Morning, brothers and sisters.
And I, like Steve, would like to extend a happy Mother’s Day to all you ladies who have given birth, and even to all of you who have not but are married. Happy day to you also.
And thank you for the things you have done to make your child’s life and your husband’s life a wonderful thing.
I have a couple of Scriptures I would like to read to begin with. The first one is in Leviticus—Leviticus 19:1-2.
And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying,
Speak to all the congregation of the children of Israel, and say to them,
“You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.”
That is also repeated in 1 Peter 1:15-16.
Then I would like to go to Matthew 5:13.
Jesus is speaking, and He says to His disciples:
“You are the salt of the earth;
but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned?
It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.”
Let’s pray.
Father, we bow before You this morning because You are great, You are holy, and You are God. Lord, there is no other One who should receive worship, adoration, and praise. There is no other One to whom we should bow, save You.
Lord, we come to You this morning knowing very little of who You are, and asking that You would reveal Yourself to us through Your Word this morning and take us into that place where You dwell.
Lord, open Your Word by Your Holy Spirit. Anoint it. Speak to us. Let it reveal You.
Lord, I just want to tell You how inadequate I feel this morning, and how unclean I feel this morning. Yet I thank You, Lord, that You are the One who has nailed everything to the tree. We stand in You. We hide in You this morning.
We ask for Your blessing and Your grace through this time. In Jesus’ name, amen.
You are probably wondering, “Boy, talking about Leviticus is going to be heavy.” But, you know, Leviticus is a book of offerings that bring us to God.
For about the last year in my life personally, I have been going through a dark time. And I do not mean by going through a dark time that bad things are happening to me or stuff like that.
What I mean is there has been a lack of light. It has been dark. Trying to get through and find—well, I cannot even say trying to get through. Probably that is one of the reasons why it has been dark.
I have been reading the prophets in my regular Bible reading, and we have a lot in common with the people to whom the prophets were speaking, when you think about that.
For example, the prophets were speaking to those who had been chosen by God and who were His people. And we, if we are Christ’s, are the same way.
They were receiving instruction. A lot of times, a fault of ours is that we take instruction without taking it to what the Lord is really trying to say. We take it at face value instead of at a deeper value.
Another thing about them is that the Lord loves them, because if the Lord did not love them, He would not speak to them.
I mean, even when we are mad at our kids—Thomas was talking about our kids; sometimes they do not deserve the things we give them—even when we are mad at our kids, it is hard not to talk to them.
You can wait a couple of days, maybe something like that, but it is hard because you want to speak to them. You want to let your mind be known to them. You want to let your heart be known to them, because you want that relationship restored.
Now, the other thing about these people—and I do not know if everybody can relate to this, but I have certainly been able to relate to it lately—is that these people were being corrected because they had gone astray.
When you look at the prophets, there are three groups of prophets. There are the prophets after the exile: Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. There are prophets during the exile, which are Ezekiel and Daniel. And there are prophets before the exile, and those are all the rest of them. I cannot name them all.
But they all have something they are saying—the Lord is trying to say something to them. The thing about it is, it is all corrective ministry. In other words, a lot of it is saying, “Your behavior stinks. Your walk before the world and before Me is just off kilter.”
It is not that the prophets are saying, “You need to just shape up, and you need to do right things,” because behavior comes from within. There is something in you that is either missing or wrong.
What I have found, and the thing the Lord has been speaking to me in this, is that when you look at God’s people during this time—they were removed from Egypt around 1200 BC, and they went to Babylon around 600 or 585 BC—that is about 600 years.
A lot can go on in 600 years. Now, we do not live 600 years, but I am 60 now. I have lived a lot of years. I became a Christian when I was 17, so I have been a Christian a lot of years.
The question is, where am I on my Christian journey? Where do I find myself, and why do I find myself there?
Looking at these prophets, I started asking the Lord, because, like I said, I have been going through a dark time. I was asking the Lord, “Why am I going through this time?” I have some inklings, but you like to hear it from the Lord Himself.
