Desire For Your Presence

Man, it's good to good to be with my family, back with my church family this week, and um excited to see all of you guys.

Uh I want you to go ahead and open up to Exodus 33.

If you've got uh your copy of God's word, as we kind of bring this series on prayer to a conclusion this week.

Uh we're gonna be in a few different passages and look at a few different um few different leaders in Scripture that model not just prayer, but they model a deep desire for more of God.

For more of God.

And I want to I want to clarify that there is a difference between desiring the work of the ministry and desiring Jesus.

And so we get caught up in our lives and pursuing what is best for ourselves and our family, and sometimes we lose sight of what is central or who is central in our life.

And so we find our desires being pulled away.

We live in a in a world that is broken, a culture that is secular more and more each day.

Um but we also live in a world where I believe history is being played out right in front of us.

And so I I would I typically tell you, do not look at the news.

I say, don't get caught up in the news, but I want you, I want to give you permission to look at the news.

And I want to encourage you to look at what's happening in other places in the world with the scripture as your reference point, with Jesus as your reference point.

And I believe that we might be living in a significant time in history.

I went to bed Friday night and woke up to headlines of what's happening in Israel, and I just, my spirit, my spirit was quickened.

Uh I hurt.

You know, the scripture teaches us, Psalm 122, to pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

I have friends that are over there right now traveling and touring.

And so to be, you know, we need to pray for those people for our families and our friends that they can get back safely to their homes.

And we need to pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

What does that mean?

We need to pray for their eyes to be opened to what is happening.

Uh, you know, I've shared this before.

My the two trips that I've been able to take to Israel, it's it's a bit discouraging to be in the middle of the land that is so significant to God's people and to see how they are so blinded to spiritual truth and reality.

And so we need to pray for them, their eyes to be opened and for them to turn to Jesus and to find their peace in Jesus.

That's what it means to pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

And so I want you to open up Exodus 33 as we conclude this series, and I want to look at a few different passages and a few different people that model prayer, but not just prayer, this continual desire to come back to our reference point being Jesus.

It's all about Jesus.

Nothing but Jesus.

Everything Jesus.

Exodus 33, 11 through 16.

This is this is Moses and his disciple Joshua.

Inside the tent of meeting, the Lord would speak to Moses face to face as one speaks to a friend.

Let me just stop right there.

What a beautiful picture of how we can approach God.

And Moses comes to God, and God comes to Moses, and they engage one another as one speaks to a friend after Moses would return to the camp.

But look at this part.

But the young man who assisted him, Joshua, son of Nun, would remain behind in the tent of meeting.

Now I want you to, I just want you to picture this.

Moses, the great leader that God calls out of the wilderness to go back to Egypt to lead his people out of slavery.

Moses is so close to God, being able to talk to God as a friend talks to another friend.

But what you see right here, Moses has completed his duties and he returns to the camp.

But you see Joshua stay back.

What you see there is Joshua has been introduced into this relationship with a God that is so overwhelming, so fulfilling, so satisfying that he wants more and more of the presence of God.

Moses goes back to the tent of meeting, but Joshua, the son of Nun, would remain behind in the tent.

Why?

Because he wants more of God.

He wants more of the presence.

He wants more to realize the promises that God has given his people.

Verse 12.

One day Moses said to the Lord, You've been telling me, take these people up to the promised land, but you haven't told me whom you will send with me.

You have told me I know your name and I look favorably on you.

If it is so, if it is true that you look favorably on me, let me know your ways, so I may understand you more fully and continue to enjoy your favor.

And remember that this nation is your very own people.

The Lord replied, I will personally go with you, Moses, and I will give you rest.

Everything will be fine for you.

Now, you know, we we typically teach out of the New Living Translation on Sundays.

My personal translation that I study from is the English Standard Version, the ESV.

But I love reading different translations to get a full picture of what God is saying and how he is interacting.

And this is this New Living Translation, it's it's I just love how personal it is with between Moses and God.

He says, I will personally go with you, Moses.

I will give you rest.

Everything will be fine for you.

Then Moses said, if you don't personally go with us, don't make us leave this place.

What he's saying is we we don't want anything that you've promised us without you being a part of it.

Verse 16, how will anyone know that you look favorably on me, on me and on your people if you don't go with us?

For your presence among us sets your people and me apart from all other people on the earth.

You see that?

It's your presence, God, that sets us apart, that marks us, that identifies us.

We have to have you, we've got to have you personally, not just lead us to be with us.

And so Moses' desire led him to pray and approach God in such a personal way.

And so what you see here is a model for prayer.

You see a model for approaching God.

