The Present- (K)Now God

What God is doing – Exodus 16:4-5, Matthew 6:9-13

Please stand for the reading of God's word.

“The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.” Then the Lord said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.”

This is the word of the Lord.

Audience: Thanks be to God.

You may be seated.

We are just coming off a weekend of DNOW. And man, was it a blast. 4 hours of sleep on Friday night, one 200 milligram caffeine energy drink, and high caffeine coffee from Black Rifle Co, and we made it through. We only had to go to two Braums (that poor guy at the first one) and two homeless shelters, and no one died. I said it was a pretty successful weekend.  I loved getting to see you guys engage in worship and the sermons, and I honestly think one of my favorite parts was seeing all of your creativity play out in the art project we did with Lottie. I knew you guys were the artistic type, but man this is just a testament to how creative you are.

            Isn’t it so easy to feel God at a time like that? Like sure, we spent a few hours playing video games, or putting on makeup masks, but the majority of our time was spent talking about God. How is our foundation? How is he our rock? The sessions were at least two hours long, and the preachers were all definitely the yelly type. If you were not hearing God this past weekend, it wasn’t cause he wasn’t there, it’s because you weren’t listening.

            It’s easy to hear God at DNOW, or at camp, or at a mission trip. Because the focus is on God the whole time. But what about right now? What about the present? How are we supposed to know God now?

This is our second week in our three-week series called (K)now God. The purpose and the prayer of this series is to help you know God now. The hope is that we can help you see God in your past, present, and future. The hope is to help you see God in your story. And that means all of your story. The past, the present, and the future! Because friends, that’s what we really want for you at Embassy. We don’t want your life with God to just be a Sunday morning, and Wednesday night kind of faith. We want you to see how God loves you and wants to be involved in every part of your life everyday.

Now there is a kind of story like what we experienced this past weekend in the Bible. And hear me out, it’s a stretch, but you will see what I mean here in a second. At this point in the story of the Israelites, they had just been set free from the oppression of Egypt! So many crazy things have just happened. Moses’s whole life is an insane miracle, but just a while ago, he heard a talking bush tell him that he was called to be the mouthpiece to provide this exodus for God’s people. Moses and Aaron went and talked to Pharaoh, and he was not having it. So God ate and left no crumbs and dropped ten plagues on the Egyptians, until the pharaoh decided to stop playing the main character and let the people go.

But as they are making their way out, they come to the Dead Sea, and the Egyptians are following them on horseback, ready to take them out, so God does his God thing and splits the sea in two and allows the Israelites to walk through to the other side, and then has it come crashing down on the Egyptians.

So ya know. Big deal here, right? Like these people have just experienced big movements of God. In MASSIVE ways. Hundreds of years of oppression and slavery, and they are given an exodus, through the overwhelming power of God shown through burning bushes, plagues, and splitting seas.

And maybe for you, that’s what DNOW or CIY feels like. Maybe for you, he has done some great things at those events. Maybe he has brought to death some things in your life at those events. Maybe through the power of the Spirit, you have dropped some chains of oppression that you feel were holding you down, or you know were sinful and were keeping you from experiencing God to the fullest. Maybe at weeks like that, you knew where you wanted to go, but there was a sea in front of you, and you felt stuck. But at that retreat, God split the seas for you to walk through.

But so often, so often it’s almost comically predictable. We act like the Israelites, and start grumbling and forgetting what God has done for us just a mere moment after we have experienced it.

One of our main texts for the day, Exodus 16:1-5 says this “The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. 2 In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. 3 The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”

4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. 5 On the sixth day, they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.”

So no joke. THE CHAPTER BEFORE THIS IS THE SEA SPLITTING IN TWO. And now here we are a month later, and the Israelites are complaining and saying, “Oh man! Times were better when we were under oppression by the Egyptians. At least then we could eat anything we wanted, and our stomachs were full.” It’s been a month of walking through the wilderness, on their way to the promised land, and these people have already started to stop trusting God. They just had arguably one of the biggest moments of proof of God’s love for them, how he provides for them, how he protects them, they were literally slaves,, and now they aren’t, and they are like “Man. I’m hungry.”

We laugh. But isnt that us? We have these great moments at DNOW and CIY, we hear these encouraging messages, we worship our hearts out, we express and confess in small group and we commit to ourselves and others how much more we plan on getting our loves together and building our house on the foundation of Christ….and then something happens and we forget all about what we just talked about and experienced.