As I was reading the prophets, I started wondering, “What is wrong with these people? Just what is wrong with these people? Why are they in the state they are in? Why does the Lord have to come in and correct them?”
I found this reason for it: they had lost their sense of who God was.
They worshiped God, but they were worshiping Him not in the ways He wanted to be worshiped. They were still attributing a lot of it to the Lord. They built up the high places. Some were worshiping other gods, but the whole thing was that they lost their sense of who their Creator and Redeemer was.
Because of that, they lost their sense of their calling. They go hand in hand. Once you lose your sense of who calls you, you lose all sense of your calling.
This morning, I felt like, “Okay, Lord, who are You then?” Because if I have lost my sense of who You are, I have got to know who You are.
It is not that we do not know that the Lord is Jesus, and we know all these things about Him. But there is something missing in all this knowledge. It is not necessarily experience, but it is knowing Him and who He is.
So I started to think, “What can I do?” As a teacher, whenever you are lost, instead of praying first, what do we do? We look for a book. “I will look it up in a book.”
And so I did. I started looking at books about who God is. One of the books I got was The Attributes of God by A. W. Pink. It is a small little book, and he talks about sixteen attributes of God.
I am going to have Kane write them on the board so that you can see them. I am not going to define them all. I will do something that we might think about, but I am just setting you up for something.
This is what A. W. Pink said are the attributes of God. He said there were sixteen of them.
The first one was solitariness. Just so you know about solitariness, if you play solitaire, you are playing a card game by yourself, right?
All that means about God is that He is self-existent. He does not need anybody else. He could be totally happy by Himself. He has everything He needs.
But I want to add one thing to that. It is like we were singing: “There is none like Me. Who is like unto You?” Nobody is like Him. He is solitary in that.
The second one he said was decrees. The way Pink explained it was that God issues decrees, which means He is very purposeful. He has purposes for what He does. If a king issues a decree for a purpose, he wants something done. And so God gives decrees.
Another attribute is knowledge. A lot of us would say He is omniscient. He knows. He knows us. He knows about us. He knows the shape of the world. He knows everything.
When we have been reading Revelation, one of the things the Lord says to each church is, “I know your works. I know. I know where you are at. I know where your failures are. I know how to encourage you. I know all those things.”
Another attribute is foreknowledge. He knows things before they are. He knew me in my mother’s womb, you know, as David said.
Supremacy: there is no one greater than He. No one higher than He. He is supreme.
Sovereignty: He has all authority. Nothing can be done without His permission. He has authority.
Immutability: it is a big word, but it just means He does not change. He does not mutate. He does not morph—that is for young people. He does not morph.
Power: He has all power—not just authority, but power. He can split the Red Sea. He can make the sun stand still. He can change a heart.
Then there is faithfulness, goodness, patience, grace, mercy, love, and wrath.
Total all those things, and we have made this into an addition problem: they all equal holiness.
Holiness—we think of it as moral purity, which is true. It is moral purity. But it also means this: He is different.
He is different than anyone and anything, different than any created thing. There is none like Him. As T. Austin-Sparks said, He is other. He is other than us.
His thoughts are higher than our thoughts. His purposes are greater than our thoughts. His love is greater than ours. He loves—but how can He have love and yet have wrath?
All these things are attributes of God, according to A. W. Pink. We need to see God as all of these things, because all of these are God. You cannot leave one of them out.
I think sometimes we like to pick and choose. Which one would you leave out of the list? I know which one I would leave out. I bet most of you would too. How about wrath? Let’s get rid of wrath.
But, boy, we like love and mercy. I did not see righteousness in here. How about righteousness?
The whole thing is, we have to see God as a whole. He is all these things. When we know Him as a whole, we have a sense of Him as a whole, and that shapes how we relate to Him.
If we do not see Him as a whole, then our view of Him is skewed, and therefore our view of our calling is skewed. It is not right. Therefore, we go astray.
