How God Demonstrates His Love

Um, what what I want to do today is I want to talk to you uh about the promised land.

Okay, we're gonna talk about that.

You've probably heard in the Bible uh there's a promised land, and so we're gonna talk about the significance of that and what that has to do with us, and uh to give you a little bit more about that, all right?

Um, just a quick summary of the first five books of the Bible, right?

So in Genesis, it has the uh cosmology or the account of the cosmos, how the world was created, um, and then uh a kind of a fly through human history and how human and mankind went from you know ultimately hunter-gatherers to nomadic herders to city dwellers to eventually um empires.

And we see that God says, you know what, I see the chaos of the world, and I want to raise up a group of people.

I'm gonna make a partnership, I'm gonna make a covenant uh with a with a guy named Abraham, and through Abraham, I want to make a covenant that will bless the world.

I want to set them apart out of the chaos, and I want to partner with them to put something in the world that ultimately will go to the ends of the earth.

Well, he says, every family of the world will eventually be blessed through what I want to do through you.

And so we see that, and we see the family of Abraham.

In the book of Exodus, we see that the family of Abraham is becoming a nation or a tribe, and they eventually end up in bondage in Egypt.

They're in Egypt for over 400 years, and God eventually leads them out of bondage, out of captivity, and uh into the wilderness.

And so then we see what happens in the wilderness.

In the book of Leviticus, we see that the establishment of the priesthood and some of the ceremonial laws, essentially, how do we worship God?

God's hitting a reset button, he's starting to create definition for how I want you to live.

And all of those things are designed to help us be in right relationship with God, right relationship with ourselves, and right relationship with each other.

And so he gives them uh the law, he establishes a priesthood.

Uh in the book of Numbers, they wander through uh the wilderness, they're lost for 40 years, and they end up basically right on the precipice of the promised land.

And in the book of Deuteronomy, you have a series of speeches from Moses, okay, who is saying, look, guys, let's learn everything we can from our history, because those who fail to pay attention to history are doomed to repeat it.

So we're gonna go painfully through our history and we're going to look at how we can do better as we go with a new generation into the promised land.

And the book of Deuteronomy ends with Moses dying.

So Moses doesn't go into the promised land.

Uh we we pick up now in the book of Joshua, who's kind of the new leader.

He's kind of like the new Moses, and he's going to lead the children of Israel into the promised land.

Right?

So that's where we find ourselves today in the book of Joshua.

Now, in order for us to really kind of get understand this promised land thing, we need to think about the concept in the Bible of covenants.

Covenants.

In the Bible, you're going to see a lot of covenants, and a covenant, think of a contract, think of an agreement, uh, think of a deal that is done between two parties.

Okay?

When the covenants are described in the Bible, um, they use these covenants with God, okay, God making a deal, making a partnership with people, they use the same sort of style historically of how they would have made covenants economically, how they would have made them uh nation to nation, um, business covenants, or even marriage covenants, and so they would follow the same style.

And so what you have are two parties within the covenant.

One is called the suzerain, and the suzerain would be the person in the power position.

Often this would be a powerful ruler, okay, a king, somebody like that, uh, but whoever's in the power position, and then you have the vassal.

So you have the suzerain and the vassal.

The vassal would be the weaker party, and they would make deals together, okay, and within those deals, they would then have a ceremony to demonstrate what we're committing ourselves to.

So, for example, in the in a betrothal covenant, there would be a ceremony and a covenant between the groom and the father of the bride, okay?

And here's what they would do, and this is going to be a little gross uh in our context, but I'm just telling you how it is.

Okay, what they would do is they would take a few clean animals, okay?

They might take like a heifer, they might take a ram, they might take a lamb or a goat, and they would cut the animal in half, all right, and they would set the halves across from each other, and they would put them on the edge of a trench, and the blood of the animals would run into the trench.

So now you have this sort of this runway of animals that have been cut in half, the blood is run down in the trench, and the vassal always goes first.

So you have the, in this case, the the lesser party would be the son-in-law, okay, the groom, who would then put on a white robe, and he would now, now there is what's called a blood path, because the blood is run down, and he would first, first the groom would stomp, would go stomping through the blood path in a white robe.

