Give Thanks to the Lord - For His Deliverance

Victories: 1. 2.

Prayer: Twin City Bible Baptist Dale Schuiteman - Pray for their Pastoral Search as they look for a Next Gen Pastor

Missionary Prayer: Matt & Katie Dooney / Word of Life - Pray for the 16 students who decided to follow Jesus a couple of weeks ago at Reverb in Jacksonville. Pray that the churches that brought them will follow up in discipleship. In Jesus’ Name, I pray.

Intro

When we think about delivery it usually is focused on pizza, groceries, a package or babies. There is that line in the movie It's a Wonderful Life that says, “…the three most exciting sounds in the world are? Anchor chains, plane motors, and train whistles.” Well, we are a long way removed from 1946 when that movie was made and most of us haven’t heard an anchor chain, or ridden on a train, and Jet Engines don’t put off the same sound that George Bailey would have expected. I would venture to say the 3 newest most exciting sounds are, Text message chirps, the Netflix start-up sound, and the Amazon Truck stopping in your front yard. We like deliveries.

However, the type of delivery I want to speak about today has nothing to do with Amazon. Actually, in humanities' most recent history, we don’t have a lot of experience with the type of deliverance I want to talk about today. That was until Oct. 7th with the attack of Hamas on Israel and now the past week with the ceasefire and many hostages being returned. You see while we see deliveries as something good that we get, this past week we have seen over 50 hostages delivered from the hands of terrorists. Delivered from the hands of their captors and now while they have the trauma of 2 months of captivity to work through at least they are back with their loved ones and receiving the care that they need. When they are asked to explain delivery they have an entirely different perspective to pull from.

It is this type of delivery that I want us to think about today because it is being captive to an enemy that we are delivered from that we need to understand. We want to give thanks to our Lord for the deliverance that He has given to us and to do that we have to understand what enemy we are being held by.

Delivered from Captivity

Physical Captivity

To understand this type of captivity we need to see it from a very real experience of captivity. We get a glimpse of this captivity when we sing the song “O come, O come, Immanuel” The first verse says, O come, O come, Immanuel, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear.” If you didn’t catch the reference that this song is pointing us to it is the Exodus account, and as we look at our scripture today we will see that captive Israel. Turn with me to the book of Exodus.

Exodus 2:23–25 “Now it happened in the process of time that the king of Egypt died. Then the children of Israel groaned because of the bondage, and they cried out; and their cry came up to God because of the bondage. So God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God looked upon the children of Israel, and God acknowledged them.”

What has happened to get the people of Israel in this position? If you know the story well then you know that to answer that question you have to go back around 300 years, back to the story of Joseph when he brought his entire family to Egypt to escape the famine that was happening. Joseph and his 12 other brothers thrived in Egypt and they became a massive nation living inside the borders of another. Time passed and the Pharaohs forgot about Joseph but his descendants kept on growing so the Pharaohs decided they would turn the nation of Israel into their slave labor. Captives were forced to do what their masters told them to do. As the population grew so did the labor and the toil that Egypt put on the backs of Israel until they could no longer take it and they cried out to the only place they could turn. They cried out to their God they needed to be delivered. As we just read there in Exodus 2:23-25 their cries were heard, God remembered them and He sought to deliver them from their bondage.

Here is the beautiful thing about God, He is powerful enough to do the act of deliverance all on His own but God chooses to use us sinful broken people to help fulfill His plans. Turn with me one chapter and let’s meet the man God chose. Read Ex. 3:1-4.

Moses is a perfect choice but even Moses doesn’t know it yet. He was born a Jew but for the first 40 years of his life he grew up in the Egyptian Royal household only to be banished from Egypt and sent into the wilderness. Now Moses has been shepherding for close to 40 more years and he probably long forgot about Egypt and his life there, but God had not forgotten about Moses. Read Ex. 3:7-8.

God had not forgotten the covenant that he gave to Abraham and He still loved the Israelites. God had a plan and now was the time for Him to accomplish the promises of that plan. God was going to deliver Israel out of Egypt and bring them to the land He promised. More importantly, though God delivered them to be free.

There is an amazing correlation that happens here in Exodus to the account of Jesus and His family in the New Testament. God sent Joseph and his family to Egypt to escape a great danger in the same way that God sent Joseph, Mary, and Jesus to Egypt to escape a great danger. Then when the time was right God called them back. Exodus 3:10 “Come now, therefore, and I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring My people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” God also called Jesus and his family back from Egypt, Matthew 2:14–15 “When he arose, he took the young Child and His mother by night and departed for Egypt, and was there until the death of Herod, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying, “Out of Egypt I called My Son.” Let us never forget that God has a plan and that His plans never fail.

Delivered from Ourselves

Self-inflicted Captivity

Unlike the people of Israel in this passage from Exodus our understanding of captivity is not so specifically physical. I don’t know all of your life stories completely but I have not heard that any of you were kidnapped or forced into slavery at some point in your life. However, our captivity is real and we are in bondage. Therefore the delivery we need is from our self-inflicted wounds. I spent some time last week talking about how Adam and Eve brought about sin which now infects all of humanity into the curse. It is that sin that we are in bondage to. It is the kind of sin that you as a believer are so wrapped up in and yet can’t see a way out of. The sin that you have in your life that you cry out to God over and over again that God will take it away from you or that He will help you to defeat it.