This is what I believe happened with the Jews, with the Israelites. They got into the land, they had all these wonderful things, and after generations and time went by, what happened? We started forgetting who He is.
It is not a purposeful thing. It is just something that happens. We start losing parts of things. We do not see Him fully anymore.
Then you have that verse in Matthew. We are meant to be salt. We are meant to be salt because of how we know God—as the whole Being that He is. That is supposed to make us who we are, and that is supposed to be salt.
But what happens when we start losing that, and we lose our taste? Can that be restored?
It is a great question, is it not? Can that be restored? We can always say very glibly, “Oh yes, God can do anything.” And that is true.
Really, it is not whether God can do anything; it is what we are willing to let Him do that really makes a difference.
That is why you see in Revelation—Revelation 2 and 3—“He who has an ear,” and, “Repent.” You need to repent.
Like I said, I feel like I have been in a dark place, and I feel that in my own heart. I have lost that sense of who the Lord is, and I am so ashamed of it.
Because of it, I see little habits in my life that have grown into bigger things. I wonder about my testimony.
Now, it is easy to put on a nice face here. I am wearing a tie. I look real nice—Jerry Garcia, as a matter of fact. But it is easy to do.
It is in the depths, when you are alone, when you are in the places where you hear the Lord trying to draw you out and you are resisting. Do you know that darkness?
What does the Lord do? He sends prophets. It is a wonderful thing about God: He sends prophets, or He gives us His Word.
If we are not in His Word, we are not going to hear Him, and we are not going to see Him. You might say that you can see His attributes through nature. Yes, you can.
But you do not hear the same calling from the attributes of nature as you do from His written Word—from the things He has actually spoken to other people who have been in the same condition that I have been in.
So how does God woo us back? What does He want? What does He desire? I think the whole key is this: it is not trying to get back to God; it is really going back to God Himself and saying, “God, what is it that You desire?”
What is it that You desire that will get me back to the place where I sense who You are afresh in my life?
I want to mention four things. I am speaking next week too, is that right? Next week I want to talk about responding. But this week I want to talk about God. How does God respond to us?
Remember in Malachi? God says, “I have loved you,” and they say, “How have You loved us?”
This is what God would say, I think, to us. I think the first thing He desires is that we would know His name.
Let me ask you a couple of questions, especially you kids. Do you know your mom has a name, or do you just know her as Mom?
I am asking, “Do you know your mom is a person?” That is what I am really asking. She has not always been Mom. She is a person. She has a name. She has a history.
Husbands and wives, do you know your spouse has a name, or is it just, “Honey”?
But what I am saying goes beyond that. Do you remember the person? Do you remember the person you fell in love with?
Names are where the personality and identity go. We are identified by our name.
Especially in the Old Testament, names had real meaning to them. When we were going through Genesis, Jerry was talking about the names of people and how those names told something about them.
For example, who can forget Jacob? That really talked about his character, did it not? It showed who he was: Jacob.
Even when God changed his name to Israel, He said, “What is your name?” when they were wrestling. Jacob had to confess, “I am Jacob.” Then God said, “I am changing your name.”
One of the promises in Revelation 2 and 3 is, “I will give you a new name that no one knows but you, and you will know My name.”
I am not talking about a generic name: “Oh, He is God. That is Mom. That is Dad. That is my wife.” That is very generic.
Do you know what the Lord’s name is?
Yahweh? Can you translate that?
“I am.” Well, you are not all the way right. “I AM WHO I AM.”
Now, I want to take that, because first of all, the Jews never would say Yahweh. They would just say, “The Name,” because they were afraid of saying it wrong. That was considered blasphemy.
But then I ask, “The Name—oh, it is ‘I AM.’” Now, we like to take names. I like to give my students nicknames all the time. If I have a redheaded girl, I call her Red. But I ask them first: “You do not mind me calling you that, do you?”
You give little names here and there. Think of the names you give your kids. My youngest is Squid. I do not know why; it just came out. That is a term of endearment to her.