And as he does, quite predictably, the blood is gonna splash up onto his white garment, and symbolically, what he's saying is to the father of the bride, I made a deal with you, and this is how I'm gonna treat your daughter, and this is what you can expect of me in this relationship.

And so he's the commitment is clear in his promise to the commitment, he's demonstrating and saying, if I don't hold up my end of the deal, if I'm lying, I'm dying.

Okay?

If I'm lying, just like these animals have been cut into, I'll be cut in two.

And just like this blood is all over my garment, this blood will be, it will be my blood, not an animal's blood.

This is how serious I am that you can trust me with the commitment that I just made.

Then the father-in-law, same thing.

He's made promises, he's made commitments, and now he walks the blood path.

The suzerain goes second.

Okay?

Okay, so the reason I tell you that is because this shows up all the way back in Genesis in the covenant between God and Abraham.

So in Genesis 12 is when God says, I'm gonna make a great nation out of you.

He makes a promise.

He promises him, I'm gonna make a great nation out of you, but don't miss the point.

The reason I want to make a great nation out of you isn't to give you preferential treatment.

I'm doing this because I want to bless the world through you.

The world is in chaos.

I want to bring order to it.

I want to show the world who I am and what matters to me through you, and it's gonna go to the ends of the earth.

That's in Genesis 12.

In Genesis 15, based on what we now know, look at this, Genesis 15, 9.

The Lord said to him, Bring me a heifer, a goat, and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.

Verse 10, look, Abraham already knows.

It's like God said to him, Hey, we made a deal, now draw up the papers.

Okay, that's basically what he just said.

Verse 10, Abraham brought all these to him.

God didn't even have to tell him.

He cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other.

Birds, however, he did not cut in half.

Then the birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abraham drove them away.

All right, now we don't have to look too far into the text to figure out what's going on here.

Draw up the papers, set up the scene, set up the blood path.

Abraham does so.

Who's supposed to go first?

Through the blood path is Abraham.

He is the vassal.

And it says that birds are starting to swarm the carcasses, which means this thing's been set up for a minute.

And Abraham, it says in verse 12, a thick and dreadful darkness came over him.

In other words, Abraham is scared out of his mind.

Because he's going, hold on a second.

With a human being, if we do this ritual and I don't hold up my end of the deal, it's a human being.

I might be able to duck my way out of it.

I might be able to talk my way out of it, I might be able to run my way out of it, I might be able to do some sort of human maneuvering to get out of the commitment that I made to that guy or that guy.

But if I'm walking the blood path with God, with Yahweh, and I don't hold up my end of the deal, there is no escaping.

He's terrified.

And so if you keep reading in Genesis 15, you're going to see that God is going to speak to him and to give him an idea, essentially prophetically speak to him.

Here's what's going to happen.

Your people are going to go into exile.

Here's what's going to happen to you.

And uh look what it says in look at this in verse 17.

It says, The sun set, the darkness fell, and a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the two pieces.

And verse 18, on that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, To your descendants I give this land.

Alright.

So what happened, and this is, again, to us, this is one of those texts you, if you're not careful, you just read over.

To the hearer of this text originally, to the ones that were receiving this story, this would have jumped off the page because what you have is Abram never walks the blood path.

He never does what vassals do in the covenant.

He was too afraid to do it.

God ultimately reassures him of his faithfulness, and then the imagery of the flaming, smoking pot and the torch passing through is ultimately, again, a statement of the presence of God.

So in this covenant, you have really foreshadowing.

You have the suzerain, the person in the power position, you have God saying to Abram, even though I know you'll have some good moments and some bad moments, there will be times you'll believe and there will be times you'll doubt.

There will be sometimes you'll be faithful to what I've asked you to do, and that faith will be counted to you as righteousness, and then other times you're gonna totally mess this up, but I will be faithful.

So in Genesis 15, you have God faithfully passing through the doing the blood walk by himself.

By himself.

And so now we see as part of this covenant, he says to him, the way it ends there, I'm gonna give this land to your descendants.

So now we start to think about the promised land, right?

The promised land in many ways is a sign of the covenant.

So in covenants there would be different signs.

If you remember the one God makes with Noah, he uses a rainbow as a sign.

