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Preacher: Ross Macdonald
Scripture: Exodus 3:9-12
Well, this morning, we continue on in our study of Exodus. Of course, we're in chapter 3, which as I've mentioned now for several weeks, is one of the most important chapters in the book. And it brings forth a new stage within the unfolding of the Old Testament story as we come to the self-revelation of God in v. 14, where God reveals His divine name.
We'll be there, Lord willing, next week, but we've been taking a rather slow approach to that great revelation of the divine name because the whole chapter is giving us more than just the divine name in the self-revelation of God.
And so for the past several weeks, we've looked at the God who calls, really began chapter 3, the call of God, Moses, Moses, the same way that God had called Abram, the same way that God calls all of His people, even if it's not an audible call as it was so often in days of old, it's nevertheless a genuine call of the Lord, the internal call of His Holy Spirit that matches so often the external call of whatever means the Lord chooses.
But we have first and foremost the God who calls. And if God does not call, man cannot put himself in a position to know God. Man is not born naturally seeking after God. If man is to know and have a relationship with God, God must call man into that relationship.
So we begin with the God who calls. Then we saw the God who knows, knows the sorrows of His people, sympathizes with their weakness, takes pity on them as a father takes pity on his children. It's the God who knows, and because He knows, He delivers.
He knows the sorrow, He knows the bondage, He knows the suffering, and therefore, He undertakes to deliver. So that's what we've seen up to this point in verses 1 -8. The God who calls, knows, and delivers.
Now this morning, we want to add two more attributes to this self-revelation of God. We see in verses 9 -12, the God who sends, and the God who is with us. So that'll be our focus this morning. The God who sends, and the God who is with us.
Now therefore, behold, the cry of the children of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppressed them. Come now, therefore, and I will send you to Pharaoh, that you may bring My people, the children of Israel,.
Out of Egypt.
So you notice that emphasis there in verse 10. I will send you. Now we've been following this repeated pronoun, I, I have seen, I have come down, I will send you. And the repeated use reminds us that this is God's desire, and really, this is God's action.
I am going to deliver My people. I am the one who has come down. I am the one who has heard, and who knows My people's bondage. Therefore, I am the one who will deliver them. All of the language front loads the activity that flows out of God's desire and action for His people.
But interestingly, now He's going to transfer this great task of deliverance to a mediator.
So Moses, of course,.
Has been listening to what God is going to do, what God has planned, what God has known, and he must have found it very exhilarating. I have heard My people's plight. I have known their suffering and their sorrow.
I have now come down, that I may deliver them out of the house of bondage. And as he's hearing this, his heart must have been welling up. Finally, yes, this is something that long ago, decades ago, I sought, and I sought after, and I even sought to be a part of.
This is so wonderful. And then what does he say in verse 9? Though I am the one who's going to do this, I am going to send you to do this. Now Moses' heart must not have been fluttering. Now it must have dropped to his ankles.
Wait a minute. I thought you were just telling me what you're going to be doing in Egypt. What do you mean you're going to send me to do it? But we notice that God's desire, God's activity, God's appointment is that which brings about the deliverance.
In other words, God appoints a mediator in order to bring about deliverance. It's God's desire, and yet God appoints a mediator in order to bring about His deliverance. Does that sound like the Gospel to you?
It ought to. God's desire, the Father's desire, appoints a mediator, God the Son, to bring about His promised deliverance. So the mediator is one that must be sent. And so we see the God who calls us, the God who knows us, the God who will deliver us is the God who sends us.
Part of being a Christian is being sent. This ought to be something that we talk about and think about and pray about far more often. We live in a way that we don't actually understand that by being Christian, by virtue of being Christian, you have been sent by God.
Sent by God. That is in part what it means to be a Christian. In other words, we have an apostolic faith. That means more than just the faith that the apostles laid down for us 2 ,000 years ago. It rather means it has an apostolic character.
The word apostle being the noun of the verb to send. Apostle being sent ones. And our faith is an apostolic faith. It is a sent faith. And those who enter into the faith by virtue of entering into the faith become sent ones.
Our faith is apostolic to the core. Now some Christians today, some church traditions today use the term apostle for authoritative figures in the church. So there's business cards that go around and Apostle Timothy Johnson, Apostle what have you.