Sometimes we cut off our names. You guys know me as Jim, right? Well, that is not my name. My name is James. How do you get Jim? There is no “i” in it. I do not get it.
But we do that—we give a nickname. Sometimes we take God’s name, we shorten the “I AM,” and then we add things to it.
We have all done this, because this was a big thing back in the 1980s: “His name is ‘I AM everything you need.’”
He is everything I need. Or we take the times the Lord Jesus says, “I am”—“I am the Good Shepherd”—and say, “This is what He is.”
But when we talk about Him as everything I need, we are doing a disservice to Him, because we are making His name all about us.
“Everything I need, He is.” It is all about us: “I need this. He is what I need.” It is almost like He is a sugar daddy, a Santa Claus. That is not who He is.
Really, we do a disservice in doing that. He says, “I AM WHO I AM.” He is not just everything you need. He is who He is.
That is that whole list of things we just saw. He is all those things, and you cannot leave any of it out.
“I AM.” He is not just what I need. He is not just what satisfies me. He has all these attributes. None of those attributes can be severed from who He is.
If we sever them, we do damage to His name.
When I was reading Ezekiel a couple of weeks ago, in Ezekiel 39:25, He says, “I am jealous for My holy name.”
He is jealous about how He is portrayed and who He is. You cannot leave any part of God out of who He is. You damage His reputation.
He is the One who says, “I AM WHO I AM. I am supreme. I am love, but I am wrath. You cannot separate that from Me, and do not try to.”
So what if you do not understand it? “I am a mystery to you, but it is who I am. I am sovereign. Yes, I am mercy.”
This is not a pick-and-choose thing. It is all the attributes, all these qualities, all these things—and to the greatest degree.
Wrath to the greatest degree. Love to the greatest degree. Supremacy to the greatest degree. Holiness to the greatest degree. There is none greater in any of these attributes in our God.
“I AM WHO I AM.” I am, in the totality of My being, the One with whom you have to do.
Another translation would be this: “I am the One with whom you have to deal.” All mankind must deal with who I am. You cannot cut anything out of it. You deal with Me in My totality.
It is a scary thing.
I always read that in Hebrews 4:13: “The One with whom we have to do.” That verse has always scared me. My translation says, “The One to whom you have to give an account.”
Now, at the same time, I just want to say this: that does not mean He is not approachable.
What does it say in Romans? By Him, by the Holy Spirit, we cry out, “Abba, Father.”
Those are two strange words, are they not? Abba is a child’s call. That is the One to whom we give our affection, whom we know loves us. That is where we find mercy. We find some discipline and stuff like that.
Then we have Father. We look at Father as being a little more stern, because He is trying to train that young man or young woman to be the person He wants them to be.
Yet God is both: Abba, Father. He is both of them. That is to His glory. He is both of them for us—inseparable.
Here is another thing about His name, Yahweh. What does Jesus mean?
Yahweh saves. That is part of Him too. He is salvation. That is a wonderful thing. God is our salvation.
So He wants us to know His name.
Even the first prayer, when the Lord taught the disciples to pray, what was the first petition?
“Hallowed be Thy name.”
This petition is: “Let it be holy. Let it be hallowed.” Where? In me. Let me hallow that name. Let my life show that I hallow that name. I hallow everything He is.
Sometimes we get into the place where we just want one side of God. Some of us want only the grace of God, and then we find ourselves living a life in which we have too much license, and we are a bad testimony.
Some of us just want the righteousness of God, and we find ourselves so judgmental. We have got to have the whole thing.
That is why Jesus was so hard on the Pharisees. They just wanted one side of God. You have got to have them all. He is not just righteous; He is holy. It is a righteousness different from anyone else’s righteousness. He is holy.
Now, the second thing He wants us to do: turn to Exodus 3.
Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. And he led the flock to the back of the desert, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.
And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed.
Then Moses said, “I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn.”
So when the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses!”
And he said, “Here I am.”
Then He said, “Do not draw near this place. Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.”