Even when we do communion in the new covenant, right?

Paul says in Jesus, this is a sign of the covenant, this is a sign of the new covenant.

And so uh just like if you think about like marriage, we have a ring, okay, is the sign of the covenant.

This ring has a monetary value, but its value is not monetary.

It's in the commitment.

In fact, that's why sometimes when people uh they break their commitment, the commitment is broken, the vow is broken, they end up taking the ring off and saying you can have it back, or they throw it in the ocean or do something, or they pawn it, right?

Some people do that.

Okay, so um the the the point is this thing is only matters, it only matters as much as the vow matters, as the commitment matters.

It's a sign, it's a sign to me and to you and to my wife of the commitment I've made to her.

Now, what we can never forget is the why.

Why?

Why get married?

Why get married?

Well, I don't get married because of her money, I don't get married simply because of her beauty, I don't just get married uh because I want something from her or even just how she makes me feel.

I get married.

Why do we get married?

We get married because the greatest treasure we have on this earth is love.

The greatest demonstration of love is God's love, who demonstrated his love toward us and that while we were sinners, he died for us unconditionally.

The closest thing we have to that is a true marriage commitment, a vow that I will not leave you or forsake you.

That of eight billion people in the world that will come and go out of my life, there's one.

One that I've promised and they've promised to drop everything, no matter what.

If you need me, you got me.

Sickness and in health, richer for poorer, till death do us part.

And that unconditional love, when we honor that commitment and we live that way, is the greatest treasure on this earth.

It's the great it's it's it's more than a monetary value.

And frankly, when that is honored, everything comes with it.

Your body comes with it, your money comes with it.

Anywhere I go, she can go.

We share everything, okay?

And and so, but it's not about the money that the person has.

It's not about the the clout that the person has, it's not about the influence.

You didn't marry them from material possessions, or at least you shouldn't have.

It shouldn't have been about the luxuries that come along with it.

All of that is just icing on the cake to the commitment of the why behind this thing, which is unconditional love.

Eight billion people in the world, I can count on one for sure that if I lose everything, ride or die.

So you could see how it would get worked pretty quickly if we started making it about stuff or making it other than about unconditional love.

So when we think about the land, okay, the promised land, what is the point?

Well, part of it is a sign of God's commitment, but it was a location, it was a geography, a geographic location for the purpose of God, the why behind the covenant to be brought into fruition.

So you we have to have a place.

I've now given I've now made you a nation, I've now given you law of conduct of how to behave, right relationship with God, yourself, and each other, and now I've got to give you some space, I've got to give you some land to do this.

Think of it like this.

Uh sometimes there's a term in organization and business called a greenfield project.

Right?

A greenfield project would it'd be something like this.

Imagine you own a business, uh, an organization, and you love that business.

You love the business, you love the people, you love the employees, but this business has got into out of hand.

It's become a toxic culture, there's been abuse of power, there's been a ridiculous amount of turnover, people are getting hurt, it's chaotic.

Every time you show up at one of the sites, it's just it's completely out of order.

And so you love this business, you're not quitting on this business, and really it gets down to you love the employees, you love the people.

And so you decide, you know what, we're gonna do a greenfield project.

We've got locations all over the world, but we have this one in Columbus.

And so I'm going, and Columbus might have had some of the most toxic team members that you've ever had.

And you show up to Columbus and you say, Look, we're relocating everybody from the Columbus branch, you're going somewhere else.

I'm gonna pick 100 employees from this company and we're going to relocate you to Columbus.

Now, here's what we're gonna do: we're going green field, we're gonna tear down the buildings.

We got 100 acres, five buildings, we're taking the buildings down to the green grass, and we're going to build now new buildings here.

These 100 employees are gonna come here and we're gonna take a year to train you thoroughly.

I'm gonna train you in mission, I'm gonna train you in vision, I'm gonna train you in our values, I'm gonna train you in our culture, I'm gonna bring a 613-page document with the most unbelievable definition of how I want you to behave, how I want you to treat one another.

Now, the problem is we got here, we know how we got here, we got here because of the way we were treating each other, and frankly, the people who were on this property before were some of the worst violators of the toxic culture that I'm trying to fix.

Now, be very clear.

Those people actually want to bless them.