You see this passion, this personal engagement between Moses and his father, and Moses leading to Joshua to have the same passion and desire.

Now, King David is another example of desire and prayer.

David, as he became king, he built his whole reign on restoring the presence of God to its proper priority in the kingdom.

Psalm 27, 4.

Psalm 27, 4, David is in prayer.

He's in prayer with the Lord.

He said, The one thing I ask of the Lord, the thing that I seek most is to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.

Delighting in the Lord's perfections and meditating in his temple.

You see that?

David is a, at this point, he has moved from being just a shepherd boy that was encountering and praying with the Lord as he did his duties and shepherded the sheep.

He is pulled out of the pasture and sent to feed his brothers on the front lines of a war.

And he goes and he ends up fighting Goliath the giant.

And you see the power of God's presence in him and on him at that point, all the way through his life, all the way through the difficult situations that he encountered, the adversity that he faced, he always came back to the fact that he knew that he needed the Lord.

He needed the Lord.

His pursuit was more than the kingdom.

His pursuit was the personal presence of God.

Do you see the difference?

One thing I ask, Lord, is the thing I seek most is to live in the house all the days of my life, delighting in the Lord's perfections and meditating in his temple.

Now, Psalm 63, this David, continuing with David, I love Psalm 63, verses 1 through 5.

Psalms 63:1–5

He says, Oh God, you are my God.

I earnestly search for you.

My soul thirsts for you.

My whole body longs for you in this parched and weary land where there is no water.

Do you feel parched occasionally?

I mean, we're we're in a, I feel like we're in a dry and weary land.

And as God's people, without the presence of God, we're going to we're we're going to wilt in the desert.

And we need God to lead us into his presence, knowing that he will fulfill us.

He says, verse 2, I've seen you in your sanctuary and gazed upon your power and glory.

Your unfailing love is better than life itself.

How I praise you.

I will praise you as long as I live, lifting up my hands to you in prayer.

You satisfy me more than the riches feast.

I will praise you with songs of joy.

Do you sense the passion that David has for the presence of God?

I mean, we could we could just camp out in the Psalms and look at the model for prayer and how David approached his heavenly father.

And these are just two examples out of the Old Testament.

But I want to give you a couple of handlebars to hold on to in regard to prayer.

Prayer fuels our desire for the Lord.

Prayer fuels our desire for the Lord.

And this is a quote.

I do not know the source of it, but here's what this quote I love on prayer.

It says, prayer is the vehicle through which we express our longing for the Lord.

The more we pray, the more our desire for Him grows.

And if you go back to church history, early church history, even up to the Reformation, you see men and women who were pursuing not just the ministry that they're called to, but coming back and pursuing the presence of the Lord and prayer.

Men like Charles and John Wesley, who were, who were, it was said of them that they would rise at 4 a.m.

every morning to spend four hours in prayer.

Can you imagine?

Martin Luther is quoted, he says, I have so much to do that I shall have to spend the first three hours of the day in prayer.

And when you hear stories of these men and women, it's not only convicting, it's overwhelming at how we sometimes fall short in our pursuit of the Lord.

Jeremiah 29.

Jeremiah is another prophet character that is intriguing to me because by the standards that we measure success, he was a failure.

He's known as the weeping prophet.

Imagine spending your whole life preaching the word and putting your trust in the promises of God, but not seeing any of the fruit in your own life.

Nobody responds.

You preach your whole life and you don't have one person come to Christ.

That's kind of what Jeremiah experienced.

Ezekiel experienced it as well.

Look at this, Jeremiah 29, 10 through 14.

This is what the Lord says.

So Jeremiah was a prophet during the exile of the Jews to Babylon.

They were conquered and they were taken and exiled for 70 years in Babylon.

Jeremiah is called to speak to God's people during that period.

He says, You will be in Babylon for 70 years, but then I will come and do for you all the good things that I have promised.

And I will bring you home again.

And this verse, these next two verses, I call them coffee cup verses, because we like to hang them on the wall, but we don't necessarily understand the context.

These are verses where people are suffering.

The people of God are suffering greatly.

And God comes to bring them hope.

And he says, For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord.

They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.

In those days when you pray, listen, listen to what he says.

When you pray, I will listen.

I will listen.

If you look for me, and then he gives us a word, wholeheartedly, wholeheartedly, where your whole heart pursues me.

You will find me.

I will be found by you, says the Lord.

I will end your captivity and restore your fortunes.

I will gather you out of the nations where I sent you and bring you home again to your own land.

That's a verse that is timely for today in light of what's happening in Israel right now.

And then finally, I want you to look at James 4.8.

James 4.8.

Very direct.

I love James and how simple this verse is.