The next thing I think God really wants us to know is this: when you are in a place of darkness, you get dark thoughts. Those dark thoughts are usually that God does not want me around. “Why would He want me around? Look at the condition I am in.”
Yet here you look at Moses. Moses had been 40 years in a condition where he had fled Pharaoh, and he was out there living on his own.
As far as we know, I do not know if he had a relationship with the Lord. Maybe he did; maybe he did not. It does not tell us that. But it does show us something about God.
What it shows us is that God desires that we approach Him. This is really, really important. When you get into a situation where you are out of whack and you are in a place of captivity, understand that God desires you to approach Him.
That is not a willy-nilly thing, but the heart of God is not to keep you out. It is to draw you back to Himself.
Here we see Moses, and God draws him to Himself. He did it in the middle of regular routine. This is what Moses did every day: he went out with the flock, and he did his thing.
For some of us, when we are in dark places spiritually speaking, a lot of times we shut off the Word. We just will not read it anymore.
Have you experienced that? You just kind of think, “I cannot read it.” That is the enemy, man.
Once in a while you pick it up again. I start reading it again, and the Lord shows you something that makes you draw to Him, draw close to Him.
Moses had seen these things all the time. I think Lance talks about that: in the Sinai Peninsula, these bushes go up all the time. They just go up.
Sometimes we have read something over and over about who God is, and it means nothing to us. But something catches your mind, catches your eye, and you approach.
This is what the Lord wants you to do. The Lord wants you to approach Him.
“I will take a closer look.” That is what Moses said: “I will take a closer look.” Approach God as He is, in all that He is.
Even in this state, God is going to let Moses come, but He is going to demand something of him.
What He demands of Moses here, He says, “Wait. Stop right there. Take your sandals off your feet.”
What is He saying to him? “Take your sandals off your feet because of holy ground.” Well, what do feet have to do with in the Bible? What do we do with our feet? We walk.
Then what is walking symbolic of? Think of some Scriptures: “Walk worthy of the Lord.” What does that mean? Does it mean I walk like this? I do not skip. What does it mean?
My conduct—yes. It is my manner of life. That is my walk.
Everybody sees your walk, even when you do not think they are seeing it. Your wife, people, your kids—how many parents have been convicted by your kids because they see your walk?
What the Lord says is, “Moses, I want you to approach, but I want to tell you this: the manner of life has got to change.”
It is a simple thing like that—not a berating thing or anything like that. He is just saying, “I want you in My presence, but I am holy, and you cannot have that kind of walk and be in My presence.”
Do not think that when the Lord does these things to us, He comes back with a list of 25,000 things: “This is what I have against you.”
For example, when we have been reading Revelation, when He comes in and says, “I have this against you,” how many things does He come up with?
Usually it is one. Why? Because that is the one most offensive to Him. He will get to the other ones.
Otherwise, He puts a big old list over there, and what do you think? “I can never do this.” He comes to us and addresses one thing. He says, “This thing has to go. Repent.”
Get rid of this because I desire you to be in My presence.
So the sandals speak of the manner of life. Again, this is not a generic altering: “I am going to change all these things in my life.” No, it is specific, and it is personal.
When the Lord was speaking to the churches in Ephesus, Smyrna, Sardis, and all those places, He spoke specifically to each one, personally to each one. It is the same with us. He speaks personally to each one.
He speaks to our own hearts, to the deepness of our being, to our own lifestyles. He does not say, “You have got to live like me.” No, the Lord puts His finger on one thing.
The one thing He says is, “This is the thing that needs to be removed right now, because I want you in My presence.”
Moses could have said, “I do not want to take my shoes off,” and gone back down the hill. That is our prerogative.
But the thing is, we want to see God. What is God doing? God is saying, “I want you to approach Me. I want you to come. I want you to get it so you can be back in My presence, because I have a purpose for you—a purpose for My people.”
I do not want you to miss out on it because I love you. I can put it even further: I paid for you.
It is like Onesimus and Philemon. You paid for him. You are Mine.