Those people actually want to help them eventually.

But based on how they think, what their culture is, if we leave them here and you and you mix with them, you're gonna have me in one ear and you're gonna have them in the other ear.

And you're gonna be confused.

And in fact, a lot of what they say is seductive to try to get you to think the old way that got us into this mess to begin with.

So I am banning them from the land.

They cannot go in land.

And I'm gonna tell you ghost them, dude.

Block them, don't text with them, don't FaceTime with them, don't have lunch with them, don't connect, don't do anything with them.

Eventually, I'm okay, I'm setting you apart for now for a season because I want to take this law in this nation and I want to take all this and I want to work it here.

And when it works, eventually you're gonna see it work and you're gonna love it.

Because it's the way it's intended to work, it's the best.

And when you do that, it's gonna become second nature.

When it's eventually it becomes second nature, now I'm gonna send you back into the rest of the company as my ambassadors to go all over to these different locations, and you're gonna bring this and you saw it work and you felt it work, and now you're gonna demonstrate it to them.

But in the meantime, until I say go, have nothing to do with the people in Columbus.

All right?

Lock in and do what I'm asking you to do.

Okay?

This is ultimately what God is doing.

Now, this helps to explain a little bit when you start, I'm gonna give a little sidebar here.

When you start reading in the book of Joshua, the book of Judges, even the book of Deuteronomy, you're gonna see some stuff that's going to weird you out.

So you're gonna read it and you're gonna see stuff about um total destruction, about people being driven off their land.

But more than being driven off their land, you're gonna see um that that they put the sword to people and there were no survivors.

So let me give you one example.

Uh, this is in the book of Joshua, chapter 10, verse 28.

Joshua 10:28

It says of Joshua, he says, He put the city and its king to the sword, and look at this, totally destroyed everyone in it, and he left no survivors, and he did the same to the king of Makeda as he had done to the king of Jericho.

Okay, so this this is probably like FAQ number one that people have, especially as it relates to the Old Testament.

Um, it seems like God's ordering up genocide, um, God's ordering up the total destruction of people.

You're gonna see that idea of no survivors left behind and complete and total destruction.

You're gonna see that repeated multiple times.

And and I think everybody that's ever read that's had a like, what do we do with this?

And usually you see like one of three responses.

One is some people, it's literally a Bible deal breaker.

They go, I'm out of here.

There's no way I'm gonna be serving a God who orders up the death of just a bunch of people.

That's just that's just not right.

Like, that's just genocide is bad, and I cannot worship a God who would just order up genocide uh haphazardly.

Number two, you you you go, well, yeah, no, that's you take the opposite approach, you go, God gave us permission, we kill bad people, and so that's that's what we do.

Like, hey, God did it, you know.

If you have a problem, take it up with him.

So we see bad people, we're gonna wipe them out.

Or number three, you do what probably most people do.

It's almost like you caught God in some compromising position and you don't want to ask him about it.

So you're like, I don't know, the world did do with that.

Yeah, I'm a little confused because you've got the the seems the the war uh warmonger Yahweh of the Old Testament, and I'm trying to wreck reconcile that with Jesus, who said to love my enemies and pray for those who persecute me.

And so I don't know if God would like change moods, uh, or because it almost seems like God was like a young parent in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, Jesus is like a granddaddy, you know, he's just like eat all the stuff, you know, eat all the sweets.

Well, what do you want?

Ice cream for breakfast, go for it, all right?

Um, it's it's confusing, right?

So, what do we do with it?

All right, so this is a very complicated subject.

I'm gonna touch on it today, I'm gonna give you a summary today, but what I'm gonna do this week is I'm gonna post on my uh Instagram stories, I'm gonna post links to a few different academic resources.

If you're interested in this subject and you want to know more than what I share with you today, because I'm not gonna be able to handle the whole thing today.

It's a big deal.

Uh, but I'm gonna, again, give you a summary, I'm gonna share those links, and you can just listen your little heart out, learn your, you know, as much as you want on these subjects.

I'll be making those available this week.

Um, okay, so here's here's the basic idea.

When you look at this concept, you look at the words, we we we've been taking our approach of looking at the literature, looking at the history.