We would say that's an illegitimate use of the term apostle. Apostles were those who had seen the risen Lord Jesus who laid the foundation that the church is built upon. Ephesians 2 makes that clear. So we're not apostles, nor are there any Apostles today.
No disrespect intended to those who use the term. Well I guess some measure of disrespect intended to those who use the term. Certainly disagree with it. But we do have lowercase a apostolic Christianity.
The church is built on the foundation that they laid down and the way they laid it down determines the building. You can't build beyond what the foundation will support. You can't build more than the foundation is meant to support.
We have an apostolic foundation because the whole building is meant to be apostolic. In other words, our faith has a sent dimension to it. This gets back to what we talked about so many weeks before we began our study of Exodus.
We talked about the mission of God. Mission and sending go hand in hand. In that sense, every Christian has not only been called by God, every Christian has also been sent by God. God has sent each one of us to where we are.
He is sending us to where we will go. We're sent in our various relationships and circumstances. You may be sent right now to be a young mom. You may be sent right now to be a faithful wife, to be a blue collar worker.
This is part of God's sending you and you need to see it as such. We do not gather here and this is the Christian compartment of the week and then we go about our secular lives and our daily routines.
All of our life is comprised by the sending activity of God who is on mission in the world. Christianity is a sent faith. Our faith is a sent faith. We are sent people. He has sent us to bear witness in every arena of our life, in every aspect of our life.
You go to the factory, you're a missionary in that factory because you're a Christian. You've been sent to it.
You're a housewife.
Well, you've been sent to that house. You're a missionary in that house, a missionary to your spouse and your children. You've been sent.
Wherever you are,.
Whatever relationships or opportunities you have, you are to understand yourself as sent. Even as the Christians began to spread through persecution as we follow out of Acts 9, only the apostles themselves were left in Jerusalem and wherever they went, what were they doing?
Buying, selling, trading, building, working. What were they doing? They were on mission. Whether they were doing it conscientiously every moment of the day, they brought their faith with them. It's a sent faith.
They couldn't but spread the faith. And so this is the logic of how the gospel makes the rounds to the very ends of the earth. He sent us to bear witness. You bear witness in every aspect of your life, whether you realize it or not.
You're constantly bearing witness, constantly bearing witness. Are you bearing witness to the good news? Are you bearing witness not only in your words but in your deeds, in the way you posture yourself, in the way you hold and maintain your relationships?
We are sent ones. Believers are sent to be bearers of the kingdom, bearers of tidings of God's love and God's grace. Sent to be citizens of a heavenly kingdom. Sent with opportunities and circumstances.
And resources at our disposal.
To be pledges of new creation in Christ Jesus. Every Christian is sent in this way. And in order to equip the saints for this high and holy calling, in order to send the saints in this sent faith, God has sent His church into the world.
And so the church takes on this missional purpose. And by the way, that word missio from Latin, one translation would be the act of sending. So even when we say mission, we're talking about sending. It's inescapably part of the church's mission.
Sending.
But that sending is not just a few people that get sent overseas, a few people that have the formal title or job description of missionary. In this most basic profound sense, every Christian is sent. Every Christian has a mission.
Every Christian is called to participate in God's mission in all of the spheres throughout the world. We speak of the prophetic mantle of the church. In other words, that the church is not just some holy club, some recreation center where we get together and share scripture.
There's a prophetic character to the church. The church is to speak the word of God into the world, to sow salt and light, to equip the saints in this very way. It has a prophetic mantle. And the prophetic character of the church stands upon the fact that God has sent her for this very purpose.
God sends.
In some ways, if we go back to this prophetic character, you think of John the Baptist who is the forerunner of Jesus. He's the prophet who comes, and as we have the language from Malachi 3, he prepares the way.
In Malachi 3, Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And now the church is a lot like John the Baptist. In between the second coming of the Lord, we are sent to prepare the way for the Lord's return.
But it all hinges upon God's sending. And so we have sending language throughout the Gospels, throughout the book of Acts. Far and away, however, in the New Testament, far and away, the language of sending is found in the Gospel of John.
The highest amount of that verb apostello is found in the Gospel of John. In John 17 alone, we have four instances where this verb is used as highlighted by Jesus. He says repeatedly, It was the Father who sent me.
And that His great desire for the world was that they would know God sent Him. And this brings us closer to Exodus 3. How will I be able to go to Pharaoh? How will the Israelites know that You have sent Me?
