Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / January 28, 2024 | Enchanted - Seeking the Voice of God

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January 28, 2024 | Enchanted - Seeking the Voice of God · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Morning.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Good to see ya.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um PSA.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Did anybody get a weird email from me this week um asking for gift cards?
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Wanted to know where those were at.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: No, um, yeah, if you ever get a weird email from me, um, listen, you first of all, you can always reach back out to me, but there's never been there's never a situation where you should be handing me money, where you should be handing me gift cards, and furthermore, if I ever start to say things like, don't call me, I'm in a busy prayer meeting right now, hopefully that was sign enough.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: So um apparently I was free enough to be able to write an email to a lot of people.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's always good if you do get those, just check where it came from.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um they never come from my individual email address, anyhow.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: So uh we are in our final week here in this enchanted series, and um, you know, really the goal for this series um has been that we would examine our faith, we would look at it, and really say, or acknowledge rather that um we are always being spiritually formed by something.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And oftentimes, uh, because we are not, we don't just live within church walls, uh, we are being formed by our experiences and the culture around us, and it is always a healthy thing to examine our faith and to sort of assess it and um sometimes even look to see if there are areas where our faith has begun to model and look like the world around us in ways that we might not even be aware of.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh just because we're finishing our enchanted series this morning doesn't mean that we've exhausted everything that there is to look out for.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but hopefully we can build in some practices here that say, you know, our our faith is something that requires careful attention.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: And when we put that attention on it, sometimes things come out.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: So this morning we are looking at a different area, and my question that kind of begins is when you think of where you would go in this world to experience God in the fullest way, or maybe to say that in a different fashion, uh, where would you go?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Where would you travel to a place where you say, God is here right now?
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now, whatever is in your mind, okay, um, it is normally one of two things.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: It is either going to be someplace in nature, maybe it's the mountains, maybe it's the beaches, maybe it's the flint hills, maybe it's next to your, you know, field of corn, maybe it's with your animals, maybe it is in a cabin in the woods, wherever, or it's someplace that you already go particularly because that's where you feel that the Lord visits you in quiet time or things like that.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe it's a room in your home with your particular Bible in this specific chair.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so the question we have to ask ourselves in either one of those situations is why do we feel like God is there and not in another place?
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Why do we feel like he visits us more in those locations?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Why do we feel like we can experience him more there and not in somewhere else?
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so we have a little bit of a problem here because this is already heading down a path that is actually kind of dangerous, and the nation of Israel was warned against.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: But to take a step back, what we're really looking at is there's this word to define what it means when we think that God is less of a personal being and he is instead more of a force or energy, and that's pantheism.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Pantheism is basically like the umbrella term for a lot of pagan religions, but basically, God is in the sky, God is in the trees, God is in the wind, or you can take a step back from nature and you can say, God is in the people in a weirder way than the sense of they have the Holy Spirit.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: God is in every person and his energy is in all things and all people.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so a lot of some of the earliest religions were focused around going and trying to experience God or gods by either communing with nature or trying to trap them in these little idols.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: You can go to any archaeological dig, right?
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: And you will you will see them unearth these little figurines of the river and the sea and the and the air and the sun and all of those kinds of things.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And and what it is actually doing beyond the fact that it's just worshiping a false god, that's kind of the obvious part.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: But the part that is dangerous for us is we begin to practice this same thing when we think that we can go to a specific place and feel God more than anywhere else, or that God is contained within something that man has created.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: So this is something that Israel struggled with.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: And oftentimes we have to ask our question in our attempt to worship the true God, are we beginning to practice idolatry in the way that we do it?
