Week 3: Who are you?

Announcements:

-February Schedule

-Junior High Retreat

-Senior High Retreat

This is our final week of our series “Who are you?”

Week 1: We talked about what we behold, and how beholding Jesus changes our identity.

Week 2: We talked about Peter and John before the courts and how their appearance was different because of being with Jesus.

And tonight we conclude our series with one of my favorite stories in the Bible, Moses encountering Gods glory.

Tonight I’m gonna preach a message called “Face to Face”

Let’s Pray.

Have you ever had an encounter with something that changed your life forever? (I have now a very natural respect for the ocean, let me explain.)

In scripture we see these moments that people have that literally change their life forever.

-Paul encountering the Lord.

-Jesus on the mountain with the disciples.

-Moses encountering Gods glory.

Exodus 33:18–23 NIV

Then Moses said, “Now show me your glory.” And the Lord said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” Then the Lord said, “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.”

Moses in this intense encounter, asks to see the glory of God. But God says His glory is way to intense. So he hides Moses, and allows His glory to pass by. This changes everything, Moses life is forever changed from this encounter, in fact after this Moses would write the ten commandments.

“God will grant Moses the privilege of seeing more of Him than he (or any other man to this point, I believe) has ever seen before. He will see part of God’s glory, but not all of it. He will see, in human terms, God’s back, but not His face” -Bob Deffinbaugh

One and only point: Beholding God in the thin places emboldens us to go into the world with his message.

So how can we do this?

1.) We no longer have to veil our face.

-After the death and resurrection of Jesus ,Paul writes to the church in Corinth that “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18) - This is vastly different from what the Israelites and Moses had to do when they experienced the visible presence of God. “Now all true Christians see him -more clearly with open face” -Matthew Henry -Story of Becca having your face covered at our wedding. When I finally seen her face.

-Listen everything changes when we see the Jesus face to face.

2.) We set our heart to seek Him daily.

-Paul uses the word metamorphoō when writing about transforming into the image of God. Metamorphoō means “to change into another form, transform, transfigure” and is the same word used to describe Christ’s appearance on the Mount of Transfiguration.

-Ask eveyone to repeat the word Metamorphoo

-The change that takes place when we have beheld God compels us to tell other people what we have seen.

Exodus 34:32 NIV

Afterward all the Israelites came near him, and he gave them all the commands the Lord had given him on Mount Sinai.

3.) We embrace the thin places in our life.

-Tracy Balzer writes,“The Celts that inhabited Ireland in the centuries surrounding the time of Christ had a name for particular geographical locations where the physical and spiritual came to touch each other in a special, almost tangible way. In their pagan, pantheistic spirituality, they believed there were places where the line between the spirit world and the physical world was ‘tissue-paper thin.’ These pagan Celts therefore referred to and revered such sites as ‘thin places’”

-Psalm 63:2

Psalm 63:2 NIV

I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory.

-Our thin places could be a quiet corner in a coffee shop, the hidden nooks in the back of a closet, a quiet drive into work in the morning, the backyard on a starry night, a wandering bike ride on a trail, a walk around the neighborhood, or a digital journal on a device. Where is yours?

-Story of my thin place in coffee shops.

Close:

We are going to close different tonight, I really feel God wants to encounter people tonight.

One of the ways I really believe God encounters us is through community. So we are going to break into groups of 6 tonight. Each group will have two adult leaders. Sit in a circle and one person at a time will sit in the middle. Everyone will lay hands on that person and pray for the real God to encounter them.

As you break into groups, we will have some worship music playing in the background.

Before we break, I want to pray.