The Book of Exodus - Week 1: October 4, 2026

Neighborhood public school, which we love.

We love their school so much.

But I'm telling you, if they get me sick one more time before Christmas, we are homesteading.

Anyway, I'm glad to be here today.

Excited to kick off this new series in the book of Exodus.

And I did something I don't usually do.

I wrote a story.

I don't write stories.

This might not be my best idea ever.

But this week I wrote a story.

And I would like to read it to you to kick off our sermon series.

You'll find, I think, that this is not exactly my story.

Parts of it may feel very familiar.

But here it is.

The young Israelite woman had been happy, relatively happy anyway.

Slavery was the only life she had known, same as her mother and her grandmother before her.

It wasn't an easy existence by any means.

It was a life with more than its fair share of pain, but there was happiness woven throughout it.

She'd gotten married and there was a celebration.

Then her belly began to swell, showing signs of the new life growing within, and there had been more celebration.

But there had also been rumors, hushed and terrible rumors, passed around the village by the local midwives.

Rumors of a nightmare come to life, rumors of what might happen to her baby if it isn't a girl.

As the sweat beads up on her brow and the midwives call for the final push of labor, the baby emerges, and the young Israelite woman sees a pained look cross the faces of the midwives, and she knows.

Her husband and the midwives scramble, trying to assemble a plan.

The woman hears the scramble.

It mixes with the sounds of her newborn baby son's cries.

But she also hears something else.

Someone is at the door.

The Egyptians are drawn to the news of the baby like flies to Carrion.

And as they force their way into the house, the rumor she's heard of a nightmare come to life plays on repeat in her mind.

It's the voice of the Egyptian king decreeing: every Hebrew boy that is born must be thrown into the Nile.

The young woman wishes desperately that they would just take her too.

She would welcome the closing of the water over her head.

She would rather go with her baby and share his fate than be separated from him, left to carry the crushing burden of grief and loss for her lifetime.

But the Egyptians take the child and leave the mother, just as they've been rumored to do and will do again and again.

The days slip into weeks, then months, and then pile into years, and for the young Israelite woman, water has become a symbol of her grief and loss, a symbol of death.

The happiness that was once woven throughout the fabric of her difficult life has been pulled loose, and all that's left is the pain and the dust and the toil of a slave's life under Egyptian whips.

There are no more celebrations for her.

And always there's the water there to remind her.

The uncontrollable chaos and evil surging all around her, day in and day out, year after year.

She's a much older woman when the man comes.

He's a Midianite man from the east.

He's one of her people, but she doesn't know him.

The man gathers the elders of her village and he tells them, Yahweh, the God of your fathers, has appeared to me and given me a message.

He wants you to know that he's been watching over you.

He has seen what's been done to you by the Egyptians.

He sees your misery, and he is concerned.

He's going to deliver you from slavery in Egypt.

When the message from the man reaches the woman, she feels the numbness in her heart change to something else, but it's not a softening.

No, her numbness morphs into anger.

Really, she thinks.

Really.

God sees, does he?

And he's concerned.

Where was his concern when I needed it?

And the woman feels a growing animosity toward God and toward the man.

And it doesn't help that everything the man does makes things worse.

He marches into the palace and demands that the king release her people.

Who does he think he is?

The king is so insulted that he forces her people to gather the straw that was once provided to them for their work, effectively doubling their labor.

And when they succumb to their exhaustion, out come the whips.

Really, the woman thinks.

God sees and is concerned.

And the anger she has toward God and the man continues to grow.

And then one day, somebody tells her about the Nile.

There's a new rumor of a new nightmare come to life.

The dead fish and the putrid metallic smell, the strange red color and the undrinkable water, the water that has been an unavoidable reminder of her grief and loss.

The Nile has become blood.

God has turned it into blood.

It's almost as if he's declaring judgment, as if he's saying to the Egyptians, I know what you did.

But it isn't just the Nile.