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of a nervous question because of course we would never want to say that we're actually worshiping false things, but the enchanted series is about the fact that we might actually be, because Israel did.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: So in Deuteronomy 4, verses 11 through 20, Moses is speaking to the nation of Israel.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, this is also a preview.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: We're stealing a little bit from our spring series in Deuteronomy.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but Moses is speaking to the nation of Israel, and he is recalling to a group of people who were not there at the Exodus, right?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, everybody who gets to the promised land, um they're they're newbies.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: They were uh they are their parents had fallen along the way as judgment for their rebellion.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so Moses, Deuteronomy is a lot of repetition, repeating things that have happened already in the Bible, um, but it's because nobody there has experienced it.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so Moses is sort of the elder statesman here, trying to inform them about what has happened in the past.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: He says, You came near and stood at the base of the mountain, a mountain blazing with fire into the heavens, and enveloped in a totally black cloud.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Then the Lord spoke to you from the fire.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: You kept hearing the sound of the words, but didn't see a form.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: There was only a voice.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: He declared his covenant to you.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: He commanded you to follow the Ten Commandments, which he wrote on two stone tablets.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: At that time the Lord commanded me to teach you statutes and ordinances, for you to follow in the land you are about to cross into and possess.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Diligently watch yourselves, because you did not see any form on the day the Lord spoke to you out of the fire at Horeb, so you don't act corruptly and make an idol for yourselves in the shape of any figure.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then he lists some of the ways that the nations around them have done this a male or female form, or the form of any animal on the earth, any winged creature that flies in the sky, any creature that crawls on the ground, or any fish in the waters under the earth.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: When you look to the heavens and see the sun, moon, and stars, all the stars in the sky, do not be led astray to bow and worship to them and serve them.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: The Lord your God has provided them for all people everywhere under heaven, but the Lord selected you and brought you out of Egypt's iron furnace to be a people for his inheritance as you are today.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so picture in your mind.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: You're an Israelite.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: At this point, you have been a slave for your entire life, and you have been redeemed, you have been rescued out of the nation of Egypt, and you are now standing at the base of Mount Sinai, and up to this point you have already seen the army of Pharaoh fall in the Red Sea as it crashed together and drowned them.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so now you're on the other side, you have been rescued and redeemed, you're standing at the foot of the mountain, and all that you see is a mountain that should not be on fire, which is consumed by fire, and black smoke is rising up into the air, and so thick that you can't even see the peak of the mountain.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Later on, this is the smoke that Moses will head up into for over 40 days, and you just think he's died.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: But you see these things, and there's thunder and there's lightning and there's all of this amazing imagery, and then you hear a voice, and this voice speaks to you.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: But you don't see anything, you don't see an individual come through out of this space.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: All you see and hear are the forces and sounds of nature alongside this voice.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so Moses speaks to them, and he says, or rather, it's implied that they are going to be prone to worship this voice through means that are not appropriate.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so, if you're an Egyptian, what is also true is that for the last 400 years, your people who are dedicated to God have been immersed in an Egyptian religion where every single God is represented by things in nature, is lives in nature, or can even be animals.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: You have Osiris, who's signified by the Nile and the cycle of its flooding seasons, Horus and Ra, who are gods of the skies, who are in the phases of the sun and moon, Seth, who is shown in the desolation of the desert and storms, or then the many gods that take the forms of animals, like cats, dogs, jackals, falcons, cows, rams, geese, crocodiles.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds like one of the kids' books that I'm reading with Dan right now.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: So listen, all of these things, imagine you are, at the very least, just no Egyptian culture and religion, and when they see jackals that are out in the desert robbing graves, and they think that that is the God of the dead, okay?
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: When they see falcons in the sky, when they see the sun moving and believe that it's a God, and now you have come to this amazing experience that is unlike anything you have obviously ever seen before.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: And Moses says, Don't worship the things that you're seeing.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Your God is the voice.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's no form about him that you should try and create.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I know you're gonna do it, but you shouldn't.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Notice there are two ways that he says that they are going to follow this danger, or at least they should be warned against.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: The first is that they should not attempt to make a specific image of God, meaning the cast images, the metal, the wood, the stone, those kinds of things.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because what happens when you do that is now you begin to think that somehow God's power is contained in this little carved image that you made.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: It has no power at all, but your eyes sort of move from the heavens in general, and this and this idea that God is present and above, yet with us, and instead they begin to get directed at this thing, which really holds no power at all.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: But once our eyes begin to be directed at a thing, to believe that it has power, that God's power has somehow infused this item, well then what happens is we begin to walk further and further down the path of pure idolatry.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: See, at this point, we're not even talking about the obvious stuff like, listen, don't worship the false things.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: God is, rather, Moses is saying that when you worship God, there are even ways that you may do that that are incorrect, even though you have the best of intentions.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: The other sort of warning that they have is that they are going to be challenged and tempted to worship, bless you, to worship nature.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: They are going to want to see the heavens and the stars in the sky, which cry out for a creator, and they are going to want to worship those as well, as if those things are God.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Moses says, neither of these things are good, neither of these things are helpful, and in fact, what they do is draw our attention away from that hard to define yet present and real voice that is speaking to the nation of Israel.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: So let's tackle the last one first.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: What about nature?
