Here I Go Again | Pastor Greg Ford Sermon | One Church Columbus

Um, okay, we are in a series, or actually we're not in a series.

We're uh this month we're not doing any series.

We're just gonna do a bunch of one-off messages.

Uh these are messages that throughout the course of my study, they didn't fit neatly into one um series of messages, so I just decided to share them kind of non-sequitur here in the month of November.

And so uh uh we're gonna do that today.

I I want to kind of start with uh sort of what I'm hoping to accomplish today.

I want I want to hopefully bring some some encouragement uh and and a message to anybody who is struggling with a recurring issue.

In other words, this is something that uh uh you've been dealing with for a while.

It doesn't seem to be going away.

Uh something that maybe you even know better, but there's that willing-doing gap.

In other words, I'm willing to do better, but actually doing better can be difficult.

It's and that's a certain type of discouraging to know better and not do better, especially if you've been in church or you've been in your Bible or you've been coming to the Lord in prayer and making promises to God, Lord, I'm gonna make this change, and then uh it's just not going away.

Um, and this could be a lot of areas, man.

This could be uh related to you know sexuality, this could be related to your money, uh, this could be related to uh being a people pleaser, insecurities.

Um, it could be a lot of things, and it just keeps showing up, and it's like that whole man versus self.

I'm losing the battle of self.

Uh I'll just gonna start off being completely open with you.

I, for all of my life, as long as I can remember, I've struggled with managing my anger.

Uh when I was a little kid, it would show up in, you know, when you're little, you can't do much damage, but it would show up in temper tantrums, or it would show up in me losing my temper in a lot of ways, you know.

As a kid, I'm, you know, you know, get killed in Mario Brothers, you know, and you're just throwing the controller and at the TV.

And then I tried to really channel that into sports and things like that.

So I became a hyper, hyper competitive kid.

And uh, and I would use all that anger to try to go out and you know, turn it into, you know, touchdowns or home runs or strikeouts or whatever it was.

And uh, you know, as I got older, eventually I in my uh early 20s, I gave my life to Christ.

And so I just totally expected that all this anger that I've been battling throughout my life, once I gave my life to Jesus, it was just gonna all melt away.

That I was gonna now be like meek, okay, that I was gonna just now like not even have to deal with anger anymore.

Because, you know, you start hearing sermons from out of 2 Corinthians 5 17 that says, anyone who's in Christ is a new creation.

And the old is gone and the new is come.

And you're like, oh, this is good news, you know?

All right, cool.

That old me is gone and the new me is here, and then and then and then uh I still want to do the same thing I wanted to do before I was a new creation.

So I don't even know what to do with that, right?

You're like, there's either something wrong with the verse or there's something wrong with me, and I don't know which is which.

Either the verse isn't telling the truth, or it's just not taking when it comes to me.

So am I doing something wrong or am I just wrong?

Or like what's going on?

And so um, you know, this was something that again, I I I've battled.

In fact, to be honest with you, and maybe this is oversharing, but I'm just gonna just whatever, I'm gonna tell you the truth.

All right.

Um I this was the main objection I had to God when I felt God calling me to do what I'm doing now.

My fear was that at some point in my life, no matter how good at coping with anger I got, there was just, it was gonna, at some point, it was gonna come out the wrong day, the wrong time, the wrong person said the wrong thing.

And now everybody's got a cell phone with video on it.

And I'm like, man, you know, at some point I'm gonna mess this up.

And that was the voice that was in my head was Greg, at some point, you know, you are gonna show up.

And when you do, you're gonna, you're you're gonna hurt a lot of people and you're gonna ruin, you know, your life and ministry and everything.

And so that was the biggest thing for me wrestling with God.

Like, Lord, are you sure that you want me to do that?

Uh, I want to uh encourage you today, I want to take you into some scripture.

We're gonna look at three different stories from one character.

So it's a character by the name of Moses, one of the most profound.