The Bible is literature, the Bible is history, and before we get to the Bible is theology.

So if you look at it in its literary form and you start with the word, the Hebrew word that's used here, is a word that, like when people study words and study interpretation, particularly in the Old Testament, what they'll do is they'll take that word, they'll look at it in the biblical context, how often is it used?

And so the word that's used here in um Genesis, I'm sorry, uh Joshua 10, 28, it's used about 20 times in the book of Joshua and not in the same form.

It's used in it, think of the root word, but then there's a family of words around this root word, and it's it's used a few times there.

But when you think of another way thing that they'll do when they're looking how to interpret a word, is they'll look at other Hebrew texts other than the Bible.

Bible to look at how was it used culturally?

So, for example, if you said uh, hey, did you watch the Rose Bowl?

Right, and I was like, Yeah, man, the Buckeyes smoked, they smoked Oregon in the Rose Bowl.

All right, well, 2,000 years from now they're studying that, and they're like, Greg Ford said that the Buckeyes smoked Oregon.

They're like, What does it mean?

They smoked them, right?

So you would look at other uh other texts, other people that said that somebody smoked somebody or something like that at that time, and then you would make essentially what he was saying is they they won the game by a lot, okay?

So in the in a similar way, that's what they'll do with words like this.

They'll they'll take this word which is harim, is the root word for total destruction, and they'll look at it in other Hebrew texts.

The challenge with this word is it's not used a lot in Hebrew, other Hebrew texts.

It's not a commonly used word.

So they'll look at even sister languages, you know, how like Spanish and Portuguese would be sister languages.

They'll look at other languages like Aramaic or Akkadian, and they will look at those languages and see how often it is it used as their derivative, and there's really not a lot with it.

So, what Bible scholars and people who interpret really look more at the genre to really go, how do we read this word?

And then you got to look at the text itself.

So the idea is the genre of the book is what what's become known as conquest literature or conquest narratives.

So at that time in the ancient Near East, you have conquest literature.

So royal figures would write about their victories.

That was very common.

And when they would write about their victories, they would write primarily about who they beat, who they defeated, and then they would write about what they built.

And they there was a very common liberal use of hyperbole.

So, like a royal figure might say, hey, we defeated these people, and we beat them so bad that the streets had blood ankle deep.

Okay, well, that's hyperbole.

You know how much blood there would have to be for it to be ankle, literally, ankle deep in the street.

That's not what they're they're they're literally using hyperbole, hyperbolic terms to say, we completely destroyed them.

So again, back to the sports analogy we might use now.

If you like when you're telling your grandkids about what the Buckeyes did this year, they say, you know what?

They smoked Tennessee.

They killed Oregon, man.

They killed them.

How close?

They killed them.

All right, well, nobody walked away.

You know, every everybody walked away from the game.

Nobody died, but you say they killed them.

They massacred, okay?

They they utterly destroyed Texas, okay?

They they uh uh completely defeated the fighting Irish.

You get the idea.

So it's the same sort of genre, the same sort of use of these terms.

And so where we look at it and we see there were no survivors left, we have to question it, number one, because it is it's coming from um hyperbolic conquest literature, but second, the text doesn't even bear it out.

So, for example, in Joshua 10, 36 through 38, it's going to use the same term.

Joshua uh put everybody to the sword, he left no survivors, and it names the cities in Joshua 10.

In Joshua 15, it will name the same cities, and there are Canaanites there.

There are people there.

So they're contending with these people, they're dealing with these people again.

You'll see the same concept in Deuteronomy.

Deuteronomy chapter 7, uh, you'll see that God tells the nation, hey, um uh Harem, have nothing to do with utterly destroy the Canaanites.

Deuteronomy 7 · chapter mention

But then he's going to say a little bit later in the exact same chapter, don't intermarry with them and don't do business with them.

So if what he means is to kill all of them, why would you have to follow that up with don't marry them and follow that up with don't do business with them?

You can't marry and do business with people that are all six feet under the ground.

So the point is, this word is a robust word, it's a broad word.

In fact, it's it's very, very difficult to adequately translate it.

It's one of those words that doesn't translate well into English.

In fact, some people use the word and translate it devoted to the ban.

Devoted to the ban.