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it that we really throughout all time we have tried to worship nature?
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's because it's amazing.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's because I don't know if you have ever walked outside and maybe beyond like I-70 and 470, right?
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: But like let's say we've moved just a little bit further than that, and you see God's creation, right?
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Not having been disrupted by man, but just as it was intended to be, even though we actually have to acknowledge that all creation that we witness is still subject to the fall.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: It is still affected by sin.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: So even creation itself, the trees and the sun and the sun and the moon and the stars and the ocean and all of those things, those things still have to be redeemed as well at the end.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: But let's just take a step back.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, one of the most beautiful things in this world is when we are able to step out into nature, as it has not been tainted.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is what the psalmist says, in this case, talking about the night sky.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: He says, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse proclaims the work of his hands.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Day after day they pour out speech, night after night they communicate knowledge.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone with senses back in Israel could perceive the beauty of God in creation.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone with senses today should be able to perceive that as well.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Romans 1 tells us that in particular, we should be able to sense two things from creation.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: One is God's power, and second is his divine attributes.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, that you look out into the stars and the night sky, even without a telescope, and you go, Man, something must have hung those stars in the sky.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Some something must have made those because I certainly can't make them.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: I certainly can't do it.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then when you look at them in their intricacy and the beauty of them, which I'm going to show you in just a moment, you say, Well, now, who has the ability to display such power?
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Are they not divine and worthy of worship?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's not necessarily the full gospel, but it is a sign from the Lord that He is here.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to sh I want to give you a quick example of this that I think is really beautiful, but it also displays how we have, even in the furthest reaches of our technology, are still unable to truly grasp some of God's greatest uh handiworks in the sky.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: So this is um this is a formation called the Pillars of Creation.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: And actually it was first observed by a guy named Charles Messier in 1774, and he just made a list of, using his little telescope, uh he made a list of 100 objects in the night sky uh that were described as fuzzy objects that weren't comets.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is how he categorized almost all of them.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, there's a smudge there, and I know it's different than something that's just traveling through the sky.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyhow, in 95, Hubble Space Telescope was sent out, and it trained its camera, um, one of its cameras, onto Messier number 16, and this is the image that it took in 95.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that was so popular, and it kind of captivated our imagination that there was this thing out in the night sky that was more than just a planet, but in fact, this massive, it's about 6,500 light years away that is forming planets, this ball of dust and gas.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so in 2014, Hubble went back and the same telescope took a little bit more time, used a different camera, and it took this image.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: So if you look from the left, and when I say the left, I mean like the left end of this picture to the right, if you were traveling at the speed of light, it would take you eight years to cross that spance.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Comparing this photo and the photo that I just showed you, scientists were able to determine that there was a some sort of jet of dust and gas that had moved 60 billion miles since they had taken the photo a little bit uh less than 20 years previous.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that meant that there were objects in this photo uh that are moving at over 450,000 miles an hour.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: These kinds of things that you go, okay, well, we took this photo, this is amazing, but then in 2022, we sent out another telescope, James Webb, and it took this image of the same area.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: And you say, this is but 30 years of telescopes that keep getting better looking into the night sky.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Each one of those bright little shiny spots you see is a star just like our sun.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, the red that you see, like here and here, um, those are the gases that have been ejected from planets that are being forming.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I show you this just because I'm not trying to dispute the idea that creation is in any way amazing or even is something that prompts us to worship.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: For me, my answer to that question at the very beginning was I go to the mountains, typically in the Rockies, and there's somewhere there where I am drawn into this idea, the image of the snow-capped mountains and the woods and the animals and the air and the fact that it's not as humid as Kansas.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: I am just drawn deeper, I feel, into the presence of God.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: So the temptation for me, though, is to not believe that God is more present in Colorado than he is in Kansas.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: That I am not thinking in some way that God is that mountain or he is that, you know, elk or something.