Quickly, because we are running out of time here, turn to Isaiah 6.
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple.
Above it stood seraphim; each one had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.
And one cried to another and said:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
The whole earth is full of His glory!”
And the posts of the door were shaken by the voice of him who cried out, and the house was filled with smoke.
So I said:
“Woe is me, for I am undone!
Because I am a man of unclean lips,
And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips;
For my eyes have seen the King,
The Lord of hosts.”
Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a live coal which he had taken with the tongs from the altar.
And he touched my mouth with it, and said:
“Behold, this has touched your lips;
Your iniquity is taken away,
And your sin purged.”
Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying:
“Whom shall I send,
And who will go for Us?”
Then I said, “Here am I! Send me.”
The next thing I think the Lord desires for us to see is that He desires to reveal to us His majesty and His holiness.
He wants us to see Him in the light of His majesty and His holiness, because when we see Him in that light, it undoes us.
That is what He wants to do. He does not want to undo us because He is some guy who just likes to mess with us. He wants to put us on a different ground.
Even though He knows it will undo us, His desire is, “I want you to see My holiness. I want you to see My majesty.”
Just like He did with John, it is going to have an effect on us. He is looking for the effect in us, just like John fell as dead, just like Paul fell off his horse on the road to Damascus.
He wants us to see ourselves in the light of who He is.
Why? Because this is going to ruin us. That is what Isaiah says: “I am undone.” That means, “I am ruined.”
Ruined from what? We might think it ruins us from any service of God because we see ourselves in the light of Him.
First of all, we are exposed for who we are, and who we are is just this: we are unholy people. We are unholy.
When we see God in that light, that is what we are going to see. We are going to see our unholiness, and we are going to fall on our faces.
But the thing about this is, it gives us a sense not just of how unfit we are, but it makes us see that we are unable to do anything that God would ever ask us to do.
Why would He want to do that? Because now we will never trust ourselves to save ourselves. That is why.
If we do not see ourselves in the light of who He is, we will always think that we can do something.
But once we see ourselves in that light, we come to the place of saying, “Oh my God, there is nothing I can do. Look at me.”
We get to the place where Martin Luther got. I have used this before: look at the movie Martin Luther. I suggest that you do. It has a real great gospel message.
Luther’s father confessor says, “Martin, just go before the Lord and tell Him you are His, and ask Him to save you.”
When you have a vision of God like this, that is all you can do. All you can do is fall on your face and say to God, “I am Yours. Save me.”
“I am Yours. Save me.” That is all I can do.
All of a sudden, God gets what He wants. He gets a person who knows he cannot do anything, but He also gets a person who knows the greatness of God.
I am unable to save myself. That is a hard lesson to learn—that we are unable to save ourselves.
The first time I ever prayed was when I was drowning.
We body-surfed when hurricanes came to Mexico, because the waves got really big. I got out there. There were no lifeguards on the beach.
I was trying to get up, but I was just getting pulled under. You get back up, another wave is coming down, you get thrashed up on the sea, and I had no strength left. Nothing to do. I could not do anything.
It was the first time I cried out to God. I just said, “God, please save me.” That was all I could do.
Think about what was against me: the Pacific Ocean—the biggest ocean in the world, is it not?
Not only that, what else was against me? The universe. Think about it: what controls the tides? The moon. Look at all these cosmic things that were against me.
Yet just a little call out: “Please save me.”
That is what God wants to do with all of us. He wants us to see ourselves as He sees us in His holiness—worms, or less than that.
“What is it? Would He devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?” We have to realize that.
But when we get to that point of realizing that, that is where God can say, “I can save. I am mighty to save, and I will save.”
Not only that, but we find out, “How can I ever be anything?” As soon as the Lord says, “I have something to do,” after He touches Isaiah’s lips, He says, “Whom shall I send?”
What is Isaiah’s response? “Oh, it cannot be me”? No. All of a sudden, in us is a response to Him that wants to serve Him, even though we know who we are.
Why is that? Because God has touched us. That is the only reason: because God has touched us.
