Safely through another week,
God has brought us on our way. Let us now a blessing seek, waiting
in his courts today. Day of all, the week the best,
emblem of eternal rest. Day of all, the week the best,
emblem of eternal rest. While we pray for pardoning grace,
through the dear Redeemer's name, show thy reconciled face, take
away our sin and shame. From our worldly care set free,
may we rest this day in thee. From our worldly care set free,
may we rest this day in thee. Here we come, thy name to praise. Let us feel thy presence near. May thy glory meet our eyes while
we in thy house appear. Here afford us, Lord, a taste
of our everlasting feast. Here afford us, Lord, a taste
of our everlasting feast. May thy gospels' joyful sound
conquer sinners' comfort saints. May the fruits of grace abound
bring relief for all complaints. ? Thus may all our Lord's days
prove ? ? Till we join the church above ? ? Thus may all our Lord's
day prove ? ? Till we join the church above ? Please be seated. Good morning. That is our prayer this morning,
that the Lord will be pleased to meet with us and give us rest
in Christ and give us comfort, knowing that the Lord Jesus has
put away our sins by the sacrifice of himself. We're gonna be in
Judges chapter six, the first hour this morning, and I've titled
this message, A Sinner's Hope, A Sinner's Hope. We are so much
like the Israelites, and yet the Lord gave them hope for the
forgiveness of their sin. And in like manner, he gives
us hope in Christ. Let's pray together. Our gracious, merciful, glorious
Heavenly Father, We do ask that you be pleased
this morning to answer that prayer that we just offered to you in
song. Lord, that this Lord's day would
prove to be a day of grace, a day of mercy, a day of hope, a day
of forgiveness, a day of life. Lord, we ask that you would send
your Holy Spirit in power, that you would open that which no
man can shut, open the windows of heaven, come down and meet
with us. Open thy word and shine your
light on it to reveal the glory of Christ to our hearts. Open
our hearts, open our understanding. Lord, we know that if you open
it, that truly it cannot be shut.
And so, Lord, we're dependent upon you for that blessing and
for that grace. We ask it in Christ's name. Amen. Someone has said that the definition
of insanity is to keep repeating the same thing over and over
and over again and expect a different result. And yet, that is exactly
what sin, disobedience, and unbelief are, spiritual insanity. We keep doing the same thing
over and over and over again, looking away from Christ, trying
to find hope and satisfaction somewhere else. And it is the
nature of the flesh. It's the nature of our old man. And truly, like that demoniac
in the gatherings that the Lord went and delivered and put into
his right mind, we are always in need of being put into our
right mind. The right mind is a saved mind. It is the mind
of Christ. It is a mind that looks to the
Lord Jesus Christ for all of its hope and all of its righteousness
and all of its salvation. Our insane mind is prone to wander
away from the God that we love. And the Lord has given us in
the book of Judges an example of that. enemies of the Israelites
were the Midianites. Midian was the offspring of Abraham
by a concubine by the name of Keturah. And so now there's a
whole nation as a result of Abraham's relationship with this concubine
Matter of fact, most of the children from his concubine all developed
into nations of conflict with Israel. And it reminds us of
how our enemies are not really nations from without, but they
are products of our own flesh, products of our own sin, products
of our own unbelief. And it really is the cause of
all of our other problems. And we are continual in our sinfulness
before God and always in need of Christ. Isaiah chapter 64,
verse five says, we have sinned. And in that is continuance. Yet we shall be saved. Salvation is for sinners. It's
for those who the Lord has shown that all they are is sin, that
they are spiritually insane, and that they are always in need
of the Lord Jesus Christ their Savior. Contrary to what most
people believe, sin is not just an outward behavioral problem
that causes shame and whatever else, pain. Sin is what we are
by nature. It's our unbelief. It's our old man, and it's just
what we are. And so when we look at the lives
of these children of Israel, we're reminded of our own lives. Now, oftentimes we've thought
that in the life of Israel, most of these Israelites were unbelievers
and they were, they were a lot of more unbelievers. The vast
majority of the history of Old Testament Israel and the majority
of the people of Israel were not believers. And, uh, And we
could look at that and say, well, that's the reason for their unbelief. But the Lord has given us these
stories to illustrate who we are in our unbelief. Because
there's a part of us that doesn't believe God. Every child of God
is always crying, Lord, I do believe. Help thou mine unbelief. I've got an unbelieving man in
me that is looking for love in all the wrong places, looking
for hope and salvation in all the wrong places. And Lord, just
like the children of Israel. What we've seen in the book of
Judges is that the children of Israel would
sin. God will put them in bondage
to a foreign nation like the Midianites and the Amorites.
