The 10 Words- Part 1 - I Am The Lord

Who are you?

If you are a fan of uh the Severance uh uh show on Apple TV, that is the opening uh sequence of a question of who are you?

Uh if you love Lewis Carroll, um he's got this caterpillar on a mushroom asking poor little Alice in Wonderland, who are you?

So what would you answer?

What would be your qu answer to the question?

Beyond beyond your name, beyond your name tag, beyond uh um where you live, maybe even beyond what you do for work.

Uh how would you answer the question, who are you?

Oh, you've got some answers for me.

Come on, Penny.

What do you got?

I am a child of God.

Oh.

You uh if you didn't know, um River's great-grandmother is in the house.

Uh and she comes from Alabama, and uh you don't know this, but you may not, that she's part of our congregation all the way in Alabama every Sunday, or most Sundays.

And uh we're so glad you're here.

Uh yeah.

Uh uh.

Oh, there's a little there's a little bit of clap for you, too.

Um, yeah.

Okay, so here's what I want you to do.

I want you to put on these imagination caps for just a moment.

You remember as as a kid in school, you you had these great imaginations while your teacher spoke.

So I'm giving you liberty to do that today.

Uh so I want you to imagine with me um a time when you were born and your parents had to hide you because right out of the gate your uh your life was in danger.

And the only reason it was in danger is because of your nationality.

And your first months are really sketchy because your family has to keep on moving you around and keeping you quiet because you're a little baby and you make noises.

And then through a series of events, the very people who are after you and trying to make sure you're not living end up finding you.

And for some reason, instead of taking your life, they actually adopt you into their family.

But you but but it's a tense moment because you're adopted into a family who are actually the enemy of your biological people.

You grow up and you grow up in wealth, and you have the best education, and you have empirical power, all the while your biological family is under this real severe oppression by the very people you're growing up with.

That would mess with your mind.

I mean, you would carry attention of who am I as you walked around and who do I represent?

And you would wrestle with that question over and over again.

Your identity would feel very uncertain in that culture.

And then one day these worlds collide and you act really impulsively, and blood is now on your hands, and you hurry and hide the body in the sand, and everyone is angry at you, so you need to run.

And so you run into exile because you can't go to anywhere that's familiar, no one will accept you.

So you run out into the desert, and there in the desert, you find yet another tribe, a whole different tribe, and that tribe welcomes you in, and so you marry someone in that tribe, and you're hoping that your whole past will disappear.

You won't even have to think about it anymore.

You've got a whole new identity, new people group that you're with, and now you're out in the desert.

And then at 80 years old, uh, 40 years later, you find yourself caring for some sheep on the side of a mountain.

I mean, one day you were in like this royal palace, and now you're out there on the desert uh among sheep.

And and you probably every once in a while begin to reflect on your past, like most of us do.

I don't know if you do that much.

You go think back on some of the stuff that's happened.

And I'm sure uh you're looking over your shoulder a bit because your past might come back to haunt you.

And you're out there with the sheep, you've made a new life, you've got a wife and children, but you are still wondering who you are.

At 80 years old, you're wondering, who am I?

You're Hebrew by blood, you're adopted into an Egyptian family, your wife and children are Midianites, a whole different tribe, and now you're nomadic.

You don't even have a full place, like a constant place to lay your head.

And one day you're walking in the desert and you walk look over and you see a fire, which isn't unusual, but what is unusual is no one's there to tend to it, and there's no food being cooked over it.

And so you get a little closer and you notice, oh wait, this fire is different.

It's not really burning anything, it's just there, and uh it's hovering or within this bush.

And so as you get closer, you you're really curious, but then you hear this voice, and nobody's around, and they're and the voice actually just starts out by saying your name, Moses.

Moses.

You end up with your shoes off because it really feels sacred.

You're told that it's sacred.

And the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, your ancestors, is talking to you.

Your head's down, you're feeling like, oh, I don't know if I'm supposed to be here.

Kind of like Isaiah.

Oh, my mouth, I my lips are unclean, I shouldn't even talk.

And God invites Moses into this plan.

He God has heard that the Hebrew people have been suffering, and so so he invites Moses into this plan to rescue the Israelite people out from underneath the slavery of Egypt for so many years.

And Moses' reply in in uh verse 11 says, Who am I?

Who am I?

So at the core of every human heart are these questions of identity and belonging and purpose.

I mean, those are the real important questions that we ask throughout our whole life.

And Kara Powell, she is the director of the Fuller Youth Institute, and she wrote a book uh after researching and meeting with 1,200 different teenagers, asking and asking them questions and trying to get the heart of what do they think about.