It's every stream and canal and pond, every bathtub and pitcher of water, blood.

And then come the frogs.

Enough frogs to stop traffic and smother crops, frogs filling Egyptian kitchens and bedrooms and pantries.

The whole world, it would seem, has become a wet, green, croaking mass of frogs.

What on earth is happening?

The woman thinks.

Wasn't the blood enough?

But the elders of her village are passing around a new message.

God is pleading with the king of Egypt.

God is giving the Egyptians an opportunity to repent.

And a fresh anger emerges in the woman's heart.

Giving them an opportunity to repent.

In fact, there will be seven more opportunities.

There are the gnats and swarming flies, the dead and dying animals, the festering boils, the hailstorm.

The woman watches out her front door as the hailstones pummel Egyptian homes and hurtle down on Egyptian heads, while her neighborhood remains miraculously untouched.

Then the locusts come and devour all that's left after the flies and the hail, and when none of these atrocities move the king of Egypt to repentance, when the complete unraveling of his world fails to move him, the darkness comes.

An opaque, impenetrable curtain of darkness lasting three days.

Finally, the man from the east appears again with a new message.

This parade of horrors is about to reach its peak.

The firstborn sons of Egypt are going to die.

A shiver runs down the woman's spine when she hears this message.

It hits just a little too close to home.

But now her anger has fresh fuel.

Where, she wonders, were my nine avenues of escape?

Why, she thinks to herself, would God give so many chances to such evil people?

Where were my chances?

Well, the man has peculiar instructions for the people.

God says that if they'll follow these peculiar instructions, he'll protect them when the parade of horrors reaches its peak.

God will see the lamb's blood painted on their doorposts.

He'll see and he'll be concerned, and he won't allow the adversary to enter their homes and strike down their firstborn sons.

After nine atrocious miracles, God is still protecting them.

He's still providing a way out.

Many years later, when the Holy Spirit inspires someone to write a definitive version of this sacred story, without a single dot of an eye or cross of a T out of place, with every word meticulously and miraculously chosen, the author will quote God as saying, The blood will be assigned for you on the houses where you are, and when I see the blood, I will protect you, I will defend you.

The God of the universe, for a moment, it would seem, loosens his grip on the order of his creation and allows the adversary to enter the homes of the Egyptians to do exactly what the adversary always does: steal and kill and destroy.

But even then there are rules.

God will protect every house covered by the blood of the Lamb, whether it's Hebrew or Egyptian.

And when the adversary does what the adversary always does, something finally breaks in the heart of the king of Egypt, at least for a moment, the stubborn, hard-hearted, relentless king relents exactly as the man said he would, exactly as God said he would.

The Israelite woman and her people, along with a not small number of Egyptians, follow the man, Moses is his name, out of Egypt and toward who knows what.

But the woman's mind is still busy with questions.

Why didn't God rescue her child?

Why was he so patient with Egypt?

Why would God include them in his mercy?

A gift of salvation, and all they have to do is believe it?

It doesn't make any sense.

The questions roil and churn in her mind as her people begin their journey into the unknown.

She hears their murmuring, mixing with the sound of the roiling and churning body of water that now lays straight ahead of them, the sea of reeds, an impassable body of water.

Water again.

But she also hears something else.

There's an army coming up behind them.

The king of Egypt, it would appear, has changed his mind.

The woman's grief and loss and anger, held inside for a lifetime, begin to simmer and then to boil over as the words come pouring out.

Were there not enough graves for us in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die?

What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt?

She's looking at the man, she's looking at Moses and shouting, Didn't we tell you to just leave us alone?

It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert.

Well, having lodged her complaint, a calm comes over the woman.

It makes sense, really, that this is how it would end, with the Egyptians behind her and the water ahead of her, pinned in by the twin causes of all her grief.

She sighs, resigns herself to her fate, and closes her eyes.

Her resignation is interrupted by a spray of seawater across her face.

She opens her eyes and sees that the whole sea has been split, torn in two like a curtain.

