Month: October 2024

Digging in Deeper: Exodus 35:1-3

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“Moses assembled the entire Israelite community and said to them, ‘These are the things that the Lord has commanded you to do: For six days work is to be done, but on the seventh day you are to have a holy day, a Sabbath of complete rest to the Lord. Anyone who does work on it must be executed. Do not light a fire in any of your homes on the Sabbath day.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

If you listen to certain preachers long enough, you’ll start to hear the same points raised over and over again. There are a handful of ideas I have talked about with my own congregation in a certain way so many times that when I start talking about them, some of the folks in the room can finish my sentence for me. Everybody has something about which they are especially passionate. This passion will show itself through their words and actions. It will become the theme of their life. Everything they do, it seems, is filtered through the lens of whatever it is. Hopefully the passion is a good one, but whether it is or not, it is going to be definitional for them because that’s the nature of passion. As we get started on the home stretch of Exodus today, we are reminded yet again about one of God’s passions. Let’s talk yet again about the Sabbath.

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Morning Musing: Exodus 34:29-35

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“As Moses descended from Mount Sinai — with the two tablets of the testimony in his hands as he descended the mountain — he did not realize that the skin of his face shone as a result of his speaking with the Lord. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face shone! They were afraid to come near him. But Moses called out to them, so Aaron and all the leaders of the community returned to him, and Moses spoke to them. Afterward all the Israelites came near, and he commanded them to do everything the Lord had told him on Mount Sinai. When Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil over his face. But whenever Moses went before the Lord to speak with him, he would remove the veil until he came out. After he came out, he would tell the Israelites what he had been commanded, and the Israelites would see that Moses’s face was radiant. Then Moses would put the veil over his face again until he went to speak with the Lord.” (CSB – Read the chapter) ‬‬

Do you remember the first time you fell in love? I’m talking about high school – or maybe even junior high – puppy love. With a bit of life experience under your belt, you quickly recognize that’s not the real thing, but don’t bother trying to convince the starry-eyed youth of that. You’ll be wasting your breath. Thinking back to that time, when you got to spend some time around your crush…excuse me…the love of your life…you weren’t the same as you were before. You were a little spacey. You probably had a sappy grin on your face. Maybe you even whistled a tune. Anybody who was around could tell that you had been around your heartthrob. You weren’t the same as you were before. When Moses had spent some time with the Lord, he wasn’t the same, and everybody could see it. Let’s see what kind of sense we can make out of this interesting end to the chapter.

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Digging in Deeper: Exodus 34:27-28

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“The Lord also said to Moses, ‘Write down these words, for I have made a covenant with you and with Israel based on these words.’ Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he did not eat food or drink water. He wrote the Ten Commandments, the words of the covenant, on the tablets.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Words matter. This is something we understand fairly well today. If something isn’t written down, there’s no sure record beyond our memory that it happened. When you make a big purchase like a home or a car, you have to sign a contract that likely runs into the thousands of words to guarantee you’ll pay for them or they’ll take them away from you. God’s covenant with Israel was recorded in words so that the people would remember it for sure. Let’s talk about why His word matters and what we see going on here.

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Doubling Down

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We have talked about sacrifice. We have talked about surrender. We have talked about commitment. When we have pursued these three essential elements of seeing God’s kingdom advancing work increase and expand in our midst, there’s just one thing left to do: Celebrate. But how we celebrate matters. As we wrap up this teaching series and enter together into the glorious future to which God is leading us, let’s talk about the best way to celebrate kingdom successes. Spoiler alert: It is an entirely more active process than we might imagine.

Doubling Down

So, my baseball team is not playing in the World Series right now. We could have. Our pitching was certainly good enough. Our manager definitely deserves great credit for his part of the effort. The Royals are one of three teams in baseball history to have gone from losing more than 100 games in a season to making the Playoffs the next. That kind of a turnaround doesn’t happen on talent alone. And for most of the season, we hit the ball pretty well. We were way ahead in the runs scored versus runs allowed statistic. Almost 100 ahead in fact. That was a pretty dramatic change from last year all by itself. In fact, we scored more total runs this season than Cleveland who won the division. If we had won as many games as our runs scored versus runs allowed stat suggested, we would have won the division instead of them. But from the All-Star break forward, we gradually hit the ball less and less, and as a result, we scored fewer and fewer runs. We didn’t do the things that had propelled us to first place in the division more than once earlier in the season. As a result, our success waned. And our Cinderella run ended.

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Digging in Deeper: Habakkuk 3:17-18

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“Though the fig tree does not bud and there is no fruit on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though the flocks disappear from the pen and there are no herds in the stalls, yet I will celebrate in the Lord; I will rejoice in the God of my salvation.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When you are the pastor of a church in a small town, you wind up getting to take part in a whole lot of the normal rhythms of the community. It’s really one of the things I enjoy most about serving in the kind of community where God has planted us. As an example of this delightful part of the job, this afternoon I get the privilege of giving a short devotion to a great group of students before they go to their activities for the evening. When doing this kind of thing, there are all kinds of approaches you can take. I decided on a little different approach than most guys will take. These kids live in a world that is beset by anxiety. Most of the fault of this lies at the feet of social media and a rapidly declining engagement with a genuine faith community. I’m not going to tell them to go to church. But I do aim to give them a little bit of hope in the midst of a world that is often dark and discouraging. As something a little different than our usual Friday fare, here’s what I’m going to say to them.

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