And the Amorites all throughout the scriptures are a picture
of our flesh. And then they would find themselves in bondage to
that enemy and they would eventually cry out for help and the Lord
would send them a deliverer. He would send them a judge or
a prophet as we're gonna see in this case. And that's the
pattern of every believer's life. They often went 40 years in rebellion
against God, but for the sinner who sees their need for Christ,
it's a continual process of repentance towards God and faith towards
the Lord Jesus Christ. We looked at Wednesday night
from Acts chapter 20. We're always in a state of repenting
and always in a state of believing. Repentance and faith is like
physical breathing. I was thinking Wednesday night,
we were talking about that. How many parents have been concerned
for their infant child, and what do we do to make sure that they're
still alive? We put our ear down there and
check and make sure they're breathing, or put our hand on their chest
and make sure they're breathing. Deanna says she does that for
Robert all the time. As long as he's breathing, he's
alive. That's the evidence of spiritual
life, is repentance and faith. And it's not a one-time experience.
Well, I repented and I believed at a certain time of life. No,
every day of my walk of faith is an experience of repentance
and faith. Repentance and faith. Exhaling
that poisonous carbon dioxide and inhaling that life-giving
oxygen. And as long as that breathing is taking place, then that's
the evidence of life. If a person's never repented
or never had faith, they don't have life. And if they ever stopped
doing it, they'd never had life. So, passage in Isaiah chapter 64
goes on to say, but we are all as an unclean thing, and all
our righteousnesses are as filthy rags, and we do all fade as a
leaf and are blown away by the wind. Isn't that your experience? You know, we're just was so easily
blown away. In Isaiah chapter one, the scripture
says, from the crown of our head to the sole of our feet, we are
nothing but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores, leprous. That's what we are by nature.
And because we carry this old man around with us, we're always,
we're just always doing exactly what the children of Israel did.
Health and wealth and national peace in the Old Testament are
the evidences of God's blessing. If the Lord gave physical health
and prosperity and peace to the nation of Israel against their
enemies, that was the evidence of God's blessing. And the evidence
of God's chastisement was to take away the man's health or
to take away his wealth or to put the nation in bondage to
another nation. Now, those things have spiritual
implications in light of the finished work of Christ and in
light of the coming of the Holy Spirit. We don't look to gain
as righteousness. We don't look to health, wealth,
and prosperity and peace with men as the evidence of God's
blessings. There are There are things that
are more important than physical health, and that's spiritual
health. That's the forgiveness of sin. That's having wholeness
before God. That's so much more important
than physical health. That's the blessing that we're
looking for, that we're in need of. Wealth, oh, there's so many. so many riches of God's grace
that are infinitely more valuable than any of the wealth that this
world has to offer. And so these things are pictures. Peace with other nations, the
absence of conflict in one's life, is an evidence of blessings
in the Old Testament, but there is a peace with God and the peace
of God that's infinitely more important than having the absence
of conflict in your life. Those are the blessings that
we're in need of. And here's the irony, I guess
you could say, I don't know how to say this, that more times
than not, the absence of health the absence of wealth, and the
conflicts of life are sent of God in order to bring us to that
place to where we're able to enjoy the greater benefits of
salvation, the things that are truly needful, the riches of
His grace, peace with God, and the wholeness before God. So when you read these stories
in the Old Testament, don't be confused by them. Don't think,
well, you know, this is the way in which I measure God's blessings
in my life. The Lord sent the Midianites
into the camp of Israel to enslave them in order to bring them to
that place to where they would cry out to God. And so it is,
the Lord exposes our sin. That's the ministry of the Holy
Spirit. The Lord said, it's expedient
for you that I go away, for if I go not away, the comforter
will not come. But when he comes, what's he
gonna do? He's gonna convict the world of sin because they
believe not on me. There's the root of our problem.