And she discovered that all of them really have been asking the same three questions over and over again.

Who am I?

Where do I fit?

And what difference can I make?

That last one's a question of purpose.

Like, what is the purpose of my life?

And over and over they're being asked, they're asking these questions.

And although it was teenagers who who were part of that study, I believe we ask that question throughout our life at different points of our life.

A lot of times it's when we're life is disrupted, when it gets really messy, when we're in transition, when we're wondering if we should transition to something else, when we make all these big decisions, when crisis happens, we we begin to ask ourselves these questions similar to this.

Who am I?

Uh, where am I where do I fit in?

It's and and what is my purpose?

If you remember uh walking into a school cafeteria, maybe for the first time, and you look around and you're like, uh, where do I fit in?

Where do I sit?

When you graduate from high school, you question, like, um, now what?

What do I do next?

If you remember, uh like you get into your 40s and you kind of start looking back and you're like, who did I become?

And I'm am I really okay with where I'm at now in life?

And then it happens again when we retire.

Like, okay, who am I now?

Like, what is next?

And what are these next years going to look like for me?

Scholar Richard Rohr believes there are two halves in a person's life.

The first half involves building our identity and our security and our success.

Like, that's what life is about.

And then we get into the second half of life and we start to wonder, like, oh, but is there a deeper meaning than those things, than those three things?

Is there something more meaningful than those three things?

And so, humans, we ask, uh, who am I?

Where do I fit?

And what difference can I make?

Moses at 80 years old.

He's feeling pretty satisfied being a shepherd, I think.

And then God comes in and just disrupts everything.

And Moses wonders aloud, who am I that God would invite me into something?

And am I even capable of doing that?

You know what God answers?

He doesn't answer directly.

It's kind of like when Jesus gets questions, uh, he doesn't really always he rarely answers the question that's being asked of him.

And so here's how God replies uh uh God says, I will be with you.

He he basically is saying, Listen, I am with you.

That's what matters here.

We are gonna do this together.

You've I've got you.

And then he further he goes on further to say, uh, uh oh, sorry, Moses then says, Well, who are you then?

And and God replies, I am who I am.

This is what you are to say to the Israelites.

The I am has sent me to you.

So before we go further into the Moses story, which I think many of you are familiar with, how many of you grew up on Charlton Heston?

All right.

How many of you grew up on the uh Prince of Egypt?

Anybody in here?

Okay.

All right.

Uh did you kind of raise your hand, Josh?

Okay, yeah, yeah.

Uh we got a uh yeah.

So before we go further, I want to tell you where we're headed.

I want to give you a roadmap a little bit about what the next few weeks are gonna look like.

So between now and Thanksgiving, which will happen like this, I want us to go through this story of Exodus.

I want us to like focus on a few people that will pop up throughout that story.

And I want us to consider what is this story and why is it here?

And and why would Jesus ever even uh reference this ancient scroll?

I mean, was this story important to Jesus?

And now here we are 3,000 years later.

Is this story important to us today?

Like, why would we consider the story of Exodus and who is a part of this?

And I'm sure if you've read uh the Old Testament, kind of like CB goes through and reads through the Bible uh once a year.

If you've read through the Old Testament, you have come across really difficult and complex uh passages.

I mean, some of the passages almost feel really uncomfortable.

Wait till you get to a passage where Moses' wife does something to their son and things get bloody.

So there are passages in the Old Testament that that feel like, I don't know what I think about this, and how do I interpret this?

And what does this mean for me today?

The Old Testament has sparked a lot of debates.

Jewish leaders during Jesus' time would argue and wrestle with the Torah.

But the Exodus story is important to read because it was important to Jesus.

And the gospels reference the story, and the church letters allude to this story.

So we today, I believe as followers of Jesus, should consider this.

So within that story, there are 170 plus words that are written front and back on some stone and two pieces of stone.

And uh, do you remember as a as a kid, your teacher would give you an essay assignment, and then you ask the question front and back?

And yes, you have to write them both front and back.

Uh and so here, front and back of the stones, so there are 170 words, and we would know them as the Ten Commandments, right?

If if we look at the Hebrew text, it wasn't called Ten Commandments.

The the literal translation would be the ten words, the ten sayings, the ten instructions.

I think sometimes commandments give it uh a disservice a little bit because we can consider it as simply a list of what I should and shouldn't do, but it's so much deeper than that.

At its core, it's a relationship with humanity and Yahweh.

So we're gonna study that a little bit, but before you get to look in into Exodus chapter 20, close your Bibles, and we're gonna do a little pop quiz.

Exodus 20 · chapter mention

Um, so what are the Ten Commandments?

Let's see.