Uh, in fact, we have so much data on this guy, is one of the most important characters in the whole Bible.

You'll hear me often refer to the law of Moses.

Uh, you'll you hear the Hebrew Bible or the Torah.

Okay, the Torah is is Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, all attributed historically, uh, traditionally, to the author being Moses.

And so Moses is not only the author of these five books, in many ways, he's the protagonist in the story.

Um, certainly God's always the main character, but you have Moses who is uh kind of the main person that we follow.

And uh I want to take you and look at three different texts um throughout in the beginning, middle, and end of his life, and then see what we can learn from it.

Uh Exodus 2, uh a little bit of backstory here.

So Moses is born uh in a time where the children of Israel, which he was a child of Israel, were in living in Egypt, and they were right in the middle of this really hard time because um they were multiplying quickly, they were growing, not only numerically, but they were they were strong people.

And so the their their their uh quick, rapid multiplication plus uh the strength of of their character was a threat to the Egyptians.

So Pharaoh uh comes up with this command throw all of the Hebrew boys, throw all the Israelite boys in the Nile.

Okay, they're growing too fast, and and he felt threatened.

And he literally said, you know what, if these guys keep growing like this, okay, we're in trouble because they're they're going to team up with one of our enemies and they're gonna come destroy us.

And so he tries to get out in front of the problem by massacring, okay, Hebrew boys.

And of course, Moses survives through a series of events, and not only doesn't he know he make it out alive, he actually ends up living in the palace.

He's adopted by Pharaoh's daughter, and so he ends up not only living, but he lives in luxury and has the finest education on the face of the earth at that time.

He had the best education you could have.

So, in a sense, right, if you put yourself there, don't just gloss over it, but you think about it, that would be a trip.

Like, in one sense, you would you would feel grateful that you didn't die and that you survived and how fortunate you are, but then there would be a whole degree of survival's guilt.

And not only that, you're growing up in a palace where you're you're the only one of your kind that's there, and and you understand what's happening outside of the palace.

And so it says in Exodus 2, one day, after Moses had grown up, this is verse 11, Moses was an adult now, he went out to where his own people were, watched and watched them at their hard labor.

He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people, looking this way and that, and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hit him in the sand.

The next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting, and he asked the one in the wrong, Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?

The man said, Who made you ruler and judge over us?

Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?

Then Moses was afraid and thought, What?

I what I did must have become known.

When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian.

What we have is uh Moses retreating from his mistake, fighting for his life, and he has to go into the wilderness, and he's there for 40 years in the wilderness, uh hiding out after his mistake.

Um, what we see here is the beginning of a pattern that will be with him all of his life.

And the pattern is Moses has something provoke him to anger.

And we see that most of the time, the thing that provoked him to anger was worthy of provoking anger.

It was an injustice.

What he saw was wrong, and it should make you mad.

Uh one time I took a mentor of mine, he's a retired man, distinguished you know, guy.

He's always, you know, in control of himself, and I was actually, I had just had some things in my life that I was really angry with and I was angry about, and I was trying to work my way through it.

And uh I took him out for breakfast and I told him the whole story, and I said, Hey man, you're kind of like goals, man.

Like when I look at you, you know, you just always seem so composed and and self-controlled and everything.

I was like, Do you ever get angry?

You know, and he's like, Oh, heck yeah.

He's like, I get angry all the time.

And uh I said, Well, I'm trying to learn how to manage my anger better, and I'd like to learn from somebody who does it better than I do.

And I said, you know, I told him my situation, and he said, Greg, let me just start with this.

He said, if everything you just told me is true, you should be angry.

He said, I don't blame you for being it would be weird if you weren't angry about X, Y, and Z.

He said, but the key with anger is you have to continue to learn how to manage it.

Not to deny it, not to simply suppress it, but to learn how to manage it.

Uh we see in in Exodus 2, he should have been angry, but he learns something, or he doesn't quite learn.