In other words, uh when you utterly destroy, I want you to be devoted to the ban.

Have nothing to do with it.

Ghost them, don't speak to them, don't connect with them.

Again, what's the purpose?

Is it because God hates Canaanites?

No, in fact, you're gonna see in the book of Joshua, God's gonna spare Rahab because of her belief.

And then there are going to be some actually within the children of Israel who live in disobedience to God's greenfield project, and they're ultimately going to be banned themselves.

So the point of this, again, is God saying, I want to do something in the earth.

And again, I'll give you more content if you want to if you want to listen more into it, but that's the general idea.

He's saying, I don't want this mindset, I don't want this culture to come in and contaminate your theology, to contaminate your culture.

These countries are bigger than you, they're more established than you, and if you listen to them instead of me, unless you if you're not fiercely devoted to what I'm saying, they're going to come in and they're going to affect you.

We're going to talk more about this also next week.

So, what you have now in this greenfield project is it doesn't work out that way.

They end up inhabiting the land.

In the story of Joshua and Jericho, they end up taking over the land, but instead of completely uh driving out and completely banning, being devoted to the ban with the surrounding people groups in of the Canaanites, they end up absolutely taking on their idolatry, they end up taking up their culture, end up taking up their mindset, and because of that, the the whole reason that God gave them the land to begin with, it wasn't for the land, it wasn't for the wealth, it was because I have something.

There is a purpose to my promise.

My promise, yes, if you honor the purpose of unconditional love, you can have all that I have is yours.

But if you lose sight of that purpose and you don't hold up your end, okay, God's saying, I'll be faithful to my end.

But if they weren't, what they end up doing is losing the land.

Eventually, they're gonna be driven off the land.

They're gonna end up in exile to different countries.

They're they're going to end up, you know, ultimately that sign of the covenant is almost like the ring that they end up losing.

And so we're gonna look more at next week as why God has such a short fuse with idols.

We'll we'll dig a little bit further into this.

But now we kind of want to move forward into Jesus.

So you've heard this term, the new covenant.

The new covenant.

So, in the new covenant, what we have is the same purpose that God has had since the Garden of Eden.

To bring shalom to the earth.

Peace with God, peace with yourself, peace with other people.

Right relationship here, here, and here.

And within the new covenant, the promise is Jesus.

Jesus is the promise.

A lot of times in this new covenant, people start getting so hung up on well, if you follow God and you give him what he wants, he'll give you prosperity, he'll give you more money, he'll give you a bigger house, he'll give you a bigger standard of living.

They start making it about possessions, which is just as warped as if you married somebody because of their net worth, not because of unconditional love.

We just know it's wrong at this level.

We know it doesn't, it's messed up, it's shallow, it's wrong.

Then within the new covenant, what we have is relationship and presence with Jesus.

And it's through Jesus that we establish shalom.

Peace with God, right relationship with God.

How?

Through Jesus.

Uh it says in Romans 10, 5 and through 10.

Or sorry, Romans 5, 6 through 10.

It says, you see, at just the right time when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.

Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die.

But God demonstrated his own love toward us in that while we were sinners, Christ died for us.

Think about that.

The foreshadowing, all the way back in Genesis 15 of the blood path, Yahweh walks through it by himself with no Abraham, going, Abraham, I know you're a human.

I expect you to fail.

Some days you're gonna believe, some days you're not, some days you're gonna obey, some days you're not.

And yet I will continue to be faithful to my promise attached to my purpose.

And so we see through Jesus, it's like Jesus walks the blood path.

Even when I'm unfaithful, it says God demonstrated his love through Jesus toward us in that while we were sinners, Christ walked the blood path.

Verse 9, since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him?

For if while we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him, right?

Relationship with God through the death of his son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life?

When you look in the New Covenant, the New Testament, you're going to see time and again the idea of peace and right reconciliation with God's self and the world around us, the people around us coming through the person of Jesus.

Paul's going to talk about this in two chapters later in chapter seven when he's talking about the lack of peace he has with himself.

He says, doggone it, I am like a slave to my flesh.

I don't want to do stuff, and I keep saying don't do it, and I don't, I do it.

And I say don't say it, and then I say it.

And he said, and then there's the thing I'm like, do that, and then I don't do it.

