In the Wilderness
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Isaiah 41:10
Isaiah 41:10
Pray
Thank you
A little background on me which will tie into the message in just a moment.
I started my career as a public school teacher.
I taught Art for 16 years.
I always considered myself to be a visual artist.
In my painting, I attempt to tell stories.
Most of them containing some sort of moral message.
But the difficulty in trying to tell a story in one painting, is that the fullness of the message is hard to convey.
I have been discovering through the leading of the Lord, that I am not a visual artist using images to create painting.
I have been led to paint with words.
To the glory of the Lord, He has been leading me to illustrate the truth of His Word through writing.
As I was teaching, early on in my career, I felt discontent.
I just felt like this is not the end goal.
I began to question why the discontent.
At the time, we were married, but we did not actively pursue our faith.
We went to church, but faith was not a central aspect of our marriage or our lives.
This went on for a number for years.
I was teaching and enduring the discontent.
I assumed it would just be a passing thing.
But I began to realize it did not go away.
So I began to pray about it.
As I prayed, the Lord laid on my heart to become more involved in my faith.
We got more active in our church.
Began teaching and studying more intentionally.
The more I poured into my faith, the more I wanted to pour into my faith.
The more I engaged with the Word of God, the more I wanted to know and grow in understanding.
Quickly the discontent I felt continued to grow more predominant.
Still just ignoring it as a passing affliction.
But the more I ignored, the stronger the discontent became.
I liken this time of my life to the account of Samuel.
When the Lord began to call Samuel as a boy, Samuel was not sure of the calling.
The Lord called out to Samuel a few times.
Each time, Samuel thinking it was Eli calling.
Eventually, Eli perceived that it was the Lord calling Samuel.
Eli instructs Samuel to respond to the Lord.
The next time the Lord called Samuel, Samuel responds with, “Speak Lord, for your servant hears.”
It took me a number of years to get to the place where I responded to the Lord, here I am, your servant hears.
Glory to God.
Glory to God because since then, He has led my family to walk a path that I would have never thought to plan myself.
Never on my radar to serve as a Pastor of church.
Never on my radar to continue to study the Word of the Lord.
Never on my radar to be here this evening speaking to a group of people who I have come to love and greatly respect.
Never would have been anything we could have planned.
Yet here I am.
Here we are.
And to this day I often ask the Lord, really?
Why me?
Who am I to be trusted to carry the WORD OF GOD?
We know that the Lord equips those who are willing.
Glory to God.
Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.
I praise the Lord for His leading.
I am humbled to be here to share what the Lord has laid on my heart.
Honestly.
I am honored.
I have come to know some of you better than others, but with truth I can honestly say it is a blessing to be part of this group.
The Lord has drawn together men and women of integrity, honor and diligence.
I am humbled, honored and excited about what the Lord is doing.
Blessed to serve my Messiah and King!
The Scripture that will serve as a point of inspiration for this message is:
Scripture: Isaiah 41:10
One of my favorite verses, if you can pick a favorite.
‘Do not fear, for I am with you; Do not anxiously look about you, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, surely I will help you, Surely I will uphold you with My righteous right hand.’
We will come back to this passage later.
It will tie into the point I am going to make.
The introduction will also tie into the point of the message.
Cover a bunch of ground in the beginning.
Move quickly.
Start in the book of Exodus.
Then we will come back to Isaiah.
“Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying, ‘On the tenth of this month they are each one to take a lamb for themselves, according to their fathers’ households, a lamb for each household. ‘Now if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his neighbor nearest to his house are to take one according to the number of persons in them; according to what each man should eat, you are to divide the lamb. ‘Your lamb shall be an unblemished male a year old; you may take it from the sheep or from the goats. ‘You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month, then the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel is to kill it at twilight. ‘Moreover, they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and on the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. ‘They shall eat the flesh that same night, roasted with fire, and they shall eat it with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. ‘Do not eat any of it raw or boiled at all with water, but rather roasted with fire, both its head and its legs along with its entrails. ‘And you shall not leave any of it over until morning, but whatever is left of it until morning, you shall burn with fire. ‘Now you shall eat it in this manner: with your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it in haste—it is the Lord’s Passover. ‘For I will go through the land of Egypt on that night, and will strike down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments—I am the Lord. ‘The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live; and when I see the blood I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.
Familiar verses.
In this passage we have the instruction of the Lord given to His people.
In this passage the Lord is revealing His final judgement.
It is a judgement against those who oppress His people.
Up to this point the Lord afflicted Egypt with various plagues in an attempt to reveal His ultimate authority to a Pharoah who had a hard heart.
Egypt sough to continue to oppress and afflict the people of God so that they could not worship Him in reverence.
Egypt wanted the people of God to remain submitted to a foreign authority.
But the Lord promises His people that He will bring deliverance.
He will bring freedom from captivity.
He will offer salvation from affliction under His authority.
He instructs the people to take the Lamb of the Passover.
To slaughter it and paint its blood over the threshold of your homes.
The Lord then tells them to enter into this home covered by the blood.
As His people entered in, they were covered.
They were covered under the blood of the Lord’s authority.
And they were saved.
The blood served as a sign of faith.
It served as a sign of trust and obedience to the authority of God.
The angel of the Lord passed through Egypt striking down the firstborn of those who refused this gift of grace.
But those under the blood, found safety.
They found freedom and deliverance from affliction.
And they were saved by the mighty hand of the Lord.
We know that the Passover can serve as a metaphor for Messiah.
Egypt can be applied to infer a picture of our world.
A world that wants to afflict us with temptation.
A world that wants to blind our eyes form seeing the hope we can have inJesus.