In fact, we learn it watching him.

He it takes him a lifetime to learn that just because the anger emerges from righteousness or injustice or something that's wrong, something that should make you angry, just because it comes from a good place doesn't sanitize everything you do after.

At some point, you have to step back and take a moment and take the feeling of anger, which is completely warranted.

It would be weird if you didn't feel it.

But to take it and then to be to be thoughtful, prayerful, and wise in how you play that out in terms of your next decisions.

So what Moses doesn't do when he sees the injustice, he doesn't step back, think, and pray and discuss and get a mentor.

He springs into action that to him feels like justice.

Okay, but what does he do?

It's vigilante justice.

It's not uh he this wasn't asked for by God.

This was him taking matters into his own hands.

Um, okay, so from this, he goes into Midian for 40 years.

He he okay, he goes, he has a family, he gets married, he's he's working for his father-in-law, he is uh essentially a shepherd, um, guiding his father-in-law's herd throughout the wilderness for 40 years, and then of course God finds him and says, Hey, uh, I want you to lead my people out of Egypt.

So he returns to the scene of the crime, he goes back to Egypt, and now he'd been herding sheep, but now he starts to herd a nation, leads them across the Red Sea, takes them out into the wilderness, up to Mount Sinai, where where God is giving him, uh gives the nation a covenant, and they're hitting the reset button.

Now, what's happened, we're gonna we're gonna jump to Exodus 32, okay, but let me give you a little bit, a little bit uh leading up to this.

What you have is God has made a covenant, or we'll think of like a contract with the nation.

And it's in the in verse uh chapters 19, 20, and 24 of Exodus, it's like a verbal contract.

So it'd be like if you were making a contract with somebody and you said, let's agree on terms.

And you're talking it back and forth.

If you do this, I'll do that.

If you don't do that, I won't do this.

And they get the terms all worked out, and then he says, Okay, cool.

I'm gonna draft, I'm gonna have the lawyers draft up the documents and then we'll sign.

But we've already agreed on it.

Make sense?

So Moses goes up in and onto Mount Sinai to get the documents drafted up on stone tablets, the Ten Commandments, but they've already committed to the covenant.

God's committed, the nation has committed, they know what's expected of them.

And so while while Moses and God are up there drafting up the documents on the stone tablets, the nation immediately starts breaking the covenant.

In fact, they break the first two parts of the covenant right away.

The first was have no other gods before me.

The second is have make no idols or graven images.

And so it says in uh Exodus 32, the Lord said to Moses, verse 7, Go down, because your people whom you brought up out of Egypt have become corrupt.

They've been quick to turn away from what I commanded them, and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf.

In other words, we literally they literally broke the first two rules right away.

They've bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.

Again, God's beef with idolatry was not only was it theological distortion and perversion, but it caused them to miss the point that uh there is no physical image, there is no statue that localizes the presence of God.

We are the image of God.

Okay, the presence of God is localized in you, so if we think it's this statue over here, we miss the fact that we are God's image-bearers.

Okay, so so he says they're getting this wrong.

Verse 9, he said, I've seen these people, the Lord said to Moses, and they are a stiff-necked people.

Now, in other words, rebellious.

Now leave me alone, so that my anger may burn against them, and that I may destroy them, and then I will make you into a great nation.

Verse 11, but Moses sought the favor of the Lord his God.

Lord, he said, Why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand?

Why should the Egyptians say, It was the it was with evil intent that he brought them out, to kill them in the mountains, and to wipe them off the face of the earth?

Turn from your fierce anger, relent and do not bring disaster on your people.

Remember your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self, I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, and I'll give your descendants all this land that I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever.

Verse 14.

Then the Lord relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he threatened.

Okay, now this is where our framework of the Bible as history, the Bible as literature, and the Bible as theology is going to really serve us well.

Okay, because when you read a text like this, if you're a deep thinker, it is very easy to get confused by a text like this, because you read it and God seems like this impulsively angry God, right?