So the thing I want to do, I don't do, and the thing I don't want to do, I do.

And he calls himself a wretched man.

He's like, I don't even like me.

Who will save me?

He says.

From this relationship that I have to myself.

And you flip to the next chapter, and it's like, thank God for Jesus.

Right?

There's therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.

We receive grace, we receive reconciliation, we receive, we receive all of the promises through Jesus of restoration with self.

And Paul comes to such a piece with this that in Philippians 4, Philippians 4, he says, it's like I've learned a secret.

He said, I've learned the secret.

He said, I used to think it was about stuff, I used to think it was about prosperity, I used to think it was about standard of living.

He goes, but I've learned the secret through Christ.

He said, I've learned that I've been hungry and I've been full.

I've been in danger and I've been safe.

I've had a roof over my head and I've slept out under the stars.

I I've had a good, I've got a job, I've lost a job, I've been the full spectrum.

He said, and what I've learned is I can do all things through Christ, through the promise.

My right relationship with God's self and the people around me, it all comes through the promise of Jesus.

And Paul said, I came to such peace with that.

I know it at such a deep level that actually it doesn't really matter what land I'm on.

I end with this.

When we think about the promised land, I think it is totally appropriate for us to think about our version of the promised land.

Don't just think of the promised land as land, think of it as a context.

It was a place, it was a symbol and a sign of the promise, but it was a location for the people to live out the covenant, to live out God's purpose.

What is your context?

Because you have your own promised land.

Sometimes we think of the promised land like the children of Israel did.

It was this magical place of milk and honey and perfection, and everything's great, and nothing's wrong.

And no, no, no.

It was an actual earthly place.

There are weeds that grow up there.

If you don't pull them, they're gonna take over.

What is your context?

What is your promised land?

Where is it that God has placed you to demonstrate his purposes and his promises in the world, to bring shalom to the earth, to right relationship with God, right relationship with yourself, and right relationship with the people, we look at it through Jesus.

Jesus teaches us how to have a right relationship with other people when he forgave those in real time who were hurting him.

When he went back and reconciled with a friend who had hurt him, when he forgave them who were yelling, crucify him, crucify him, and he forgave them.

He had peace with people who didn't have peace with him.

And even though it didn't look peaceful, it was peaceful internally in here.

Where is the place?

Where is the place?

Is it a job site?

Is it in your home?

Is it in your neighborhood?

Is it in your community?

Where has God given you influence?

Where has God given you location?

What context do you exist in?

That is your promised land.

That is your promise.

That is a sign of God's covenant through Jesus.

Okay, this is where you're supposed to demonstrate his will in the world.

And I think it probably would be in all of our best interest.

It would be appropriate right now to look at how a nation made it about the land instead of making it about the purpose and the promise.

Often we wish for different land.

We're trying to be somewhere we're not.

Instead of taking the place that God has given us and treating it like a promised land, this is the context He's given you.

How are you doing demonstrating his purpose to the world around you?

Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you, God, for the power of your word.

Lord, we thank you that it's great joy to open it up and to even wrestle with it and to have questions about it and to look deeper.

Lord, we invite you in.

We invite you in, Lord, to our context.

Lord, we we want to be a part of your greenfield project.

We ultimately want to demonstrate your character in the world, to live the way that you've called us to live.

And Lord, we know that that starts by seeking first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

And Lord, we know that usually in the human covenant, the vassal makes the first move, but we thank you, Lord, that the suzerain made the first move that we love because you loved us first.

And you move to us before we move to you.

And so right now, Lord, we take a moment if there's any barriers between us, even psychologically in our minds, or maybe something that we've been holding back.

Today, those barriers are removed.

We thank you, Lord, for your grace and love.

And if that's you right now, I just go ahead and bring to God whatever is between you.

There's no obstacle that he can't go through.

He wants to today.

Invite him.

Lord, as we get right with you, we find peace with ourselves.

And Lord, that always spills out, should always spill out into the world around us.

Lord, help us to take a fresh look at our context.

Instead of looking at it the way we've been seeing it, may we see it as the promised land, the sign of the covenant, and a place to demonstrate your purpose to the world around us.

Help us to be faithful.

In Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.