The impassable water has become a passable highway.

The water that has, for the woman, represented evil's foothold in her world is helpless when confronted by the majesty of the God of her people.

As the woman passes through the walls of water, hemmed in by a crowd of her own people, she rubs shoulders with a young woman she doesn't recognize, a young Egyptian woman carrying her Egyptian baby boy.

A woman who accepted God's protection, who was included in his mercy and who took his way out.

The Israelite woman begins to think that perhaps God didn't engineer her grief, but perhaps he did engineer her way out.

And her heart begins to feel something new.

It isn't anger, and it isn't exactly joy either.

It's something like hope.

And for the first time in a very long time, the woman begins to pray.

Many hundreds of years and many hundreds of Passover celebrations later, a man named Yeshua Hanotzri, or Jesus who is from Nazareth, would redefine the meaning of this story around himself.

Like Moses, he miraculously escaped a genocide of baby boys.

Like Moses, he arrived on the scene at a time when his people were living in oppression.

Like Moses, he wandered in the desert before coming to his people with a message from God, a message of liberation.

But unlike anyone else before him, Jesus understood himself to be the Lamb whose blood would trigger God's protection against the stealing, killing, destroying work of the adversary.

It is Jesus who is from Nazareth who shows us that our God is not a distant puppet master coordinating the occasional plague or disaster just to show off.

Our God is love.

So much so, in fact, that he would come low, entering the chaos and turmoil of a broken world and succumbing to death, the work of the adversary, so that we wouldn't have to, including us in his mercy, including us in his way out.

It is my belief that, like the sea of reeds, the loss and grief of our lives can be split in two.

The impassable water can become a passable highway, the blood of Jesus, the dry ground, giving us a way out of the chaos and evil and into something altogether new.

The book of Exodus is only the second book in the story in which we are still living.

It's our story.

And one of the many things it shows us, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, is that the chaos and the evil in your life, the things you've done and the things that have been done to you, are not an impassable sea.

Jesus, the Passover Lamb who takes away the sins of the world, can speak, split the waters, and provide a way through from hopelessness to something like hope.

At the end, let's pray.

Heavenly Father, Lord God, we thank you for your good word.

We thank you that it is living and true.

We thank you for the sacrifice of your Son Jesus, whose blood makes a way for us.

We thank you for the gift of your Holy Spirit who helps us to understand your word and know what it means to us.

We invite you to be here with us in the rest of our time together.

And pray your blessing over everyone here in the name of Jesus.

Amen.

Okay.

So, as I mentioned earlier, uh we're beginning a new sermon series today on the book of Exodus, eight weeks.

And I struggled for a long time to wrap my mind around how to start a series like this because, to be honest, I don't think there is another story quite like it.

Uh this is like the central story of the people in the Bible.

It demands our patience and it defies our understanding of how a story works and what a story should hope to accomplish.

But for all of that, the Exodus story shows us, I think, in bright, bold clarity, who God is and who we are in relation to Him.

Exodus shows us a piece of good news that is present all throughout the Old Testament.

The news is that God is involved with us, that he sees and he's concerned.

In a sense, the heart of the story takes place in just a few chapters of text.

In another sense, the story begins with Joseph in Genesis 41 and it ends in Leviticus chapter 9 with the ordination of the priests.

Leviticus 9 · chapter mention

But in another sense, it's the gospel story.

It's almost like a prototype of God's redemptive work through Jesus.

And in yet another sense, it's the whole story of humankind.

It's our story, and we're still living in it.

We're going to talk more about that later.

But regardless of how you look at it, it's a story that the ancient Israelites knew by heart.

It was told and told and told again, repeated and detailed and referred to.

It pops up all over the scripture, which is why I finally decided to start this series by just rewriting the story, by retelling it, kind of in the spirit of what writers all throughout the Bible did.

They knew that this story had bearing on everything they said and did.

And so they told it again and again and again.