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: But rather instead that creation, and wherever it is that it is beautiful, draws us more deeply into our worship of God because we are worshiping the creator rather than the created.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: So this was the first warning that Israel had.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: Israel do not, or rather you could say the second, but Israel do not begin to worship nature itself.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: I know it's beautiful.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: I know it's amazing.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, because you have a desire to draw close to me, because you were made for relationship, and I want to have a relationship with you, you are going to be tempted to think that I can be found in places or I exist in places where I do not.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: God is everywhere, but he is not literally the tree.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: He is not literally the wave.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: He is not literally the animal that comes up to you.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: This is a temptation for us.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: But let's say, right, that we're still seeking after the voice.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: This, as they saw it, this immaterial voice.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Moses says, listen, that is how you are going to witness God.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: But you're also going to be tempted now to try and bridge the gap between you and that voice.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're not going to worship nature, then the other thing you're going to do is you're going to try and make objects.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to try and make things.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to try and constrain the immeasurable and infinite God in something that is finite and man-made.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to take metal, which he made, and cast it in your own sort of fanciful image, and believe that now you can witness and experience God in a more special way than you could without that object.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is how C.S.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis describes this phenomenon.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: There's a little passage from the screw tape letters, which for the uninitiated is a book written from the perspective of a demon who is trying to trick a Christian into falling into all sorts of traps and schemes.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so what you're about to read is from his perspective.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: He says, I have known cases where what the patient called his God was actually located up unto the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head, or in a crucifix on the wall.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it, to the thing that he has made, not to the person who has made him.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Capital P person being the way that we refer to the persons of the Trinity, not like they are like us necessarily.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so what C.S.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis so wonderfully sort of encapsulates here is there are even, again, subversive ways when we go to our Lord and the quiet of our home or wherever it is, right, is there a Bible that you use because it's better than the other Bibles, right?
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because that Bible, and by the way, um the average is that the average American has 3.6 Bibles.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: So for all the people that don't have any, some of y'all have like 12, okay?
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: So whichever one of them that you're using and picking, um, oh, also by the The way, if you don't have a Bible, we have free ones in the lobby.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: Just go and pick one up.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: But whichever Bible that you pick, why are you using it?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: That place that you go, maybe in your home, why do you go to that place?
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: Look, even Jesus wanted to go to a quiet place to pray.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a bad thing, right?
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe your Bible, like mine for a long time, before some great Danes that my wife and I were dog sitting ate it, was given to me by a grandparent.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so it had sentimental value.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: I had notes in it.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: Those things are good.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: But what I had also begun to do with that Bible in particular is I had had it with me for so long, and it had kind of walked with me through so many steps in my spiritual journey that I began to almost, I don't think it was specific, but I began to think that it was almost a powerful object in and of itself.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: Beyond the fact that it contained the words of God, beyond the fact that, I mean, just in general, it was something that should be respected.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: But I began to think sometimes, maybe none of you have ever done this, but that by touching it, that that was better during my quiet time than maybe just setting it off to the side when I was praying.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: I began to think that there were aspects about it where God was more present in that than he was in anything else.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: We do this in other ways, right?
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: You can think of, for all of our um Catholic or previous Catholic friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, the bones of saints hold no power, right?
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: But yet so many churches are based around the idea that the rib of Paul or the shoe of a saint or the fingerbone, there's so many finger bones out there.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: They're way more than the hands of the apostles to make up.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's got fingerbone, but the fingerbone of some saint is worthy to sort of build a church around, to enclose it, to sometimes even direct our prayers to, even though ultimately we would say they're going towards God, you know how that normally works.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: If it's uh C.S.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis mentions kind of the crucifix, um, this idea, you know, if it's a piece of jewelry or something like that, right?