We've got every we can lean on each other.

We don't have to individually know the Ten Commandments.

Let's see if we can come up with all ten together.

All right.

No other God, okay.

Uh Jesus is gonna summarize it like that.

That's right, yeah.

But no other God?

What else we got?

Honor your father and mother, okay?

Don't steal, don't kill, don't covet.

Don't commit adultery.

Okay, Jesus is gonna summarize it like that.

Uh any others?

Keep the Sabbath, alright?

Do not commit adultery, okay?

What'd you say?

Don't lie, don't bear false witness.

Yeah, excuse me.

I have the King James kind of memorized in my head.

Uh yes, okay.

You guys are doing good.

Good job on the pop quiz.

Um don't make what okay, don't make idols.

All right.

Um, and uh don't serve any other god.

Don't know, don't worship any other god.

Okay, oh, I think I think we got them all.

I let me make sure.

I've got a cheat sheet here.

Um I think you said it all.

Okay, oh, we didn't say it all.

There's one.

Don't take my name in vain.

Well done, John.

Uh uh, like these these ten that you may have grown up with if you were in Sunday school, uh they feel a little familiar.

Maybe you've heard conversations as you've gotten older about each one of them separately.

Then we hear about Jesus kind of summarizing them.

There's been some questions that Jesus gets about them.

And so what I want to do for the next few weeks is let's focus on a few of them as we go through them.

Let's focus on them and study them.

Moses, he he eventually, if you didn't know, Moses eventually makes it out of Egypt.

He brings all the people out of Egypt.

Um, and it wasn't really easy.

There were a lot of bugs and a lot of blood, and there ends up being this passage through the sea, and we're going to get to some of that story.

And three months into this uh journey, they make it to a mountain, and they begin to be called into uh uh to worship.

And so God is there, the people are at the base of the mountain, and in chapter 19, Moses has a conversation with God, and I'll pick up in verse 5.

Now, if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all the nations, will you read this with me?

You will be my treasured possession.

That's remarkable.

Although the whole earth is mine, you will be my uh for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

These are the words you are to speak to the Israelite.

So God speaks to Moses, and then Moses runs to the people and says, Okay, this is what God is saying, this is what's on the table.

And then all the people are like, We're in, we'll do everything that you say.

Moses runs back to God, says, Hey, they're all in.

What do you want to do now?

And Moses goes back and forth between God and the people, and he becomes this mediator.

He begins to tell them, this is what God is expecting of you, and this is, and then he'll go back to God.

This is what the people's reply is.

Then God says to Moses, Okay, I'm coming down in a dense cloud, like driving through Afton Mountain.

The next time you drive through Afton and there's a lot of clouds, I want you to think about this scene.

The clouds are on the mountain so that the people will hear me speaking, and they will be with you and will always put their trust in you.

Sometimes we forget that the people were all there at the base of the mountain as God speaks to them.

And he begins to speak to them.

And the clouds come, and the thunder and lightning happen, and the smoke and the mountains shake.

And God speaks.

So would you stand with me as I read these words?

God speaks to the people.

That's also to wake you up a little bit.

If you're able to stand.

Exodus chapter 20, verse 1 through 6.

Exodus 20:1–6

And God spoke all these words.

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

You shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make up for yourselves an image in the form of anything in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters below.

You shall not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.

But showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me, and keep my commandments.

You may be seated.

The very first line it says, God speaks, which is super remarkable because what the people were doing all in the ancient Near East is wondering what do the gods expect of us?

What did they want from us?

And how are we know how do we know we're even appeasing that what they want?

And so they are constantly doing different things in different lands, serving different gods and worshiping different gods.

And here we have Yahweh who says, Listen, I'm gonna start this conversation.

Um without you having to wonder what my expectations are, I'm gonna share it with you.

I'm gonna just speak this into you.

And so God begins to speak, just like in Genesis, where God spoke and all the things happened.

God speaks to this people surrounding this mountain and says, This is the truth.

But before we get into like all the do's and don'ts and the now shalls and shall nots, uh, I think there's a really important truth that we have to hold on to right at the beginning of this.

It's something that you have to pay attention to uh from the foundation of this whole story.

It's the relationship that Yahweh establishes right at the beginning.

He begins to introduce himself and then begins to tell them who they are.

Before any commandment is given to them, before uh God says, this is what you do and you don't do, right back in Egypt, God right away shows his character by being gracious.

God doesn't come down from heaven and say, oh, the Egyptians are under the slavery, or the Israelites are under the slavery, therefore I need to give them ten commandments to see if they can do these commandments.

And if I come back and see, oh, they're doing these commandments, I'm going to rescue them out of slavery.