It's told in Joshua 24, in Psalm 105, in Isaiah chapter 43.

Isaiah 43 · chapter mention

Let's look at this.

Here's a version I found that I like.

This is Deuteronomy chapter 26.

Deuteronomy 26 · chapter mention

This is an instruction to the Israelites for how to bring their offerings to the temple.

Okay?

A little instruction for how to bring your offerings to the temple.

It says this when you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you as a special possession, and you've conquered it and settled there, put some of the first produce from each crop you harvest into a basket and bring it to the designated place of worship, the place the Lord your God chooses for his name to be honored.

Go to the priest in charge at that time and say to him, With this gift I acknowledge to the Lord your God that I have entered the land he swore to our ancestors he would give us.

The priest will then take the basket from you, uh take the basket from your hand and set it before the altar of the Lord your God.

Okay?

That sounds easy enough.

I think I can You must then say, Oh, okay, we're not finished.

In the presence of the Lord your God, my ancestor Jacob was a wandering Aramean who went to live as a foreigner in Egypt.

His family arrived, few in number, but in Egypt they became a large and mighty nation.

When the Egyptians oppressed and humiliated us by making us their slaves, we cried out to the Lord, the God of our ancestors.

He heard our cries and saw our hardship, toil, and oppression.

So the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a strong hand and a powerful arm, with overwhelming terror and with miraculous signs and wonders.

He brought us to this place and gave us this land flowing with milk and honey.

And now, O Lord, I have brought you the first portion of the harvest you have given me from the ground.

Then place the produce before the Lord your God and bow to the ground and worship before him.

Right?

This story is so formative, it's so important to the people, they're keeping it in mind, even just when they bring their offerings to church.

It's like they've just got it in the front of their mind all the time.

It's everywhere.

We're gonna mainly focus on how this story is told in the book of Exodus, okay, for the next eight weeks.

And here's how it's told.

Here's how it's it's organized anyway.

If you would like to know where we're going in the series, this is it, okay?

Cards on the table.

Show us this outline, would you, Isaac?

We're gonna look at the whole book of Exodus in seven sections.

Now, this is interesting to me because I think it points to the literary construction of the book.

But the first two sections tell the saga.

Okay?

In the first section, Moses is delivered from Pharaoh, and in the second section, uh, Moses is commissioned by Yahweh, by God.

Then, interestingly enough, the same pattern repeats, but writ large for the whole Hebrew people.

So then we have the saga of the Hebrews, which is gonna be told in five more sections, in which the same thing happens to them that happens to Moses.

The Hebrews are delivered from Pharaoh.

It's gonna take us three sections to cover that part of the story.

And then, like Moses, the Hebrews will be commissioned by God.

That'll be the last two sections.

The story is very dense in the beginning, and then it's a little less dense narrative-wise as we go along.

So you might notice we'll be covering larger pieces of the book in each section.

Does that all make sense?

Okay.

Here's the thing: the more I read the Bible, the more impressed I am with how thoughtfully and creatively the books in it are designed.

These writers were brilliant.

I don't think it hurt that they were writing under the influence of the Holy Spirit, but I also don't think it hurt that they just organized stories differently than we do.

We tend to have what C.S.

Lewis called chronological snobbery.

As then we kind of feel like the best way, or maybe even the only right way, to tell a story is to give us the facts in chronological order, okay?

But the writers of the Bible just had different ways of organizing things.

And I think this brings us to a good point to think of, not just about Exodus, but really about all of the Old Testament that I think might help us as we start in on this kind of weird, complex story.

Exodus, I mean, it's like a lot of the Bible, it can be really confusing to me.

I often am reading the Old Testament going, what am I really supposed to get out of this, right?

I don't want to take everything literally because I'm not the intended audience for a lot of it, but I sure don't want to be dismissive and miss something that the Lord has for me to learn.

And so uh it's hard to know what to do with it sometimes.

And so I have this idea that maybe there are these three frameworks or three dimensions we'll call them to the story.