So all of a sudden God's, you know, drafting up the documents, and next thing you know, they turn, and now God gets super ticked.

And he's like, I'm gonna scorch the earth, man, I'm gonna wipe them out.

And God gets really, really mad and he threatens violence.

And so if you're not careful, you'll start attributing those characteristics to Almighty God, which is horrifying because he is omnipotent, which means he has all the power, and he's omniscient, which means he knows everything.

So the idea that he would have all that power and then just be um he would have a temper, and then in his temper would be impulsive with his anger is is is horrifying.

And then when you read again what we just read, uh God's like, you know what, I'm taking him out.

And Moses is like, God, chill out.

You know, God, calm down, Lord.

Okay, now now let's now now God, let's think about this now, Yahweh.

Let's think about this now, okay.

Uh, first of all, the Egyptians are gonna, we're gonna look bad in front of the Egyptians, you know.

They're gonna go, what are you doing?

You know, you guys uh you you you brought them out and only to go out here and then and then kill them in the mountain?

Come on now, God.

We you don't want to look bad in front of the Egyptians.

And then and then beyond that, Lord, remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, and don't forget the covenant that you made.

Don't forget your word now, all right?

Remember your word.

And so you have you have Moses like talking to God, and God's like, you know, Moses, you're right.

You know, you're right, you're right.

I'm so glad I have you, right, to help me in these moments.

You know, you saved me once again.

All right, and so that's how it reads.

Well, that's not that that's not what's going on.

So if you look at it from a literary standpoint, very important to understand that Moses, like we said, is unbelievably educated.

So this is a guy who's writing this, who grew up with the best education of the day, would have been really well versed as a reader and writer of ancient Near Eastern texts.

Big part of those would be theological text.

So there is, I'm gonna give you a big fancy word, but I'm gonna define it for you and put it up on the screen so we're on the same page.

So it's called uh anthropopathism.

Anthropopathism, which is this it is um attributing human emotions or inner conflict to God so that the readers can grasp his moral character in human terms.

So when you see a conversation like God going, I'm gonna kill them all, and Moses going, Oh, hold on, God, and God's like, you know, I changed my mind, I relent.

Okay, what Moses is not doing is making a claim that he recorded this conversation.

What it's doing is when you have anthropopathism, it is doing accomplishing two things.

First, it is helping people to make sense of the relationship between justice and mercy in the cosmic order.

Okay, in other words, we're always, you know, we we all believe in justice, but we all understand mercy.

And the relationship between those two things, especially as it relates to deity, relates to God, okay, that's a big thing, that's a question that it's answering or wrestling with.

The second thing that anthropopathism does, the purpose of it, is to reveal the character of the deity.

Okay?

So in their world, they're polytheistic.

They have a whole pantheon of gods, okay?

The Israelites are monotheistic, in other words, one God, Yahweh, that's it.

But to the in the other ancient Near Eastern nations, they had this whole team of gods.

So when they would be, you know, recording a conversation between a person and God, so to speak, with anthropopathism, it was a way of revealing the true character of that deity.

So this is what Moses is doing.

And so he's taking them, he's dramatizing it, and he's taking them through a logical thought progression that starts with justice, right?

If God had looked down at the nation of Israel, violating the covenant immediately, immediately upon agreeing upon it, and to violate it right away, how would you not be angry?

It would say something about him if he was careless about that.

It's supposed to.

And by the way, when you see text, this is very important.

When you see God described as angry in the Old Testament, don't think of it in the human terms.

In human terms, we think of it like this.

We think of anger often comes from ego.

And I'm embarrassed.

In fact, you even see Moses saying, God, uh, you know, the Egyptians are gonna think you're you look bad.

So that's a human thing for ego.

This has nothing to do with ego.

When you see God's anger, it's it's it's about the seriousness of this moral situation.

So what God is doing when he looks down and sees this, it's not that he's worried about being embarrassed in front of the Egyptians.