unbelief. And so just like the Midianites
invade the nation of Israel and bring them in bondage, so our
unbelief and our sin, that spiritual lunacy, if you will, whereby
we keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over
again, thinking that it's going to produce a different result,
but it doesn't. It doesn't. The result that we're looking
for, the result that we're in need of, can only come from Christ. And the Lord uses that old man
and that sinful nature in order to do for us exactly what he
did for the children of Israel, cause us to cry out. Lord, I'm
the sinner. Have mercy upon me. Lord, this
is all on me. This is all my fault and I'm
in need of your mercy and of your grace. I'm in need of Christ. Another thing we're going to
see in this story is that The children of Israel were desperate
to save themselves against the Midianites and the Amalekites.
And so they dug holes in the K, in the mountains, in order
to hide. And they planted their crops. And we're gonna see in the next
chapter where Gideon, or in this chapter, actually, where Gideon,
the next judge of Israel, is winnowing wheat behind a wine
press, hiding out from the Midianites. Isn't that what we do? Hide from
God, hide from our sin, think, well, you know, I'm desperate.
I can, I can fix this. We'll dig some caves in the,
in the ground and we'll, we'll try to, we'll try to winnow the
wheat and produce some fruit. And then as soon as they produced
it, As soon as they produce that crop, the Medianites would wait
and come in and steal them. They let them do all the work.
Yeah, go ahead. You guys plant, you guys, you guys, you know,
work your fingers to a bone. And when you get, when you get
ready for harvest, we're going to come in and take it from you.
And that's exactly what they did. Isn't that what we do? You know, I can fix this. I can
make this work. And we work ourselves to a bone
to work our fingers to the bone. And then, and then, and then
the enemy comes, sin and unbelief. And the Lord lets us to be stripped
of all those things that we labored for because we didn't trust him. And that pattern repeats itself,
not once every 40 years, like it did to the Israelites, but
it repeats itself over and over and over again every day. So
the child of God is always finding himself. Lord have mercy upon
me. That's who Christ came to save.
He came to save sinners. He came to save those who struggle
with sin every day. Paul said it was a faithful saying,
and it was worthy of all acceptation. Christ Jesus came into this world
to save sinners. He only saves sinners and he
saves every one of them. And Paul went on to say, and
this was at the end of his life, of whom I am chief. You see, the more you grow in
grace, and the more you grow in the knowledge of the Lord
Jesus Christ, the more you see of your sin, and the more you
see of your need for Christ, and the more sensitive you become
to your lack of fellowship with him, and the more you loathe
yourself, This is the believer's life. The flesh dies very slowly. The old man is obstinate. He will apply every means possible
to solve his own problems before he finally cries out. The Midianites and the Amalekites
were marauding hordes of enemies that came into the camp of Israel. So it is with our sin. In these is continuance, and
we shall be saved. Who is it that's saved? Those
whose sin is continuance. Those who can't live without
it. Those who are always bearing
that rotting corpse on their back and able to say, oh, wretched
man that I am. Who shall deliver me from the
body of this death? Thanks be to God. Through Christ
Jesus, I'm free. If we want to find unbelievers
in this story, we're going to read the story in just a moment.