That is a strength to us. That is what makes us different. We are people that God has touched, and we have just responded to that touch.
How many people did Jesus heal just by touch? Same with us.
Lastly, Psalm 8.
The last thing I think God desires us to know is found in Psalm 8. David writes this, probably when he was a little shepherd boy.
O Lord, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth,
Who have set Your glory above the heavens!
Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
You have ordained strength,
Because of Your enemies,
That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honor.
You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,
All sheep and oxen—even the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air,
And the fish of the sea
That pass through the paths of the seas.
O Lord, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth!
Here David found out what God’s purpose was. His purpose was for man to have dominion.
The question David has is, “What is man that You even take notice of him?” And God shared with him His purpose for him. It is an eternal purpose. It is not an individual purpose he is talking about.
He is talking about an eternal purpose: “I have meant this for My new creation. They have dominion. They reign with Me.”
Through them, I rule. That is what I want. I want to rule, and My purpose is that I rule through you—that I have a vessel through whom I can rule.
The attributes of God are known in the heavens. That is what David sees. He sees how great God is, how big He is, how wonderful He is, and how small, in return, we are.
When we look at those things, it is like Isaiah sees how unfit he is in the holiness and greatness of God. What do we even matter?
Yet God says we do matter. He says, “I have chosen you that I might rule through you.”
This earth—I have put you in these places. Again, not a personal purpose, but an eternal purpose.
Yes, we have a personal place in it, but it is not just like we get hung up on, “What is God’s personal will for me, for me alone?” His purpose is greater than just me.
This purpose is for all the new creation. The purpose is that all the new creation rules.
Now, I told you that I was in a place that I look at as maybe being captivity.
For those of us who are like that, there will not be another Red Sea experience. Sorry, the Red Sea has passed.
I have already been saved from my sins. I have already had that punishment fall on Christ for me. So there is no longer going to be that Red Sea experience for me.
Well then, where is my hope?
My hope is this: remember that Daniel found that 70 years would be completed, and when the 70 years were over, the captives would come home.
He told it to Cyrus, and Cyrus wrote a decree. He said this in his decree: “Whoever wants to go back, you have my blessing, you have my permission, and you have my provision to go back and build a house of the Lord.”
So what do we get? If we get no Red Sea experience, what do we get?
We get the still, small voice of the Lord talking to us that says, “The time is up now. Let’s go on back home. Let’s go back to where we should be.”
That is what we get. No fireworks. No celebration. Just simply that little word: “Whoever is stirred in spirit can go home.”
That is what we get, brothers and sisters.
We need to know who God is. We have to have our walks sharpened again by who He is—the wholeness of who He is, every bit of Him, and not just the parts that we want.
We need to approach Him. We need to approach Him just as we are. Come to that place, and when He says, “Do not come any further,” and He speaks to us about things in our lives that are out of whack, we need to respond to Him in a positive way.
When He lets us see how sinful we are, it is not to punish us. It is to make us depend on Him. It is to make us see that there is nothing in ourselves that we can do for ourselves. We have to go to Him.
It is for us to just say, “I am Yours. Save me.”
Finally, He is doing all this to bring us back into His purpose, because the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. They will not be taken away.
If we hear His voice today, if we hear His voice, let’s respond.
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, I want to thank You that You are who You are. Lord, we want to know You in every bit of who You are, and we want to come into line with everything of who You are.
I pray that, Lord, this week we would see You afresh in Your totality. Lord, for those of us who are in bad conditions, that You would speak to us and draw us back, just like You drew Moses back.
For those of us who are seeing our own sinfulness, may we see You making that provision by having that hot coal come and touch us.
Lord, we pray that we would hear Your voice calling us back. It is all that we want, Lord. We want to respond to You in a way that You desire from us.
Lord, thank You that You desire to show Yourself to us, that You desire to bring us back, that You want us in Your presence.
Lord, give us the faith not just to believe, but, Lord, to act—to draw close. We ask this in Jesus’ name.