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: So there are all of these different ways.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: And even if you don't have some like carved wooden idol in your home, what we instinctively do, because we have a desire to be with the voice, because we have a desire to know God personally, because we have a desire to see him and feel him and touch him, because we were designed to have a relationship with him, and yet there's still an aspect of our relationship with God that is about connecting the finite with the infinite.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: And there's always going to be a gap there to some degree.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's not, it's mysterious, and it's not mysterious because he's secretive, right?
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: But it is mysterious in the sense that his ways are above our ways, and trying to think that we can, in the span of a lifetime, understand 100% of the way that God works and moves is foolishness.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so what we do is we bridge that gap with things of our own creation, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, what should we do, right?
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is sort of the dangerous thing.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: Israel was warned by Moses, carrying the word of God, that they could still seek after the voice.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: They could seek after God Himself, and yet miss the mark because they were trying to do it by their own rules and by their own estimation.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: Go all the way back to what we began at the beginning, where we think of God less as a personal being, someone who can be related to.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is a significant part of the New Testament about how we can now relate to God through Jesus Christ.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that as the mediator of the new covenant, being fully God and fully man, Jesus Christ is the one to whom we can relate on an even more, you could say, personal level than we can the voice of God.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: They are all one, but Jesus Christ as the image of the invisible God is a helpful way for us to begin to try and bridge that gap.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: But nevertheless, we are still seeking the infinite in our finite way.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: And we are drawn to it.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so what should we do, right?
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the good news and the bad news is that Israel fell into the this, I don't want to say trap because it wasn't laid for them.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: They set the trap themselves.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: They fell into this ditch.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: Ditches is a better illusion than trap.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: They fell into this mistake.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: Even though Moses warned them, as soon as they went into the promised land, they did all the things that God warned them to not do.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so what ended up happening was God attached to all of those warnings, he says, okay, if you do begin to worship false things, and ultimately for Israel, it moved beyond just cast images of God or worshiping nature and genuinely into idolatry and its fullest expression in the worship of false gods.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: And God said, Okay, when you get to that point, after you've traveled through all these ways, he says, you're going to realize that one of the ends of our covenant agreement is that you are going to experience judgment for that.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to experience exile, in fact, from the promised land that you've inhabited.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm letting you know ahead of time that this is what's going to happen if you pursue these things.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, Got it, sounds good to us.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then over the next couple hundred years, it is just a narrative about how they pursue that basically as fast as possible and disregard almost everything that God said.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the bad news.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: But the good news is that God knew that that was going to happen.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so in his mercy, in his compassion, listen to what he says to them just a little bit later on in that passage in Deuteronomy chapter 4.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: Just a little bit later, God has said, You're going to go into exile, and now he's speaking about what will happen when they have sort of run to the ends of themselves and want to come back to him from exile.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: There you will worship man-made gods of wood and stone, which cannot see, hear, eat, or smell.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: They're nothing.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: But from there you will search for the Lord your God, and you will find him when you seek him with all of your heart and all of your soul.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: When you're in distress, and all these things have happened to you, in the future you will return to the Lord your God and obey him.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: He will not leave you, destroy you, or forget the covenant with your ancestors that he swore to them by oath, because the Lord your God is a compassionate God.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we don't always appreciate the number of times in the Old Testament that God is expressed as one who is compassionate and gracious.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: Normally in the Old Testament, we're like thunder, lightning, expected, right?
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: Smiting, one of his favorite things.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: But when we get to the New Testament, we always think that that's sort of where the God of love appears.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: The God of love, the God of compassion, the God of grace and mercy, has been present for all time.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: He's the God who creates us, rescues us, saves us, and then gives us a way back because we inevitably, right, rebel against all of those things.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: So the good news is right here, is that as our faith is sometimes warped and twisted by the world around us, and let's take sort of the less talked-about version of idolatry, not the one that says we worship false gods, which, listen, if you're doing that, let's stop, okay?