If we want to find unbelievers in this story, it's not the Israelites. They're, though most of them
were unbelievers, but they're a picture, they're a symbol,
they're a type of the believer. The unbelievers in this story
are the Midianites. the Amalekites those are the
and yet when it comes to the to their lives the children of
Israel worshiping Baal they they were in bondage to fear and sin
and you know you really couldn't tell a big difference at the
end of the next hour we're going to be able to observe and celebrate
and worship baptism Lowry Beasley is here with us
today. He's from Oxford, Mississippi,
and has been listening to our services for 20 years. And Lowry
has come here today to be baptized. And I met, I've talked to Lowry
several times over the years, but I've never met him until
yesterday. And Lowry with tears in his eyes
looked at me and he said, You're the first believer I've
ever met in my life. And my first reaction was, I
hope I don't disappoint you. And then I realized the difference
between the believer and the unbeliever is covenantal. It's having Christ. I don't look or act much different
from your friends in Mississippi do a lot. Men are pretty much
the same. But the child of God, the difference
that he has is Christ in him. We're able to fellowship and
understand spiritual things in a way that the unbeliever can't
enter into. Children of Israel, that's me. And that's you, child of God.
And if the Lord has not yet made you to be a sinner, I pray that
he will and that you will see yourself in the life of these
Israelites, because this is our life. This is our life. Just
doing the same thing over and over and over again. thinking
that we're gonna get a different result. And it never turns out
that way, does it? Eventually, it always brings
us to cry out, Lord, save me, save me. Chapter six, verse one, and the
children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord, and the
Lord delivered them into the hand of Midian seven years. Now, the word seven is the number
for perfection, and the Lord will allow us to remain in our
unbelief until he's brought us to perfect repentance. He brought
us to see that, Lord, I've got to have Christ. And the hand of Midian prevailed
against Israel. And because of the Midianites,
the children of Israel made them the dens which are in the mountains
and caves and strongholds." There we are. This descendant of Abraham,
this child of Keturah, this child of Abraham was not a child of
promise, but it was a child of his flesh. And that's what your
sin is and my sin. It's the product of our own flesh.
It's the product of our own belief. And the Lord allows it to raid
our souls until we cry out. Seven years, however long that
is. Hopefully it'll be more like
seven minutes, but however long it takes, however long, the Lord
knows. So they, in desperation to save
themselves, they dug holes in the mountains and they They planted
their crops in secret and they did everything they could with
the strength of their own flesh to deliver themselves. It's what
we do. And so it was when Israel had
sown that the Midianites came up and the Amalekites and the
children of the East, even they came up against them. All the
enemies of Israel came against them in every direction. From
the north, from the south, from the east, they circled him. Up
against the ocean, no place for him to go. And that's a blessed
thing. This is God's grace. And it's
his grace for you and for me to shut us up to Christ, to where
we have no place else to go but to him. And he shows us what,
in what desperate straits we're in. And they encamped against
them and destroyed the increase of the earth till they came into
Gaza and left no sustenance for Israel, neither sheep nor ox
nor ass. They robbed them blind. They
took everything away from them. Isn't that what sin does? Isn't
that what unbelief does? Just robs us blind, puts holes
in our pockets. You know, This is a, this is
a work of grace. This is an act of mercy that
God gives to us. See most folks, most folks are
able to live very content in their unbelief. Not convicted
by it at all. Matter of fact, you didn't know
you had unbelief until you got the new man. So you got the new
nature. You didn't know you had an old
nature. So most people can just continue in their unbelief and
rebellion against God and not suffer any consequences for it.
And this is a work of grace that God gives only to his children,
only to his people. Well, they came up, verse five.
Notice the Israelites planted, and the Amalekites and the Midianites
waited until the harvest time, and then they come and took it
all away. And they came up with their cattle
and their tents, and they came up as grasshoppers for multitude,
for both they and their camels were without number. And they
entered into the land to destroy it. Oh, Lord, if I continue down
this path, I'm just going to destroy myself. And Israel was greatly impoverished
because of the Midianites, and the children of Israel cried
unto the Lord. They cried unto the Lord. The difference between a believer
and unbeliever. Unbelievers, they do suffer consequences
for their sins. And they get conflicted and they
get in hard places and they will cry for help, but they'll never
cry to the Lord. They never seek after Christ.