It's that God understands how destructive, how destructive their their idolatry is, what it does not only physically but mentally and spiritually.

So the first part is his justice, and his justice, it's provoked, and he's angry about it.

But in that what the the use of anthropopathism here takes you through the process where now we see that even in his anger, that God turns and is merciful.

So he offers mercy.

So this is this would in Moses' writing, this is him using a literary uh technique to show and to prove to his audience look, God is certainly a God of justice, that's why he was upset.

But God is a God ultimately of mercy.

So God sends Moses back down the mountain, essentially says, go down and lead.

And watch this.

Moses comes down the mountain, Exodus 32, 19.

When Moses approached the camp and he saw the calf and the dancing, and his anger burned, and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them into pieces at the foot of the mountain.

So Moses comes down the mountain.

Now think about what did he just talk God out of?

He had just said, God, don't forget your covenant.

And what does he do?

He takes the covenant, okay?

The covenant shatters it.

In a sense, he's making a statement of you broke the covenant, but he breaks, he shatters the covenant impulsively.

He shatters the covenant right there in front of them.

It would be like you taking the contract and ripping it up in front of somebody.

Be like you taking the ring and throwing it, right?

Again, I don't want this anymore.

So so it turns into an impulsive uh behavior.

And then look at this, verse twenty.

And he took the calf the people had made, burned it in the fire, ground it down into powder, scattered it in the water, and made the Israelites drink it.

Verse twenty one.

He says Said to some of you are like, it's giving you PTSD when your mom used to wash your mouth out with soap.

You're like, I I think I think I did something like that one time.

My mom, my mom must have been reading Moses.

And and and then verse 21, he said to Aaron, Why did you let these what did these people do to you that led you into such a great sin?

Verse 22.

Do not be angry, my Lord, Aaron answered.

You know how prone these people are to evil.

Now, the irony here is supposed you're supposed to see it, right?

Who does Aaron sound like?

Aaron sounds like Moses a few seconds ago when God was upset.

God was mad.

Oh, you know what, I'm gonna scorch the earth.

Moses comes down, you know, and Moses says to him, Lord, you know, have mercy on these people.

He intercedes for the people.

Now Moses comes down and his anger is provoked, and he's starting to scorch the earth, and Aaron says, Don't get angry.

But instead of relenting and giving mercy, um, he he continues to to carry out his anger.

His anger gets the best of him.

Okay, so uh look at this.

It says in Exodus 32, 25, when Moses Oh, wait, let me let me keep going.

When Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control, and so be it become a laughing stock to their enemies.

In other words, his anger was burning, his ego was burning, because we're a laughing stock to our enemies.

Verse 26.

So he stood at the entrance of the camp and said, Whoever is for the Lord, come with me.

Whoever is for the Lord, if you're on God's side, come with me.

And all the Levites, don't forget Levites, rallied to him.

And he said to them, This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says.

Each man strap a sword to his side, go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.

Verse 28.

The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about 3,000 of the people died.

Verse 27.

Strap a, thus saith the Lord.

This is what God wants.

Everybody who's on God's side, come here.

I'm on God's side.

If you're on my side, you're on God's side.

Come over.

If you're on God's side, come here.

This is what God told me to tell you.

If you're on my side, get a sword and go kill your neighbor and brother for his honor and glory.

When did God say that?

Where is that in the text?

Um, last time we heard from God in verse 14, he was giving mercy.

Last time we heard from God in verse 14, he relented in his anger.

Last time we heard from God in verse 14, he said, Yeah, I'm upset at the what they're doing.

How couldn't I be?

But God had given Moses a revelation of his mercy, and then said, Now go down and lead.

And Moses came down, and because his anger blinded him and was getting the best of him, he put words in God's mouth that God never said.

And it wasn't just putting words in the mouth, it was putting swords in people's hands.

So now, what started in Exodus 2 that happened to one Egyptian, now turned into a massacre in Exodus 32.