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: But if we're worshiping false gods, we know the judgment for that.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: We understand that that is not good.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: But for us here, the vast majority of us, if we know Christ, it is our goal to follow after him.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so then the question becomes, right, how do we do that to the best of our ability?
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: How can I walk the road that God has for me in this lifetime, being a disciple, an apprentice of Jesus Christ, seeking to transform myself into his image in the way that God has designed for me to do it?
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the way that God has designed for us to do it is by seeking out his voice.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the problem there, right, is that we want to begin to worship the mountain or the fire or the smoke, whatever those things look like in our daily life.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: There's a part of us that goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: Worship the voice, but where is the voice, Moses?
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: How do I touch it?
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: How do I see it?
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: How do I encounter it whenever I want to?
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: On a moment's notice.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: How can I constrain it till it fits my image of the way that worship with God should look like until I have almost made a religion myself because I have begun to set the rules of engagement in this relationship with God.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: You don't get to set the rules of engagement with God.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: Helpfully, though, he gives us many, many examples of how we might connect to this voice.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: So briefly, when we go before the living God, when we seek out that voice, the first thing that we have to do so that we don't fall into these ditches of pantheism, of thinking that he is some force or energy that can either be touched in a tree or experienced by sitting only in a specific room in our house, but rather that he is both transcendent, he is outside of time and space, and he is imminent, he is present with us in all things.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: So we have to walk forward with this understanding that the voice, first of all, that who God is and how he relates to us is at a degree beyond our understanding.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: There is a lifetime of understanding to be had.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: There is a lifetime of growth, and none of that is supposed to be something that dissuades us from wanting to learn as much as possible about the creator of the universe who has died for us and saves us and wants to have and does have a personal relationship.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yet, at the very, very end of it, we have to accept that there will always be an area that we cannot fully define.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: He is beyond us, yet invites us into his presence.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: The next thing that we have to do is recognize, like it says here in Deuteronomy, is that even, in fact, this sort of goes the other direction, even when we feel like he has left us, even when we feel like he is gone and distant, and we have not heard that voice for a long time, this is how the Israelites felt in exile.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: God, all of our circumstances, everything around us, I mean, going on for sometimes a very, very long time.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: God, where have you been?
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, the gap between the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi, and the first book of the New Testament, and the timing of those events, is about 400 years.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: 400 years where the nation of Israel felt that God was silent.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, what happens at the end of that supposed silence?
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Jesus Christ comes onto the scene.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: So what Moses is saying here, what God is saying through him in Deuteronomy, is when you are in distress and all of these things have happened, when you feel like I am gone, I want you to remember that I have not left you, that I certainly have not destroyed you, even though I had the right to, should remember that, or forgotten the covenant with your ancestors that I have sworn to them because I am compassionate.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the next thing as we go to him understanding there's some mystery about it, yet knowing that it is entirely possible, and then seeing that there's never really been a time where that voice has been distant from us.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's just we might not have heard it.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then third and finally, we must remind ourselves that there are still concrete realities to our relationship with God.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: The whole thing is not just some like loosey-goosey mess where we just sort of throw up a prayer and hope, you know, sort of against hope, that somehow, somehow he hears us.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: The clear message is that you will search for the Lord your God and you will find him when you seek him with all of your heart and with all of your soul.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: This is where we meet reality and where God gives us great expectation for what it is to pursue a relationship with him.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: There might be aspects that are hard for us at times, but instead of trying to fill that gap with the mystical or the natural or some kind of thing that is going to fool us, we sort of allow that gap, that mysterious gap to remain.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: The thing that really is bridged in our souls by Christ, but in our minds that we might not fully understand, or we won't fully understand until heaven.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: That still that experience of knowing God and having him fully know us is one that can be our experience in this world if we would seek after him with our whole heart and our whole mind and our soul.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: Finally, what does that look like?