And I want to encourage us not to forget about any of them, but try to keep all three dimensions in mind as we read and we study this story in the coming weeks.

First, there's a literary dimension, which that's what we were just talking about.

How the book was written and organized as a piece of literature.

What genre is this?

What themes or phrases show up repeatedly, right?

You gotta go back to like uh writing a middle school book report.

Um, I'm not sure.

We we might do this or we might not.

We we might geek out in uh an upcoming week and talk about something called chiasm.

Chiasm is a literary method employed by many of the writers of the Bible where you put the most important thing that happens in the middle of the story, and then you frame it in with events that mirror each other.

It's not chronological at all.

It's a strange way.

Way to us to tell a story, but it's a brilliant way to tell a story if you want it to be easily remembered by people who can't read.

Right?

So there's a literary dimension, okay?

There's also an historical dimension.

Now, I believe that this story is meant to be believed as an historical event.

Okay, it's not poetry, it's not allegory or prophecy.

It's a true story written down as an historical document.

So we can see it with that framework as well.

Like, where is this?

When is this?

Who are these people, historically speaking, etc.

Then lastly, and I think most importantly, there's a theological dimension.

I believe this story is meant to tell us something about who God is and what his plan has always been for humanity.

My point, though, is that if we only focus on one of these dimensions, things go kind of sideways, right?

So I could end up studying it academically like I'm a literary critic, and then I just don't get anything out of it for myself.

Or we could minimize its weirdness, right?

All the miracles and the plagues, and we could overfocus on its historical reliability.

Or I could ignore both of those things and overfocus on the theological dimension, but then I don't have any context for what I'm learning about God.

And it's tempting then to be like, boy, God seems real angry and kind of mean.

I don't like this at all.

But I think if we're willing to attend to all three of these dimensions, okay, I think we can end up with an interpretation of Exodus and any Old Testament text that is accurate and solid and truthful and maybe even helpful to us.

I think that's important.

Okay, so as I was preparing for this series, I tried to do this really pastory thing of being like, what is the main theme of this book?

Okay, how are we going to boil it down to one main theme that we can all learn from?

Then I quickly realized that either I'm not very good at really pastory things, which is quite possible, or this book is just way too brilliantly inspired and designed and written for me to be comfortable with boiling it down to just one main theme.

Okay, so instead, I want to just show you, again, cards on the table, all of the themes that I've found in the book of Exodus.

And I'm sure there are others.

This is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

Uh, but these are the ones that I saw repeated all throughout this story.

And rather than trying to funnel eight weeks of teaching through one of these themes, right?

I want to help us to be aware of all of them because uh I want us to recognize them when they come up, and because I don't know what's gonna speak to you.

I don't know which of these themes is gonna sort of rise at the top as being like what you need to hear in this series, okay?

Uh so here they are.

All these themes are gonna show up several times throughout this book.

The first theme is creation, as in the creation story.

Um, in a way, the whole book of Exodus can be read as a retelling of the creation story from Genesis.

This may seem like a stretch, but Genesis is all about God bringing the material world he created into functionality, into order, a garden, right?

And then blessing it with his presence.

Well, the book of Exodus is all about God bringing the formless and void nation he created into functionality, into order and blessing them with his presence.

I think this theme also calls forward to New Testament writings about us being a new creation, about being born again and blessed with God's presence, blessed with his own Holy Spirit living in us.

Okay?

All right, second theme that jumped out to me is women.

Exodus has sprinkled throughout women working within their sphere of influence to resist injustice, often without any specific instruction from God.

And just like God, they see and are concerned and are moved to action.

Now, a bunch of them are even mentioned by name, which is kind of unusual.

Miriam, Saporah, Shipra, Puah.

And there are others who aren't mentioned by name, like Moses' mother, Pharaoh's daughter.

But as we'll see, uh they move the story forward at key moments.