They'll look at everything else, everywhere else to go to. But
the children of Israel cry unto the Lord. They ask for the Lord
Jesus Christ. They know that he's got to deliver
them. And it came to pass when the
children of Israel cried unto the Lord because of the Midianites,
the Lord sent a prophet unto the children of Israel. Oh, Lord
always sends a prophet, doesn't he? And what's the prophet say? Look what he says. The Lord sent
a prophet unto the children of Israel, which said unto them,
thus saith the Lord God of Israel. Now, a couple of things here
I want you to see. Number one, Lord does nothing without the
voice of a prophet. He always declares his intentions
through the voice of a man. And if he's going to save someone,
how can they call upon the name of the Lord and it shall be saved?
Well, how are they going to call upon him in whom they've not believed?
And how are they going to believe in him in whom they've not heard?
And how are they going to hear without a preacher? God uses
the foolishness of preaching. to declare his word for the deliverance
of his people. And he sends that message only
to his people. I was accused one time of, they
said, well, you know, he's a hyper-Calvinist because he believes that you
should only preach the gospel to the elect. I don't know where
they got that from. I don't believe that. We're to
declare to all men. I don't know who the elect are.
I can't go through the world and pick out who the elect are
and just speak to them. But only the elect are gonna
hear. They're the only ones that are gonna hear. No one else is
gonna hear. So God sends his prophets to
Israel, to his people. The voice of the prophets is
declaring the truth of God, but the reprobate has no interest
in what thus saith the Lord. They've got no interest in Christ.
And unless the Lord gives them ears to hear, they're not gonna
hear. So we declare unto all men everywhere, repentance towards
God and faith towards the Lord Jesus Christ. But we know that
The voice of the prophet is not the voice of the Holy Spirit. The voice of the prophet is just
an audible voice. It's like John said, I'm the voice of one crying
in the wilderness. It's just an audible voice. It's
a means to an end. The end is when the Spirit of
God takes, thus saith the Lord, and applies it effectually to
the heart and gives faith to believe it. And that's what has
to happen in order for one to be saved. The voice of a man
can't do that. And yet God uses means and he
uses his prophets. And here he says, you know, I'm
using this word prophet in a very broad sense. There may be someone
here thinking that I believe myself to be a prophet, not in
the strictest sense of the word. I don't. Prophets of God are
gone. They've given us the scriptures. But as a fourth teller, a foreteller
of the scriptures, yeah, that's the voice. You see what I'm saying?
I know there are some religious groups that believe there's still
prophets. We do not believe that. God used
the prophets to pin the scriptures. And now he uses preachers to
declare it. What does the Lord say? You know, I, I was
thinking that God's preachers are just sheep dogs. You know,
that's what they're doing. You know, they're just rounding
up God's sheep. God's sheep are going to hear. They're going
to believe and they're going to, they're going to become part
of the fold and, and they're going to flee to the shepherd
and, and, and have fellowship with the other sheep. but we're
not interested in trying to get a gathering of men just for
the sake of that. God will make this message effectual
to the hearts of his people. Notice, I want you to notice
the personal pronoun I and the tense of the verbs in these next
two verses. The tense is always past tense
and the pronoun is always singular. And so here's the message. I
brought you up out of Egypt and brought you forth out of the
house of bondage. I did that. This is what God says. It settles
all controversy, the scripture does. What sayeth the scriptures
is the only question that has to be answered. And God's people
believe God's word. They just believe God. Though
they wrestle and struggle every day with their unbelief and though
they find their sin ever rearing its ugly head in their hearts,
they do believe God. And so they just need to be told
what God has said, what his word has said. Because they know that all scripture
is given by inspiration of God and all scripture is profitable
to them. For doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction
in righteousness, that they might be thoroughly furnished unto
all goods works. They're dependent upon God's
word. Preacher, don't waste my time telling me what some dead
theologian wrote in a creed or a confession. And make your illustrations
very short and to the point. I wanna know what God says. Tell
me what thus saith the Lord is. And here's what thus saith the
Lord is. I brought you up. You didn't have anything to do
with that. Now he's talking about when Moses was sent of God down
to Egypt as a type of the Lord Jesus Christ to invade the very
gates of hell and to lead captivity captive. And that's a picture
of salvation. These Israelites were in bondage
to the taskmasters of Egypt. And every time they would get
close to their quota, some of you have had this problem at
work, haven't you? Your boss will set you a quota,
and you get close to that quota, and what do they do? They up
the quota. And you can never quite achieve the, well, that's
what was happening. And that's the law. That's the
law. So the Egyptians taskmasters
were never allowing the Israelites to reach their quota. And so
they were always striving and never able to achieve. And that's
the law of God. Can't ever achieve the demands
of God's law. God's law is holy, just, and
pure. God's law is, it requires absolute
perfection. That's why we have to have Christ.
