Sermon Tone Analysis
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Good morning, it is great to be able to speak this morning, I am always thankful for the opportunity.
If you would please turn in your Bibles to Please stand for the reading of God’s Word.
It has been a really busy time for me.
Later this week we will be travelling to Lynchburg, Virginia as I am finally graduating from college.
Yes, I squeezed a four-year degree into fifteen years so we will not be with you next week.
But I was also not able to be here with you last week.
Many of you know that when Courtney and I lived in South Carolina I worked with a group of middle and high school boys in a program called Christian Service Brigade.
Think of Brigade as a sort of Christian Boy Scouts.
We work with the boys to learn leadership skills and the older boys actually lead their own small group Bible studies called “squads.”
Brigade was one of my big reservations about moving to Kentucky.
I really did not want to leave that ministry.
But, thanks to technology, I have been fortunate and privileged to continue working with them from here in Kentucky.
This past weekend, I travelled with them to my home state of “Almost Heaven” West Virginia for an annual competition called Camp-O-Rama.
The boys got to have fun shooting rifles, throwing tomahawks and boomerangs (yes, you heard me correctly), shooting bows and arrows, orienteering, disc golf, fire building, and doing a chariot race.
Now, let me pause on the chariot race.
This event is intense.
What happens is this, there are three large sticks about five to six feet long.
A team of three boys takes three ropes and ties these sticks together in a triangle.
One boy then mounts the chariot while the other two drag them around a course on the field.
And yes, it is filled with tumbles, chariots falling apart, total carnage and chaos.
It is wonderful.
But it is not just all about fun and games.
One of the events is Scripture Memory.
And this year the passage was difficult.
It was .
Listen to what these boys, some 11 years old, had to memorize,
This is not an easy passage, especially for some guys who are 11 and 12 years old.
One of my favorite preachers, Steven Lawson, would say this is “big boy football.”
But I was so proud of my guys.
All nine of them said the verse perfectly without any mistakes.
They also worked on a service project for Camp Hemlock which is the camp where the competition was held.
This was not just raking leaves or cutting some grass or doing some cleaning.
No, this year 250 boys from all over the West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and our boys from South Carolina, built a bridge.
A big bridge.
They laid over 100 wooden planks that were 12 feet long, 10 inches wide, 6 inches thick, and weighed more than 120 pounds each.
They installed over 1400 screw bolts.
They covered a surface area of over 1400 square feet.
That’s bigger than my house!
This was all done between 9am and 5pm in rotations of 35 minutes.
All in all, they saved the camp over $4,000 in labor costs.
So why am I spending so much time talking about Christian Service Brigade and Camp-O-Rama this morning?
Part of it is because I believe it is the best ministry for young men, period.
But more importantly, it is because I believe if we do not act, we are going to lose a whole generation to the world.
In fact, did you know that 70% of church-going high school students will stop going to church once they get to college?
We have a generation growing up without being discipled in the faith.
Sure they know about Jesus, they know about right and wrong, but do they really know how to live out their faith?
That is what Christian Service Brigade does.
It teaches men to mentor young men and it teaches those young men what it means to live out their faith among their peers.
At this point you are probably thinking, all of that is great David, but what in the world does this have to do with Moses in ?
I think that a lot of the reason we are losing ground with the next generation, and our culture in general, is because a lot of us are like Moses.
We are given a task by God and we question God, we try to find a way out, we try to make excuses.
Let’s take just a minute to just review Moses’ life up to this point.
In , Moses mother, Jochebed, does something extreme.
Pharaoh had commanded that all the newborn Hebrew boys be put to death because there was fear that the Hebrews were becoming to many in number.
So Jochebed, knowing this, decides she is going to attempt to save her baby by putting him in a basket covering it with pitch and tar and setting it down in the reeds of the Nile River.
Moses’ sister stood at a distance to watch what would happen to her baby brother.
Now you know the story.
The daughter of Pharaoh finds the baby in the basket and takes it to be her own and names him Moses.
But God would have it that Jochebed was able to take care of her baby for Pharaoh’s daughter.
So Moses was raised as a prince of Egypt, the most powerful nation in the world.
The Bible does not fill in many details of Moses life in Egypt.
But we actually do know quite a bit of what happened thanks to some ancient historians.
Philo tells us that Moses was an exceptional student as a boy and extremely talented.
He was beyond his years.
He was trained in math, philosophy, astronomy and other subjects.
Josephus tells us that Moses was summoned by Pharaoh to become a general in the Egyptian Army to fight Ethiopia, which he conquered.
Luke tells us in that Moses was 40 years of age when he went out to his people in Egypt and struck down the Egyptian.
He thought nobody saw him but they had.
Pharaoh was not pleased.
Now, there is a lot of back history as to why Pharaoh would want to kill Moses over killing this Egyptian builder that goes much deeper than the murder itself but we do not have time for that this morning.
What you need to know is that Pharaoh sought to kill Moses and Moses fled to a nearby country called Midian.
In Midian, Moses saves the daughters of Jethro, the high priest of Midian, from shepherds that were trying to steal their flocks.
Jethro ends up giving his daughter, Zipporah, to Moses as his wife and they have a son named Gershom.
Now what happens next in the life of Moses is where we get our text from today.
The Pharaoh who sought to kill Moses had died and a cry and groaning went out from the Hebrew slaves to God and God remembers the covenant that he made with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
And we come to .
Moses is keeping the flocks of his father-in-law Jethro and while in the wilderness God appears to him in the flaming bush.
And here is what it says in
Now, if you are like me, if I am Moses, I am pretty freaked out by this point.
I see a burning bush that is not being consumed by the fire.
I’m not really sure that I would approach such a thing to begin with.
But then, as Moses approaches the bush, a voice calls out to him from the bush.
If it were me, I probably would have dropped of a heart attack right then and there.
But God speaks to Moses and tells him who He is.
“Moses, I am the God of your fathers.
You are on holy ground.”
At this point, I am sure God had Moses’ attention.
So God goes over the plan with Moses.
Moses, you are going to go to my people and take them out of Egypt.
You are going to go to Pharaoh and tell him to let My people go.
You are the deliverer that I promised would come.
You are the one that will be their leader.
And now we are finally at , our text for today.
And what does Moses say in verse 1?
Moses questions God, he gives Him an excuse as to why he cannot be the one to do this.
He says “Don’t you understand God?
Your people will not listen to me?
They will just say you did not appear to me and I am just making it up!”
So how does God respond?
Exodus 4:2-
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