sin, but there is forgiveness within this uh within this law.

So the moral law comes from Yeshua on Mount Sinai.

His finger wrote the Ten Commandments, and on the Mount of Beatitudes, he explains the heart and the meaning of the Torah.

And on Mount Calvary, he died to forgive us of our transgressions of that law.

On the Mount of Olives, he will return to punish those who refuse that forgiveness and that obedience.

This is the work that Jesus has been doing from the beginning of time.

Now, here's one more really important story that I want to point out in the story of the Exodus.

Uh, you might remember that Moses didn't actually get to make it to the Promised Land.

Moses died on Mount Nebo.

And whenever I took a trip to Jordan, uh, Pastor Nick Lesmeister and his wife Tabitha, that were that Nick prayed the prayer over the Jewish people last weekend, they were the ones leading that trip to Jordan.

And so we went to Mount Nebo and uh and and were there, there at Mount Nebo.

And I'm thinking through why we've we've seen the crazy terrain of the places that the Israelites traveled.

We've seen the difficulty of their their wandering through the wilderness.

And and and Moses did so much in the faith.

Why doesn't Moses then get to go into the promised land?

And the Bible says that it's because uh instead of speaking to the rock to get water to come out, he strikes the rock with the rod and water still comes out.

But because of that, after everything that he's done, every mistake that he's made, every single thing that he's done, he doesn't get to go into the promised land because of that.

Now, I did a series um called Promised Land, where I talked extensively about all the imagery in the story of the Exodus that points to Jesus.

This is talking about the actual instances of Jesus' appearance to the Israelites in the Exodus.

But uh here what we we're looking at then is that Moses was first, what he did by striking the rock was something that he had already done before.

The first time God told him, take the rod, strike the rock, and water will come forth.

Anytime in the story of the the the Exodus, you see the rod that's made of wood that represents the cross.

Anytime you see the rock, Jesus is described over and over in the Bible as a rock.

He is the rock.

So Jesus is the rock.

The cross struck Jesus and life-giving water came out of it.

This is a symbol for what he was later going to do, many years later, through his death and resurrection.

So the first time Moses was told, take the rod, strike the rock, and water will come forth.

The next time he was supposed to speak to the rock.

Moses, this wasn't as much of a punishment as I think we like to make it out to be.

The stance that Jesus was taking here is that Jesus was struck once and once only for all of our transgressions, and he will not be struck again.

Seems like a minor innocent mistake.

God worked this way last time, we'll just make him work this way again.

What God is saying here is Jesus was struck once for all of our transgressions, but he will not be struck again.

And if you're worried about Moses and him dying and not being able to make it into the promised land, uh, I want to tell you a little something about this.

Look at Deuteronomy chapter 34, starting in verse 5.

Deuteronomy 34 · chapter mention

It says, So Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, just as the Lord had said.

The Lord buried him in a valley near Beth Peor in Moab, but to this day no one knows the exact place.

To this day, no one knows the exact place.

So I'm with a group of people, great people from the church, and we get to Mount Nebo, and it's this beautiful place.

It stands very high, and you can see everything.

And and uh God gave Moses this supernatural vision to see all the land, all the land that they had been through, and all the land that the Israelites were going to go into from that very spot.

He's standing on this very high place.

And so we get there and we're standing there, and it's an incredible experience standing on Mount Nebo and knowing that this is the spot where Moses died.

And Nick is leading us, and uh I don't know, I don't know what I ever thought about this scripture.

Honestly, I think I had passed over it so quickly, so many times, that I'd never really thought about it.

And there Nick is explaining it to us, and he says, uh, imagine the care that God had for Moses that when Moses died, he comes down like a friend, or someone who loves this person so much.

He bends down and he scoops up his friend.

He picks him up and he carries him off to this place where he'll never be disturbed.

I started realizing maybe in the past, whenever I've thought about this story, I just assumed God miraculously picked up all the dirt particles and the rocks and moved them out of the way, and the body magically slides into the grave and dirt just piles back over him.

No, Jesus himself comes down to the earth.

He scoops up his friend, carries him off to a place where no one will ever find him.

He does the painstaking work of digging over and over and over again so that carefully he can place his friend down in that grave and lay his body to rest.

And so we're standing there on the top of this mountain, and everyone had kind of gone off to see different things, and I'm standing there at the place where, based on the description of this in the Bible, where they believe Jesus or God may have taken Moses to go and bury him.

And so I'm standing at the edge of this rail and I'm looking down on this beautiful valley, and something that happened to me that has never happened to me before in my life.

I I have seen things in my mind that I'm tempted to attribute to a vision from God that may be prophetic or a sign of warning or something like that, but I've never had anything like this before happen.

I'm standing at the edge of the rail.

And I'm looking down and through the trees, I see this Bedouin-looking man holding a dead man.

Gray hair, long beard, head tilted back, no life in him at all.

And I could see so clearly this man taking each step down this rocky hill and moving down towards the place where he was taking him.

And they came into my vision as they passed through one tree, walked through this open spot, went behind another tree, and I never saw anything again.

And it was as real as anything I've ever seen in my life.

I could see the person there.

It was in that moment that I realized we need to see Jesus in the Old Testament.

Maybe you've thought, well, there was God the Father, this angry, harsh, judgmental God who turns people to salt in the Old Testament, and then Jesus comes along, and it's like he's this weird other version of God all about grace and forgiveness.

It is Jesus all the way through.

The Jesus who wants to redeem everything in the world comes down to the earth with a sword of fire and flames to set everything right.

It is also Jesus who, even when we mess up and we don't get to the place where we want to be, he comes down himself and he scoops us up.

And with such meticulous care.

He says, There is no condemnation with me.

Now go and sin no more.

This is the grace of Jesus.

It is consistent from the beginning to the end.

His love for you is never exhausted.

It never runs out.

And it never ends.

What I felt when I was praying for today is that some people will walk here and in here and say, I've been beating myself up over and over for the things that I've done.

In just a moment, we're gonna pray.

And if that's you, or maybe you just need prayer for a different area of your life, you need help in an area of finding a job or finances or health or any of those things, it says where two or three are gathered together, God is in their midst.

But specifically, there will be people here tonight who cannot stop beating themselves up over what they've done.

Through the power of prayer, I believe what you'll hear tonight is I don't condemn you.

Now go and send no more.

This is the Jesus that has existed throughout all of creation and the one that wants to meet you here tonight.

Would you bow your heads and close your eyes with me?

In just a moment, we're gonna have a time of prayer at the altar at every campus.

And whatever your need is, don't miss the opportunity to pray with someone today.

Lord, when I was praying before the service, I just felt like you asked me to pray for gratitude.

Lord, I was just back there earlier.

I was thanking you for countless things over and over again.

Lord, we have so much to be grateful for.

And chief among all of those things is that you are so gracious to us.

So, Lord, I pray that your grace, like a wind rushing over this room, would overtake us.

Lord, there's been people that are here tonight that are afraid to go up on that mountain and meet with you face to face.

We know it's sin that holds us back, but God, you sent Jesus to be the ultimate mediator.

And so now, no matter what we've done, we can come boldly to you.

We will hear your precious words say, There is therefore now no condemnation.

We are so grateful for the grace that you have extended to us over and over and over again.

And Lord, I pray that every person who needs prayer, that God, the work of the enemy would not stop them from having an encounter with you today.

And Lord, may we recognize that it is you in our presence and in our midst today.

So, Lord, give us strength and wisdom and power, and we pray all these things in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Thanks for joining us today.

If you'd like to connect with us, text Connect to 71010 or visit gatewaypeople.com.

We hope you have a great week.