And later in the story, we're gonna see that these women are also included in the covenant and in the law in ways that really cut against the grain of how women were seen in other ancient Near Eastern cultures.

Okay.

All right, uh, another theme.

This is the one that quickly emerged as my personal favorite.

Like, this is what I needed to hear from the book of Exodus this time around, and that's the theme of identity.

I think this theme is especially important if you believe, as I do, that identity is the single most important issue, question, concern facing young people today.

Who am I?

What are my options, and who gets to decide?

Right?

Now, Moses has these same questions about his own identity, and they surface all throughout his saga.

Uh, we'll talk more about this when we get to it in the story, but I find it really fascinating that when Moses asks God, Who am I?

God answers with, I will be with you.

Ultimately, it's like we are whoever God says we are because he is with us.

This is how Moses' identity was shaped.

This is how the identity of Israel was established.

God was with them.

I will be your God and you will be my people.

Right?

We see this theme come up a lot in the book.

Another theme that shows up, uh, not quite as often, is prayer and intercession.

I think this is cool.

God is gonna invite Moses into his own thought process, and Moses is gonna participate by praying.

They share their feelings with each other like they're friends.

It's really quite unusual, uh, but also maybe it's not.

There's an element to it that seems like God is testing Moses, and there's an element that seems like Moses is actually convincing God to change his mind.

But regardless, there's a recurring theme that the more time we spend face to face with God, that there's a more literal translation of the phrase that's used would be mouth to mouth.

Like the more time we spend with that kind of closeness to God, the more we become like him.

We're gonna see that theme come up a few times.

I kind of already mentioned this one, but one of the major themes that stuck out to me is just the literary construction of the book.

I have to be perfectly honest, I felt like I was in way over my head preparing for this sermon series.

I'm not a I don't speak Hebrew, I'm not a Bible scholar, I went to journalism school, right?

And I play the drums.

So I took a class, I took an online class on the book of Exodus.

One of the best things I could have done.

Hooray for learning, right?

And the class was taught by a woman named Carmen Imez, who she is a biblical scholar, and she's one of the foremost authorities on the book of Exodus that we have.

And so the class was very, very helpful.

But there was this other guy in the class who said something that I thought was so funny, I wrote it down.

He said, reading Exodus is a little bit like watching a heist movie.

You know what I mean?

Like a like an action caper movie.

But if the crooks steal a car and get chased by the cops in the opening scene and then spend the whole rest of the movie reading the car's manual.

That was pretty good.

Now, if you read the whole book, if you if you if in this series you read all of Exodus, you will see what I mean.

It's tempting to see it as being like a few jam-packed chapters and then a whole bunch of boring chapters.

But I'm telling you, the book is so unbelievably well constructed.

Every time things slow down or you start getting bogged down in all the rules and the laws, we're gonna try to zoom back out and look at the literary construction of the book so we can see what it's actually trying to do.

Okay.

Another theme, we're almost to the end, another theme that we see repeatedly is that of bearing God's name.

Now, this might be the richest, deepest theme in the book of Exodus.

The idea is that if you belong to Yahweh, you should know his character, you should know what he's like, follow his instructions, and then you should live in a way that reflects him accurately.

Bear his name well, steward his reputation, represent him accurately.

Does that make sense?

God gives the people his name, and then he instructs them to bear his name, to carry his reputation to the rest of the nations.

It's one of the Ten Commandments, so we'll talk about it more uh when we get to the passage on the Ten Commandments.

Don't bear the Lord's name in vain, which I think we'll probably find means more than uh just not saying Jesus is a swear word.

God gives them uh the law so that they'll know how to bear his name well.

It's a high and holy calling to bear God's name, but that's what God calls his people to do, to represent him accurately to the world.

All right, the last theme I saw, and this is sort of a bigger picture idea, okay, but this is something that the fine folks at the Bible Project, which is a resource we use often, they refer to this as the Exodus way.

Now, their scholars posit that the book of Exodus is simply the first iteration of a pattern that repeats all throughout Scripture the whole way through.