And now we have 3,000 bodies, and 3,000 funerals, and 3,000 widows, and a bunch of kids that don't have their dad.

And we got a bunch of people who are grieving.

And it was from not only did they die, but they died at the hand of their own brother and their own neighbor and their own friend.

Moses at the end of this, uh, he goes to the Levites in verse 29, who killed all, you know, did all this killing.

Moses said, You've been set apart to the Lord today.

For you were against your own broth sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day.

Um, you know what's weird about this?

Well, I don't think it's weird, I think it's awesome actually, uh, this part of it.

Okay, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus.

Leviticus, Levites.

Levites.

The ones who killed 3,000 people because Moses told him God said to.

Moses, who was provoked by righteous anger, but became overzealous and put words in God's mouth that had collateral damage, that's unthinkable.

The Levites in the book of Leviticus will become the priesthood.

And when God talks, and God instructs them on their role description, he says, I want you to do four things.

First, I want you to put my image in the world.

So everything that's on your clothing, your garb, it will all be representative of my character.

Second thing that I want you to do is I want you to intercede for the people.

I want you to be a bridge from people to God and from God to people.

I want you to help connect people to God.

The third thing that I want you to do is help people navigate atonement.

In other words, when they mess up, inevitably they will, whether it's through foolishness, ignorance, or arrogance.

I want you to help them get back on the right track because sin and mistakes come with guilt and shame, and we can't get stuck in this, but we got to learn from it.

So help people navigate, learning from it, feeling the appropriate pain you're supposed to feel at the mistake, so that you are that you turn from it and you accrue wisdom and you don't live in it.

So, Levites, that's what I want you to do.

And then the last thing is I want you to take all of the resources that come to the temple and help get them to the right people in the right way.

Okay?

That's what God had the Levites to do.

Quite a bit different from what Moses, angry Moses, coming down, not thinking through what he had just had a revelation of God and how God was going to handle the situation.

He comes down and orders this thing up, and now the Levites, now the Levites have uh go and uh do the opposite of what God ultimately raises them up to do.

Uh I could keep going, but I'll I need to move on.

It says, uh the next day uh Moses said to the people, You've committed a great sin, but now I will go up to the Lord.

Perhaps I can make atonement for your sins.

So Moses went back to the Lord and said, Oh, oh, oh, what a great sin these people have committed.

They they've made themselves gods of gold, but now please forgive their sin.

But if not, then blot me out of your uh the book you have written.

So blot me out of the book is is imagery around a census in a kingdom.

You'd have a census, and people's citizens' names would be in the book, and if you blotted somebody out, they're no longer part of the kingdom.

And so we see here from Moses a tremendous blind spot to what he's just done.

Somehow he's continued to sanitize what he did uh and miss miss the the full picture.

But there is this sincerity that that's immature and overzealous.

And uh look how the Lord responds.

But the Lord replied to Moses, Whoever has sinned against me, I will blot out of my book.

Now go lead the people to the place I spoke of, and my angel will go before you.

However, when the time comes for me to punish, I will punish for the sin.

I will punish them for their sin.

When the time comes for punishment, I'll do it.

Essentially, what God says to Moses is why don't you leave the blotting out and the punishment to me?

How about you let me keep the cosmic order of justice and mercy?

How about you instead of forgetting what we just talked about and somehow losing sight of what you just saw in my character and coming down and telling people I said something I didn't say, misrepresenting me.

How about you leave the punishment to me, and when it comes time to punish, I'll be the punisher?

You can't help but think about the comparison and the contrast between Moses and his offer of atonement, and Jesus and his offer of atonement.

Jesus, by the gospel writers, is presented essentially as the new Moses, as the second Moses, the first Moses tried to create purity through massacre, through spilling their blood.

Jesus ultimately gives us the example of what is the good news in the gospel, is that he makes us right with God through his own blood.

Right?