I know I often am confronted by my sin and the consequences that it causes in my own life. Much like Paul in Romans 7, I find that while I want to become more like Christ I find that I instead consistently fall into the same traps of sin over and over again. Paul said in Romans 7:15–17, “For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.” I can hear myself saying these same words that Paul is saying here because I too find myself falling over and over again into the same sins and I also cry out to be relieved from the sin and condemnation of those sins.

Friends we don’t have to have a physical captor to be delivered from because we have a ready-made captor in our lives at all times. But here is what we must do; we must continue to call out to God for His help. It doesn’t matter how long we have been praying for relief or how fervently we have prayed the fact of the matter is we cannot defeat SIN by ourselves therefore we have to rely on God and more importantly God’s timing to see victory in our lives.

Think back to Israel's captivity in Egypt. We looked at a specific period in Moses’ life, the time when he was around 80 years old and the people of Israel were calling out and the Lord heard them and sent Moses to get them from Egypt. Sounds good right, we cry out to the Lord, the Lord hears our prayers and the Lord immediately sends help. That is exactly what we want but that is not how God works. Could God have saved His people from Egypt without the help of Moses? Of course; but God chooses to use his people and He chooses to use the consequences of our sins to help us to grow in the process. We learn to be dependent on God and we learn that His ways are the best ways. These are lessons we wouldn’t learn if God just gave us what we wanted all the time. That is not our God and getting what we want when we want it isn’t even loving. A loving parent gives what they know will benefit the child, to give them everything they want only spoils the child and makes them entitled and quite frankly a brat.

However, if you read the passage we read in Hebrews 2 and 3 and determined that God just immediately gave them the deliverance they were requesting then you would be wrong. This happened when Moses was 80 but if you look at the reason why Moses was banished from Egypt in the first place 40 years prior you will see more reason for the people of Israel to cry out. Moses who had grown up as a Hebrew in the Royal Egyptian household (his adopted mom was the daughter of the Pharaoh) Moses witnessed an Egyptian beating a Hebrew and Moses took it upon himself to kill the Egyptian. We do not think this Egyptian abuse of Hebrews was an isolated incident. and therefore, I can’t imagine this beating happening and the people of Israel not crying out. But even this was not the start of the abuse Israel had to bear at the hands of the Egyptians. If we go back even further to the beginning of Moses’ life we find that the Pharoah had ordered the death of all Hebrew boys which is why Moses was in the household of the Pharaoh to begin with because Moses' real mother and sister devised a plan to save baby Moses by placing him in a basket and sending him down the river where he was found by the daughter of Pharaoh. Not only this but Pharoah had already put Israel into bondage, Read Exodus 1:13–14 “So the Egyptians made the children of Israel serve with rigor. And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage—in mortar, in brick, and in all manner of service in the field. All their service in which they made them serve was with rigor.”

What do we learn from this? You could easily cast blame on God for not rescuing or delivering His people sooner because that is very convenient for us to do as we look at the situation from a very narrow perspective. God doesn’t, His view of the world is complete, He sees all the people involved, He knows all the problems, anticipates all the angles, and sets everything in motion. Job attempted to complain that God wasn’t fair at one point and God’s response was, Job 38:2–11 ““Who is this who darkens counsel By words without knowledge? Now prepare yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer Me. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? To what were its foundations fastened? Or who laid its cornerstone, When the morning stars sang together, And all the sons of God shouted for joy? “Or who shut in the sea with doors, When it burst forth and issued from the womb; When I made the clouds its garment, And thick darkness its swaddling band; When I fixed My limit for it, And set bars and doors; When I said, ‘This far you may come, but no farther, And here your proud waves must stop!” That scripture puts me in my place when I get a bit too big for my britches. You know what? I know that my sin is horrible and there are things in my life that I would love to be delivered from. I have a God who loves me and wants to see the best for me but this is His world and I am just a visitor here. He is in control and I am not. Who am I to say that He is wrong for not giving me what I want? Who am I to believe that I know better?

Spiritual Deliverance

Paul once again knew that there was nothing that He could do to fix his sin problem and the Law of God only served to condemn him. The law only showed Paul just how weak he truly was. However, Paul reminds us of just who our deliverer really is, Romans 8:3 “For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh,”

Here is our spiritual Deliverance, Jesus. Paul reminds us that we too require deliverance, and we find our Deliverer in Jesus. For there is no one else in whom we can believe that will hear our cries for salvation and then brings us that salvation immediately. There is a cry that God will always hear and answer. Do you want to know what it is? It is the cry of the sinner in need of a savior. God not only desires to answer that cry but He sent His son Jesus to solve our sin problem.

Gospel Message:

Jesus is the Lamb of God who died for your sins. God sent Jesus in order that Jesus might take the punishment we deserve in order that we might return to God and be called His own. God holds out His outstretched hand for you. Are you going to continue in your sin or are you going to take His Hand? He is calling and all you have to do is believe. Romans 10:9 says, “that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.

It is just that easy. You can confess Him as your savior. If that is your desire today you can say this prayer with me. Bow your heads.

Dear Lord,

I know that I’m a sinner. I’m sorry for my sin, and I ask you to forgive me. I believe you died for my sins and rose from the dead. I repent of my sins and I ask you to come into my life and take control. I make a commitment to follow you, and I trust you as my Lord and Savior.

Friend if you prayed that prayer today I ask that you come and speak to me after the service.

For those of you who are believers, Never forget the deliverance that Jesus bought for you on the cross and in this season of the year where we remember the birth of Jesus let us thank God for sending us the deliverer we desperately needed and who continues to deliver us from our sin.

Benediction: Kings Treasure