And they've made a little video to explain this idea.

So, in the spirit of telling and telling and retelling and rethinking this story, right?

We started the sermon with a retelling of the story.

I'd like to end today with yet another retelling of the story.

This one from the Bible Project.

I promise this one's more lighthearted than mine, so don't worry.

But let's watch this short video, okay?

I love that we're gonna get into this story together.

That the story is it's gonna feel like it's this big and also like it's this big at the same time.

That's really wonderful.

Okay, so we're gonna spend the next eight weeks with this story.

It's it's our story.

Um, just a reminder growth groups are kicking off this week.

All right, so if you're not already in a growth group, but you would like the chance to study this story with a few other people, talk about it as you go, we'd be happy to help you find a growth group, but still not too late.

We also have a connect class that's actually starting today, across the hall, right after this service, during the next service.

Uh, there'll be a class.

That's a great opportunity to take a much deeper dive into this book than what we can do in here.

Today, for instance, Jude McDaniel, who's teaching that class, is gonna be focusing on answering simple little questions like when exactly did this story take place?

How do we date it?

Can we trust it if we can't date it?

Is the story true or a myth?

Why aren't we given Pharaoh's name?

You know, really simple little things like that.

Uh, she's also gonna begin exploring the similarities between Moses and Jesus.

So there are a lot of opportunities to dig into this story, to see what we can learn from it, see what happens.

The whole point, as far as I'm concerned, is to recognize that we are invited into a story that, in a sense, begins here in Exodus.

And that like the ancient Israelites in the story, we're invited to bear God's name, to carry his reputation, to obey his teaching, to count on his presence, and to represent him to the world.

And I hope that you'll find something in the book of Exodus that's more than a compelling story, though it definitely is that.

I hope that as we read the story of Moses in the Hebrews, that we'll see God revealing himself to us too, that we'll hear God telling us what our identity is, that we will know that Yahweh is God, that he will be our God, and we will be his people.

And I hope we'll be encouraged as we see patterns in this story that bear out in great cosmic stories of humankind, but as well as in the little details and nuances of our own lives.

Well, before we uh come back to worship together, we're gonna take communion today.

Um we don't take communion every week at Connect Church, we do about once a month, and today's the day we're doing that.

You don't have to be a member of the church to do it.

Just if you're a follower of Jesus, you're welcome to take communion with us today.

Um, last week Nate was Nate was talking a little bit about kind of our history as being a Wesleyan church.

He talked about a couple people who are sort of like founders of this movement, the Wesleyan church, one of them being John Wesley.

I found something kind of cool this week.

Cool if you're a nerdy guy like me, I guess.

Uh John Wesley himself wrote a liturgy for communion.

And so I found it, and I would like to read it to you guys today.

So this is like more than 250 years old, but this is what John Wesley would read when he led people in taking communion.

So would you all stand with us?

The liturgy will be on the screen, and then there will be a part coming up where we can uh participate together.

I'll give you a cue.

Okay, here it is.

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, who of your tender mercy did give your only Son, Jesus Christ, to suffer death upon the cross for our redemption, who made there a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world, and did institute, and in his holy gospel command us to continue, a perpetual memory of his precious death until his coming again.

Hear us, O merciful Father, we most humbly beseech you, and grant that we, receiving these your creatures of bread and wine, according to your Son, our Savior Jesus Christ's holy institution, in remembrance of his death and passion, may be partakers of his most blessed body and blood.

Who in the same night that he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you, and do this in remembrance of me.

Likewise, after supper, he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, Drink you all of this, for this is my blood of the New Testament, which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins.

Do this as often as you shall drink it in remembrance of me.

Let's pray this prayer together, as Jesus taught us to pray.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever and ever.

Amen.

Would you also like to hold your hands out to receive this benediction, this prayer of blessing?

Again, this is part of uh John Wesley's Communion liturgy.

May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God and of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always.

Amen.