He demonstrates the mercy that we see from Yahweh in chapter 32.

I gotta go fast because I'm running out of time.

I knew this was gonna take longer than it should.

Oh, you know what?

Let me give you this.

This is my I got one point, but it's it's kind of long.

But I'm gonna I'm gonna read it to you.

All right, this is the point today.

Learn from what you did to the Egyptian in Exodus 2 before it turns into a massacre in Exodus 32.

Learn what you did to the Egyptian.

Learn from what you did to the Egyptian in Exodus 2 before it turns into a massacre in Exodus 32.

Repentance, correction, and transformation are an option at every step.

Beginning, middle, and end of your life.

If you don't heed the warning and seal the problem, it will continue to cost you.

So I gotta go fast, but if you go, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Numbers chapter 20 is near the end of Moses' life.

Numbers 20 · chapter mention

And God says to Moses, after the nation had gone through another rebellion, God says to him, Moses, I want you to help me.

We're gonna meet a need for the nation.

So even though the nation had been rebellious, they had a physical need, they were dehydrating, they were thirsty, they were in the desert, they needed water.

And so it says in Numbers 20, verse 7, the Lord said to Moses, You and Aaron must take the staff, when you think see staff think symbol of authority.

Numbers 20:7

Take the authority symbol and assemble the entire community.

And publicly, as the people watch, speak to the rock over there, and it will pour out its water, and you will provide enough water for the rock to satisfy the whole community and their livestock.

So that's what God tells them to do.

Numbers 20, verse 10.

Numbers 20:10

Then he and Aaron summoned the people to come together and together at the rock.

Listen, you rebels, he shouted.

Must we bring, must we, me, Aaron, and God, bring water from this rock?

Then Moses raised his hand and he took this authority symbol and struck the rock twice with his authority symbol.

And the water gushed out because even though Moses was disobedient, God still met the need of the people.

So the entire community and their livestock drank their fill.

But the Lord said to Moses, he called him over for a little sidebar after, the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, Because you did not trust me enough, you did not obey what I told you to do to demonstrate my holiness.

Some of your Bibles say, to sanctify me.

In other words, to represent me publicly in an accurate way.

So although there are fewer dead bodies than there were in chapter 32, it's hard for us to measure the distortion that just came out.

When you stood up there and spoke for me once again, and you took your authority and you beat this rock in front of these people, they think that you and me are the same, but I just told you to speak to it because I'm a relational God and I'm not here to beat the people that have already been beaten.

I want to show up and I want to speak to them.

I want them to see relationship.

I want to have a conversation and say, because you failed to do that for the people of Israel, you will not lead them into the land I give them.

So you have Moses who spent 80 years of his life in the wilderness.

80 years.

The first 40 was after he kills the Egyptian.

The second 40 is after he leads them out of Exodus.

How should this story have ended?

The story should have ended with my man Moses in the promised land on an Adirondack rocker, eating the fruit of his labor, watching what he work he put in for 80 years in the wilderness, watching a new generation for a few of his final years, watching them live the thing that he had worked his life for.

But here I go again.

You have now a recurring issue.

You have a guy that didn't learn.

He could have learned what he needed to learn in Exodus 2.

He certainly should have learned it after Exodus 32.

And here he is in Numbers 20.

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers.

Deuteronomy is the final book of the Torah.

Deuteronomy is a series of speeches that an elderly Moses gives to a new generation.

Their parents and grandparents have died off.

This is a new generation.

These are the ones that are going to go into the promised land.

And you have an elderly Moses giving cautionary tales.

He goes painfully, painfully, situation by situation, through their time in the wilderness, so we learn everything.

We wring every drop out of our time in the wilderness so that when we go in the promised land, we go in wiser.

And in Deuteronomy, three different times, Moses brings up his striking of the rock and he says to them, This is why I'm not going with you.

You guys are going to go in the promised land and you're going to carry this forward.

I'm not going to be going.