You get in the van and you get a mean text from your friend. Your dad texts you and says that things are not going well at home while you were gone. Your boyfriend breaks up with you. You get into a yelling match with your mom. You start going back to your old habits of looking at things you shouldn’t and using lust as a coping mechanism. You forget all that God has done. And you look back and say, “Wouldn’t life be better if God could just always be splitting seas? If he could be constantly burning bushes?” We get back into real life. We enter back into the wilderness, and we start asking ourselves, “Can we really trust God? Will he provide for me in this moment? Will he protect me? Will he give me what I need?”

You hear what I am saying? But look what God does. Rather than punish them, he rains down bread from heaven (v. 4). Look at verse 4: “ Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day.” If you need convincing of the grace of God in the Old Testament, you need only to look here! God has just given them everything! All they could ever ask for! freedom from slavery! And they are like, “Dad, I need a snack.”

But listen to the rest of God’s response. He says, “In this way, I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions.” Remember what we said last week, God does not tempt, but he does test. He says, “Since you can’t seem to trust me, after all that I have done for you” (sounds like they needed to do a God did timeline like we did last week, and they could’ve saved themselves a lot of trouble). “I will provide for you. I will give you food to eat. But enough for one day. So you will have to trust me every day to provide for you. You will need to wake up and trust that I am there and will love you.”

Do you hear what I am saying? God could have guided His people straight into the promised land, but instead, He led them through the wilderness, providing daily bread—just enough for one day—to test their trust.

Friends. Can you guess what I am about to say? Are you seeing where I am going?

We need to trust God every day. We need to trust him to provide for us. We need to trust him to protect us. We need to trust him to love us. We need to trust him enough for our daily bread.

Which is exactly why God himself, Jesus, in the sermon on the mount, when teaching his people the way of the kingdom, says when you pray, pray like this. “ Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread.And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’

God, the creator of the universe, teaches us how to pray, and in he says to say “Give us today our daily bread.” Why? Because normal life isnt camp. Normal life isnt DNow. Normal life isnt those crazy highs. Normal life was today. God is not just at CIY. He is not just in the splitting of the dead sea, he is in the mundane, boring every day that you and I both experience. And we need to trust him in it.

God doesn’t just want a relationship one week every summer. He wants to be with you all day everyday. He wants to be in every moment with you. He wants to be involved. And because he is a good father, he knows exactly what we need. And he does it this way, so we can trust him. He knows what you need today, and tomorrow, and the day after that. He will give you what you need. More times than that, not what you want, but what you need. Because he is a good father.

We need to rely on God because we are dependent on God, whether we want to believe it or not. Maturing in your faith is learning more and more that you are completely and utterly dependent on God. And the quicker you learn that, the better off you will be.

So how do we do this? Well, there is an ancient practice called the Daily Office that I would like to quickly explain to you. It has its roots in ancient Israel, where we can see throughout the Bible that many Jews prayed at fixed hours of the day. Most would do this one time in the morning, once in the afternoon or midday, and once in the evening. Jesus and the apostles lived within this rhythm, and the early church practiced this as well. Early monasteries changed this to 8 times in a 24-hour period, and later Anglican and Reformed traditions did only 2. This practice has had various forms throughout Christian tradition, but for our purposes today, we will stick with three.

The idea is that, 3 times a day at specific times, I want to challenge you over the next week to try and pray. It’s not a rulebook or a checklist, but rather a discipline to come to God and acknowledge him today. In the present. To remind yourself that he is here. Working in your midst, and he knows exactly what you need.

So once in the morning when you wake up.

Once in the afternoon, say, at lunchtime.

And once at night, before you go to sleep.

And I know it will be hard. The idea is to help interrupt the hurriness that we all experience every day, and to help break the illusion that we are the ones whose lives depend on. To re-engage our bodies and our minds to understand that God is in charge, and we need to trust him. To just even for a few minutes, read his word and pray to God three times a day.

For our youth group, I would like us to use this script as we move forward with this challenge over the next week.

In the morning, I want you to read Psalm 23. And simply say, “Lead me today, Lord.”

In the afternoon, I want you to read Exodus 16:1-5 and simply say, “Lord, please provide for me.”

And in the evening read, Psalms 121:3–4 and say “Lord, please watch over me.”

And that’s it. Try it and see what happens.

Because we the more we trust God in our present, the more we will be able to trust him in the future.