He is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone that
believeth. And so God's saying, remind them what I did, past
tense, when I brought them out of Egypt. I delivered them from
the law. I brought them through the Red
Sea. picture of our baptism. I led them through the wilderness
and fed them day by day with manna from heaven and water from
the rock. And I led them across the Jordan
river, that river of descent and river of death. And Joshua
was the one that did that. And I brought them into the promised
land. I got them to heaven. Remind
them of what I did for them and that they didn't have anything
to do with that. What is the Lord saying to us? He's saying
to us that the goodness of God leadeth to repentance. It's the
love of Christ that constraineth us. It's not threatenings from
the law that's gonna correct your sin problem. It's the grace
and mercy of God in what He has already done in times past. And what the Lord's saying to
you and me is, You want deliverance from your sin? Don't be like
those children of Israel that were trying to kill the snakes.
That's what those, you know, the poisonous snakes that were
in the wilderness and they were, you know, killing the children
of Israel. And you can just imagine the
terror in the Israelite camp trying to stomp out these snakes. And the Lord said, make a brazen
serpent and put it upon a pole and tell them anyone that looks
shall live. He didn't say, if you look, you
won't get bit. He said, if you look, you're
gonna live. And so children of Israel looked. They looked to that one who was
made sin. for us and bore the sins of his
people in his body upon that tree and suffer the full wrath
of God's justice and judgment in order to put away our sins
by the sacrifice of himself. How often, you see, this is what
we do. We try to correct our sin problem by digging holes
and planting and hiding and we're just like the Israelites, aren't
we? Trying to fight this old Midianite, this old product of
our flesh. And the Lord says, all right,
I'm gonna tell them. Thus saith the Lord, I brought you out.
Don't look at the snakes. Don't look at your life. Don't
look at your commitment. Look back. When Abraham offered
Isaac, was gonna offer Isaac on that altar, scripture said,
God stopped him. He raised the knife. He was gonna
kill his son. God stopped him. And Abraham looked behind him. and found a ram that was tangled
up in a thicket of thorns. There's our hope. Look behind
you. There's a ram who's been tangled
up in a thicket of thorns. He's the sacrifice. He's the
sacrifice for Seth. When the Lord, when the Lord
met with Moses on the Mount of the Law, the Lord said, no man
can see God and live. But I tell you what, there's
a place near unto me that I'm going to hide you in the cleft
of the rock. And I'm going to put my hand over and I'm going
to pass by you. And my goodness is going to pass
by you. And you're going to see my backside. I'm going to cause my goodness
to pass by you. That's what's going to save you of your sin.
not your renewed commitments, not your discipline, not your
attempts to try to fix your own problems, but you're going to
see my backside. Truth is you and I have no idea
what God's going to do in the next five minutes. This thing
may break out in a nuclear war. As far as we know, we have no
idea what's going to happen. We don't know what's going to
happen tomorrow, but we know who's in control
of that. But we do know by what thus saith the Lord, we do know
what happened 2000 years ago. By faith, we just take God at
his word. I brought you up out of Egypt. Why are you doing this? Look
what I've done for you in the past. There's the deliverance
from unbelief and sin and rebellion. It's believing God and looking
back. And not just 2000 years ago, We don't look at his backside
2000 years ago. We're looking to his backside
in eternity past in the covenant of grace, before time ever began,
when the Lord Jesus Christ entered into a covenant relationship
with his father and agreed to become their surety. And it's
called the lamb slain before the foundation of the world.
That's where I'm looking. These Midianites, they've come
and taken everything away from me. And God sent a prophet. and said
to them, you tell him, I brought you up out of Egypt. I delivered you from the law.