And here's why: because I had a recurring issue.

Friend, I want to say, God is a God of mercy.

God is a God of love, but our actions have consequences.

And I know I'm talking to people in three different seasons.

Some of you are in Exodus 2, you're near the front of your life.

Patterns are starting to emerge.

Don't sweep it under the rug.

Don't just call it righteous.

Don't make excuses.

Don't push away wisdom.

Don't push away correction.

Every single phase of your life, there will be opportunities for correction, transformation, and change.

You've got to learn, you'll have to learn how to deal with it.

I told you I've had a struggle with anger all my life.

I eventually, I'd been to so many altars and I'd prayed so many times.

I'd sang so many songs and named it and claimed it, gripped it, ripped it, pistol whipped it, dipped it, flipped it, and I was still angry.

I was still angry.

I was still angry.

And I was preaching the gospel.

I was still angry.

And I had a moment where it almost boiled out.

I got so desperate, I went to a counselor and I said, you know, I about did some stuff I shouldn't have didn't want to do.

I about lost my mind.

And I'm talking, and we we started to dig into some things from my childhood.

We started to dig into some things from my past.

We started to untangle some knots as to how I got there.

Friend, I if you're in a place where the new creation, right, you're going, old things aren't new.

It's not because the verse is wrong, and it's not because you're bad and corrupted.

It is because often these things that we work out take time and process, and you've got to be willing to do whatever it takes to look as deep as you need to look to and to work through.

And part of what I learned in the process was where the anger was coming from.

And guess what?

It wasn't coming from evil thing.

It was actually coming from a good place.

Okay, there were some things that you know hurt me, but I should have been angry about them.

And there was a whole season of time where I had to learn how to manage with decision making, even though I was still boiling, and what to do with that boil and how to work my way through it.

And now in the process of continuing to do the right thing for the right reason, I'm starting to find even my feelings change, but those things take time and I'm still a work in progress.

So whether you're in Exodus 2 and you're starting to see the pattern emerge, or maybe some of you are in Exodus 32, this thing keeps coming up.

And now one Egyptian is turning into a massacre of 3,000.

You're seeing the stakes get bigger and higher.

Listen, don't sweep it under the rug, deal with it now.

Every single phase has an opportunity for repentance, transformation, and correction.

And some of you are here and you're near the end of your life.

Don't die in the wilderness.

Don't die in the wilderness.

You're in Numbers chapter 20.

Numbers 20 · chapter mention

You're still alive, you still have consciousness, you still have some health.

Okay?

It's never too late to repent.

It's never too late to learn.

It's never too late to change.

And for some of you, if you don't heed this right now, you're going to end up dying in the wilderness when you're supposed to get that Adirondack in the promised land.

You're supposed to see some of the fruit of your labor.

Here's the final good news for them all done.

Moses, even though he had a recurring issue, was still used powerfully by God.

He was still used powerfully by God.

I'm thankful that God still uses flawed people with recurring issues who in many ways have done some damage to still, still be used for his glory.

It's not too late.

Let's pray.

Lord, we come to you in the powerful name of Jesus.

Lord, we thank you that anyone who is in Christ is a new creation.

There's nothing wrong with that verse, other than maybe how we tend to think about it and understand it.

Lord, we thank you that you have given us salvation, you've given us forgiveness, you've given us grace, and so we're not walking in condemnation.

And yet today, for us to walk in freedom means that there's some work to be done.

Just like Moses, Lord, who probably had some sort of survival survivor's guilt.

Who saw things that he couldn't unsee, and they were things that made him angry.

Lord, it took him a lifetime to learn that.

In fact, in some ways, uh it cost him, created consequences, Lord, that uh cost him some things he probably should have been able to have.

I pray, Lord, you would help us, whatever season we're in, beginning, middle, or end, Lord, to be willing to see the thing you want to show us and to be able to walk it out so that we can operate in freedom and health.

We thank you and praise you in Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.