We live in a world that wants to increase the rebellion or the hardness of the hearts of humanity so that the promises of God become irrelevant.
This world wants to erase the gift of grace from the minds of those who reject the authority of God.
They exchange the mercy of God for the exaltation for the self.
But to God’s glory, He gives us the same hope.
He gives us the Blood of the Lamb.
Offering those who step under the blood deliverance.
We can be set free by the blood of the Lamb.
We can be set free to follow the leading of the Lord.
We are set free to be transformed.
Once in bondage to sin, and set free to humbly follow the leading of our Messiah.
Thinking back to the Passover.
The Lord promises to lead His people to a place of Promise.
This promise is revealed a few chapters earlier in the book of Exodus.
Now Moses was pasturing the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian; and he led the flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed. So Moses said, “I must turn aside now and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up.” 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 come near here; remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said also, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. The Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt, and have given heed to their cry because of their taskmasters, for I am aware of their sufferings. “So I have come down to deliver them from the power of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite. “Now, behold, the cry of the sons of Israel has come to Me; furthermore, I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians are oppressing them.
We have this declaration of the Lord to deliver His people to a land of Promise.
The Lord promises to lead the people to a place of hope.
He intends to lead them along the way.
He promises to be with them in the journey to this destination.
He declares that He will be with them in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.
He intends to provide for them along the way.
We know the final destination,
We know the place that the Lord intends to lead His people,
but what is most profound in this account is to consider where the Lord takes the people first.
After the Exodus, the Lord leads His people into the wilderness.
Now when Pharaoh had let the people go, God did not lead them by the way of the land of the Philistines, even though it was near; for God said, “The people might change their minds when they see war, and return to Egypt.” Hence God led the people around by the way of the wilderness to the Red Sea; and the sons of Israel went up in martial array from the land of Egypt. Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, for he had made the sons of Israel solemnly swear, saying, “God will surely take care of you, and you shall carry my bones from here with you.” Then they set out from Succoth and camped in Etham on the edge of the wilderness. The Lord was going before them in a pillar of cloud by day to lead them on the way, and in a pillar of fire by night to give them light, that they might travel by day and by night. He did not take away the pillar of cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the people.
The Lord delivers them from Egyot.
he leads them to the Red Sea.
I am not going to elaborate much on the crossing of the Red Sea this evening for the sake of time.
But this is a beautiful account in and of itself.
The Lord leads His people through the parted waters.
As the pass through the waters, their enemies are destroyed in pursuit.
And the Lord leads them to the other side.
A deliverance from oppression in a world that hates all that is of God because this world seeks to exalt the self.
The Lord delivers them from this oppression, through the waters and into where?
Then Moses led Israel from the Red Sea, and they went out into the wilderness of Shur; and they went three days in the wilderness and found no water. When they came to Marah, they could not drink the waters of Marah, for they were bitter; therefore it was named Marah. So the people grumbled at Moses, saying, “What shall we drink?” Then he cried out to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a tree; and he threw it into the waters, and the waters became sweet. There He made for them a statute and regulation, and there He tested them. And He said, “If you will give earnest heed to the voice of the Lord your God, and do what is right in His sight, and give ear to His commandments, and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you which I have put on the Egyptians; for I, the Lord, am your healer.” Then they came to Elim where there were twelve springs of water and seventy date palms, and they camped there beside the waters.
Into the wilderness.
The Lord delivered them from captivity leading them into the wilderness.
As the Lord led them, the people started to grumble.
Move down to chapter 16
Then they set out from Elim, and all the congregation of the sons of Israel came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after their departure from the land of Egypt. The whole congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The sons of Israel said to them, “Would that we had died by the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat, when we ate bread to the full; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” Then the Lord said to Moses, “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a day’s portion every day, that I may test them, whether or not they will walk in My instruction. “On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather daily.” So Moses and Aaron said to all the sons of Israel, “At evening you will know that the Lord has brought you out of the land of Egypt; and in the morning you will see the glory of the Lord, for He hears your grumblings against the Lord; and what are we, that you grumble against us?”
The Lord continues to lead them in the wilderness.
The text tells us that the whole congregation of Israel began to grumble against the Lord.
They questioned the Lord.
The people remembered the pots of meat and the bread they ate in Egypt.
They longed to return.
Some thought it would be better to suffer in captivity than tp be tried in the wilderness.
Some longed to return to this place of bondage because they saw it as more convenient.
It was easier to submit to the authority of a forgien ruler than to trust in the Lord.
It was easier to go back to captivity where at least they had food.
It was easier to give up and return to the place of conformity that to do the hard work of following the Lord.
As stated earlier, Egypt can serve as a picture of our Salvation.
We find Salvation under the blood.
It is the authority of Jesus that delivers us from bondage to sin.
Under His covering of authority we are set free from the sin nature.
We are set free to walk according to His leading.
We are set free in our Messiah from a world that wants to keep us in bondage.
The world wants us to conform to its image rather than being conformed to the image of our Messiah.
In Jesus we are set free to walk as the person that we are designed to be.
We can find out true identity in Jesus.
Our true identity is a child of God who as been Redeemed.
We are children of God who have been
Think back to Israel in Egypt.
After they were delivered, the Lord led them to the wilderness.
He declared to them that He would lead them to a land of Promise, but first He took them to the wilderness.
Next point in salvation if to be equipped tal about this, then lead into my stiry of the wilderness.
We got connected with an online ministry. Year 20 18 or so.
COnflict online, which is a hard truth we needed to learn.
Like putting your toe in a tank full of sharks.
In hindsight we should have separated form this online ministry due to the conflict.
Then the verses in Isaiah.
then the changes with RFI
he helped us not to quit i tak eno credit for myself it was only in him