I put away your sin. I saved you. Come on to me. Come on to me. Don't look to the sincerity of
your prayers or the depth of your sorrow. God puts prayers
in the hearts of his children. Don't misunderstand me. We do
cry out. Boy, our prayers are so feeble,
aren't they? They're so brief. They're so
insincere. Well, I'll just be more sincere.
contrite, I'll be more broken and God will hear me. No, thus
saith the Lord, I brought you up out of the land of Egypt and
I brought you forth out of the house of bondage. You don't have
to be in bondage to this sin. There was a time when you were
in bondage to sin. What does it mean to be in bondage
to sin? Because Paul said, I know the law is holy and just and
good, but he said, I am carnal sold under sin. Now that word
to be sold under sin means to be made a slave. And Paul's talking
about his, this is Romans chapter seven. He's talking about his
current situation. He said, my carnal man is a slave to sin. He can't do anything about sin. Who shall deliver me from the
body of this death? Here's the difference. There
was a time when sin held you in such bondage that you were
incapable of believing God. You were blind. You were spiritually
dead. You could not believe. You would
not believe. You were dead in your sin. Now, because of the one who died
to sin, you have hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. Child of God,
I know what we're talking about here. I know you feel like, you
know, I'm a slave to sin. I just can't get away from it.
Every time I turn around, they just keep doing the same thing
over and over again. And I'm just a spiritual lunatic. There was a time when you were
in the house of bondage. You couldn't believe. Sin had you completely blinded. And now what's the Lord saying? I delivered you from that. I
gave you faith. I put away your sin. I gave you
Christ. Come back to me. And so we keep coming back. Look
at verse nine. And I delivered you out of the
house of the Egyptians, out of the hand of the Egyptians. I
delivered you. They had complete control of you. They had complete
bondage of you. Your entire being was held in
bondage, but now I brought you out. What I've done for you is the enticement for you. to
keep coming to, because what you're looking for in sin, you
know that you can only find it in Christ. You'd only find it
in him. Looking for love. Oh, there's
nothing like the love of God. Looking for peace. Oh, nothing
like the peace of God. Looking for hope. Oh, the hopes of this world are
so disappointing, aren't they? We have a sure hope. All the
things that men look for in sin are only found in Christ. And
so the Lord's saying, I delivered you out of the hand of all that
oppressed you and drave them out from before you and gave
you their land. This world exists for one reason. That's the salvation of God's
people. I know I say this a lot, but
I just want to remind you again, when the last of God's elect
is saved, this whole thing's coming to an end. There's no,
there's no reason for it anymore. I gave you this land. This whole
world exists for you. Everything else that's happening
in the world. You see, God is the director of the drama of
redemption, isn't he? And God's people are the actors
in that drama. And everything else is props.
Everything else is props. Everything. The only reason it
exists. I gave you this land. Remember,
this is all for my glory and for your good and for your salvation. That'll bring you to cry out
to me. And you'll do it out of love
and not out of fear. And I said, remember I said,
I want you to remember to look at the pronoun and the tense
of the verb. I said, past tense. Unto you,
I am the Lord your God. We're looking at verse 10. Fear
not the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell, but
you have not obeyed my voice. Oh, how devastating fear is. 365 times in the Bible, God says,
fear not. Fear is Oh, it causes us to do a lot
of bad stuff, doesn't it? Fear does. And it's paralyzing. You know, people talk about fight
or flight when it comes to fear. Well, there's a third option.
And that's just to cave in and do nothing and be completely
paralyzed by fear. It doesn't have to just be fight
or flight. And that's usually what fear
does. It just, you know, I just can't do anything. I can't look
to God. I can't believe I can't pray. I can't trust God. Why? Because I'm afraid. The Lord says, don't be afraid. I brought you out. I brought
you into this land. I gave you the land. You think
I'm gonna just stop doing what I started? You think I'm not
gonna finish what I started? I'm gonna bring you to your expected
end. And that, my brothers and sisters
and my friends, is the way the Lord brings his children to faith
and repentance. Amen. All right, let's take a
break.