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we go before God in prayer.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: And there's nothing more holy about closing your eyes when you do it.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: You can keep your eyes open.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's just if other people are praying when their eyes are closed and they open their eyes and they see you just staring out, might freak them out just a little bit.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: But you can both pray to God the exact same.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: You can keep one eye open, whatever you want to do.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: You go before God in prayer.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is how we um the Bible would use words like we go before his throne, okay?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: We are, in a sense, transported spiritually before him in the heavenly realms.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: And we are able to speak with the Lord of all of creation.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's no waiting line to do it.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody can do it.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: And as you go before him, you might not hear a response like a conversation.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't necessarily work like that.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes, in the stirring of our spirit, God does come to us in ways that sound an awful lot like conversation, but sometimes he doesn't.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the way that we encounter the Lord and find him is by reading his word and prayerfully reflecting on it.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the way we encounter the Lord is by trying to be like Christ to our neighbor, and understanding that there was an element of that that was reflective of Jesus, and feeling like we've drawn closer to him in that way.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: The voice is not only God, the Father, our Lord Creator, is not only experienced by talking to him like some sort of text message, but rather it is an experience.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that experience is, at its very best, ill-defined.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yet what you know is that if you have experienced it, you have experienced it.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: You have felt his spirit moving within you.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: If you have not ever experienced that, if you want to have a personal relationship with God, there are things that you can do.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: You can go before him and you can search for him, but you have to do it with all of your heart and your soul.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: And when you go before him, there are many ways that you can pray.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: Excuse me.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: There are many ways that you can pray.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: But the way that I believe God wants us to go to him is with a heart that recognizes our place in this relationship.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to close us in prayer.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to, um, this is not some kind of model prayer necessarily, but I am going to pray in a way that I feel is a good example for us to go before the Lord and how to speak with him and to try and sometimes sit in silence for just a moment and to feel and to sense that voice.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, just to be very clear, we love setting expectations.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to pray.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then what I'm going to do is we're just going to sit in silence for like a minute.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to sit in silence for a minute, and then I will close us.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: And what I encourage you to do for that minute is I want you to, you can have it in your mind like you are the Israelites at the base of Mount Sinai, and you're seeing this amazing thing, but I still want you to try and cut through that and to say, Lord, what is your voice?
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: Will you speak to me?
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: Will you be with me?
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: Will you walk with me?
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think these are the kind of prayers that God responds to, and ultimately that I think He will answer.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: So let's bow our heads and pray.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to close my eyes.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to keep yours open, that's on you.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, we come before you into your throne room.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_00: God.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_00: We come before you as people who are broken and sinful.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, we have fallen short of your expectations.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: But God, you are compassionate.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: You are gracious.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: You are kind, and you're merciful.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, you know that we are going to continue to mess up.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know that we are going to continue to walk away.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: But yet, God, you continue to come to us, to meet us where we're at.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: And like Elijah said, Lord, in the still small voice, you are not in the wind, you are not in the earthquake, you were not in the fire.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, you were in the voice that came to him in his time of great distress.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, I pray that for anybody who is with us this morning who feels distant from you, and in fact might even be a little uncomfortable by this idea that there is something unknown about engaging and worship with you, that there is a part of being finite created and connecting, fellowshipping, having a relationship with the Creator that we will never fully understand until, Lord, we are with you.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_00: God, might you help us to bridge that gap by experiencing your voice, by feeling your presence, by hearing and seeing your word.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: God, finally, I ask that for anybody who does not have a relationship with you, that they would come before you and they would accept your Savior Jesus Christ as, Lord, the way that you have bridged the gap between them.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: A gap, Lord, that only you can cross.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_00: And God, finally, that they would accept him as their Savior, knowing that they are completely forgiven of their sins through his sacrifice on the cross, and that we might hear your voice through his body.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, now, as we go into a moment of silence, I pray, because you are the God of the infinite, that we would be able to experience you just in this time of reflection.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, thank you.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, God, for the opportunity that you give us to have a relationship with you.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_00: But God, as we close, would you help us, Lord, to also understand that we can have this same experience with you in our homes?
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, we can have it in on the beaches and in nature, wherever it is.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: But Lord, that you are a God that does not live in a tree, does not live in the sun, Lord, does not live in our favorite chair, but rather, Lord, you are a God that can be heard and experienced wherever we are, because nothing can separate us from your love.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's in Jesus' name we pray.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for being with us this morning.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: Hope you have a great week.