Instead, what God does is he first rescues them out of slavery, he brings them out of this bondage, and then he begins to speak these words of this is how you should live then.

Without them having to do anything, God chooses to rescue them first and then invites them into a life with him.

Sometimes we humans get it the other way around.

We think we have to perform first before we can get God's attention.

We think we have to do these lists of things before God will actually receive us into the family.

But what God does, and even in the Old Testament, because sometimes we think, oh, the God of the New Testament is not the same as the one in the Old Testament.

God in the Old Testament is just as gracious.

He first says, I invite you into this life with me.

Let me rescue you out of bondage.

And we see that in the Exodus story.

That there's this invitation to follow him, to join him in a covenant, a promised life.

And now it's up to them to respond to his invitation.

Israelites have to decide whether or not they want that.

And what God does is He invites them into a life of freedom.

Once they say, okay, I want to be in on this.

He invites them into this life of freedom that takes them out of bondage.

Because as the story goes, we'll learn in the coming weeks, they keep wanting to go back to just be enslaved by the Egyptians rather than being there in the presence of God.

So God speaks these words in verse 2 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, and into the land of freedom.

And then God follows this up with a second commandment.

He tells them, Listen, you can't form anything to look like me.

You could try to carve something and carve it out of stone or carve it out of wood.

It will never ever represent me.

And so therefore, just give up that whole idea altogether.

But we humans like to make idols out of things, don't we?

I mean, we like to make idols out of people.

We like to make idols out of careers, out of Bitcoin, out of politicians.

We like making idols out of comfort and a life of ease.

We just are prone to that.

We even can make some idols out of Jesus sometimes.

Like we we sometimes can receive Jesus and then make him into our image so that he will be okay with what we want.

And so what God is gonna say is, no, you can't make an idol out of me, and you can't make an idol out of Jesus.

Here's how I'm gonna, I'm gonna show you who I am.

And out of that we begin to worship them.

So God speaks and asks them, hey, don't worship anybody else, and don't make any idols, because they'll never satisfy you.

But he invites us into a relationship with him.

A few centuries later, uh God speaks again.

This time it's not on stone tablets.

This time the word becomes flesh and lives among us.

The living word Jesus is everything God has to say to humanity.

I wanted to go back to that Colossians passage that uh Cindy read earlier.

And as I read it, I want you to pick up on the tones of the Exodus story.

Like pick up on words that feel like the Exodus story a little bit, of what we just read a little bit ago.

In Colossians chapter 1, verse 13.

Colossians 1:13

For Jesus has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves, in whom we have redemption for the forgiveness of sins.

The Son is the image of the invisible God.

And in Jesus' very first message, when he began to preach to the people in a synagogue, he had he says some things that feel like the Exodus story as well.

In Luke chapter 4, verse 18, he says, The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.

Luke 4:18

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recover the sight for the blind and to set the oppressed free.

This freedom that Jesus offers is under the bondage of sin.

Sin that began way back in the garden.

And here we have Jesus, God in the flesh, saying, There's nothing that you could do to merit my grace.

But I'm here to rescue you from darkness.

The very thing that's out to destroy you.

That you might have life.

And that you might have it more abundantly.

But then Jesus will call them into a life that they should live.

And it will feel at times like dying sometimes.

But that dying always produces freedom.

And this flourishing that Jesus would call us into would be the abundant life within God's way.

If you know the story about Peter, Peter struggled with his identity, about who he was.

He often struggled with it.

And Jesus had to tell him directly, like, this is who you are, Peter.

Live in this.

This is who I've called you into.

And Peter, he gets it throughout his life.

He slowly gets it of who Jesus is.

And at one point, he feels like he needs to tell the church who they are.

And what he has to say feels a lot like the words that God spoke over the Israelites in the Exodus story.

Listen to what he has to say in 1 Peter 2.9.

But you, you are a chosen people.

You are a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession.

That you may declare the praises of him who has called you out of darkness and into his wonderful light.

Who am I?

I join him with Penny.

I am an adopted son of the Creator.

Where do I fit in?

I fit in this beautifully messy church.

And I mean the church as a whole, you're not all messy.

What is my purpose?

My purpose is to love God and love my neighbor.

That I may become like Jesus for the sake of my neighbor.

The very one that our Creator loves.

That is who we are.

Would you pray with me?

Father, the uh we know there's so much that wants to steal our um our identity in you.

To shake our foundation of who we are and to cause us to worry and be full of anxiety and to believe false stories.

So God, would you rescue us from those things?

Reminding us that we as followers of Jesus are daughters and sons of the king.

Would you remind us of that today?