Just looking at the first part.

It says, come close to God and God will come close to you.

Come close to God and God will come close to you.

Putting our trust in the person, in the presence of God, as we pray, our desire and our focus on the Lord grows.

Prayer fuels our desire, and desire fuels our prayer.

Diedrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian, German theologian that was executed by Adolf Hitler at the end of World War II.

He's talking about our relationship with the Heavenly Father, but he's using marriage as a picture.

And he says, it is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage sustains your love.

And I love that because it gives us a picture of how we are in a relationship with the Heavenly Father.

It is not based on emotions or feelings.

It is based on a covenant that He has established and He has promised to fulfill.

We are incapable in our own strength to fulfill it, which is why we need to come back to Jesus over and over.

He is our hope.

He is our gift.

He is our promise of salvation.

Augustine said this, just a short statement.

He says, You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rest in you.

Do you have a restless heart?

I feel, I feel like, you know, the world pulls me back over and over to this restlessness where, man, if if I desire the presence of the Lord, He gives me His rest, His promise that He will be with us.

I want to invite you to something we're going to do, and I know this may not fit.

We're going to probably experiment with a couple of different times and days, but we're going to start this week, Wednesday morning at 8 a.m.

I want you to set an alarm on your phone.

And if you if you're working and you can't stop and join us on the Zoom prayer time, you just try to be reminded at 8 a.m.

of just focusing on the presence of the Lord.

And that would be for us as a church family weekly.

That would be our time that we know, man, everybody in our church family is spending a few minutes together in prayer.

If you have the ability to jump on the Zoom call, we're going to have a short devotion and spend a few minutes in prayer and then allow everybody to get back to their day.

And if you're at work, you can't stop and pray with us, just set your alarm to remind you, just take a moment or a couple of minutes and just pause, hit the pause button, and focus on the Lord for a few minutes.

That'll be Wednesday morning at 8 a.m.

And if you need a reminder, go to church at the grove.com forward slash prayer.

Church at the Grove.com forward slash prayer.

And our desire is that we as a church family would pursue the presence of God together, especially in this season that we're in in our world and season that We are in as a church family right here in Walton County.

And let's just spend if you would let let's just spend a few minutes in prayer right now and just ask the Lord to meet us in a personal, real, real way where we experience his presence.

So let's just spend a moment just in in silence.

And you call out to the Lord in your own heart.

I just want to come to you using the words of David, Psalm sixty-three, and just say, God, you are my God.

I earnestly search for you.

My soul thirsts for you.

My whole body longs for you.

In this parched and weary land where there is no water.

God, it feels it feels so dry at times.

And we get our focus off of Jesus.

We're pulled into circumstances that challenge us.

There's an enemy that wants to distract us and pull us away.

And verse 2, I have seen you in your sanctuary.

And I gazed upon your power and glory.

Father, your unfailing love is better than life itself.

I think of just along with Moses, along with David.

I think of the Apostle Paul as he is in Athens in Acts 17, and he sees the idol that they have set up for the unknown God.

And Paul says, this unknown God that you have set apart, just to be, just in case these other gods don't meet the standard, I am here to tell you who the unknown God is.

He is our creator.

Paul goes on to tell them that he is our creator.

And then he's also created us to be set apart for him.

I know that probably most of us come to a place, come to places in our life where we just feel helpless and overwhelmed.

And even it is difficult sometimes to formulate the words that are adequate to come to God.

And he said, sometimes we just have to come by the power of the Holy Spirit through the groaning, groaning, and the uttering of our spirit.

We don't know what to pray, we just groan.

Oh God, oh God.

I don't know what to say, but I need you.

I don't know what to do sometimes, but I desire you and your will.

And so, God, will you work?

When we can't and don't know what to do, would you work on our behalf and lead us and guide us?

And may your promises be the place that we put our hope, life.

Father, we we come just saying that we want more of Jesus.

We want more of his presence.

We come to say back to you, we we declare that it's all about Jesus.

Jesus is at the center of our life and our being.

And we come to say, God, we want more of you.

I want to encourage you as we close this time and this service in a time of worship and prayer.

If you want somebody to pray with you, please come and ask myself or Jonah, one of us to pray.

Feel free to come to this altar.

If you're carrying something heavy and you just say, you know, I need I need the Lord right now.

The altar is a place.

It's a place to come and to encounter the Lord.

And so we come believing and trusting in what Jesus has provided for us through his life and his death and his bodily resurrection.

And because of him giving his life, and because of our hope and the forgiveness that he has provided, we come personally knowing that we can encounter Jesus through prayer and through our desires to pursue him wholeheartedly.

It's in Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.