And Jesus is essentially saying the same thing in John 17. My desire is that the whole world will know, Father, that You have sent Me. And so the church is then sent. So that the whole world will know the One who was sent by the One who sent Him.
In John's Gospel, we have the cascading language. And of course, it comes to a culmination in chapter 20, verse 21. And we're going to circle back to this at the end of our time this morning. Jesus says, and this is a profound verse, you get the sense of the devotional quality of the way that some Scripture was passed down.
Certainly, this has this devotional glow to it. As the Father has sent Me, so also I send you. So the whole logic of the Father having sent the Son terminates now in the Son sending His followers. Sending His disciples.
Immediately in chapter 20, but look at the end of Matthew's Gospel. This is something that occupies everyone who would follow Jesus. The Father has sent Me, even so I send you. The way that the Father has sent Me, even in this way, I send you.
The purpose for which the Father has sent Me, even in this way, I also send you. And when you understand the larger ramifications of this, you recognize this is not something that's meant only for a handful of missionaries in the church.
This is something that is meant for every follower of Jesus. The Father has sent Jesus into the world and in this very way, Jesus sends us into the world. Following after His example to bring about His great desire to glorify His Father and bring forth all of the redeemed.
To whom we are sent, to what we are sent, where we may be sent, that's all God's prerogative. But the key is that we are sent. Christianity is not a religion that we simply check our little boxes, do our little devotional habits, take the equivalent of spiritual vitamins and think that somehow we have maintained our relationship with God.
To walk with God is to participate in God's mission. And therefore, God sends every peculiarity about your life right now is part of God's sending you. Every relationship you currently possess, the place that you are and the people that you have come to know in these places, all of this corresponds at this very moment to God's sending of you into these places and into these relationships.
You need to open up your mind and your heart to recognize, why am I here? Of all places that I could be, why am I here in this physical place? Why do I have these relationships with these people, these co-workers, these neighbors, these relatives?
Why am I here? Of all places, of all relationships I could have, why these? Why have I been called to this? Because you've been sent. This is what it means to be missional, to recognize that everything we encounter as believers, we encounter because God has sent it our way.
But more specifically, we don't receive that passively. God has sent us for the very things that we encounter. So we are sent out, his mission for all of the spheres. Leslie Newbigin, I mentioned some weeks ago before we began Exodus, just to bear this point.
Leslie Newbigin, in his book, a tremendous book, Foolishness to the Greeks, a tremendous book,.
He says,.
The church is the bearer to all the nations of a gospel that announces the kingdom, the reign, the sovereignty of God. It is not meant to call men and women out of the world into a safe religious enclave, but to call them out in order to send them back as agents of God's kingship.
Marvelous.
Moses has not been called out to the Midian, called out to this spectacle, to this miraculous sight of the bush that is ablaze, and yet the branches are not consumed. He's not been called out in order to stay there.
He's not been called out into the desert, into this miraculous encounter with God, in order to build a church or a monastery around the bush and spend the rest of his life there in solitude. Why did God call him out?
In order to send him back? Why are Christians called out to this encounter with a holy God, drawn out from the ways and the corruption of the world? Why? So that we can be sent right back into it. To sow light rather than darkness.
Salt rather than defilement. Hope rather than destruction. We're called in order to be sent. All of life, all of Christian life, verges on the mission of being sent. And the more we recognize we have been sent, in every circumstance and relationship that we currently possess, the more we will accurately display the Gospel in us as a treasure hidden within ponchards.
Brothers and sisters, this is the way we reveal God. We reveal the God who sends. Jesus prays this. My desire is that the world will know you have sent me. My desire is that the world will understand something of your desire, Father.
The very reason that you would send me into this world. My desire is that they would see you as the God who sends because He's the God who knows the sorrows. Who sees the suffering and the misery. Who calls people and delivers them out of it.
My desire is that the world will know you have sent me in this very way. Is that our desire as Christians? That the world around us, our co-workers, our relatives would know that God has sent His Son for this purpose in this way.
That God has sent us into their lives in this current season for this very end. So send I you. Jesus makes clear He's not only sent by the Father, but that He Himself is now the sender. As the Father has sent me, I send you, He says to His disciples.
Jesus is now the one who is sending.
I send you.
From my own strength, my own grace, my own presence, the work that I have accomplished, my own example and pattern, I have sent you in this very way. As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you. In other words, there's this necessary parallel between the life of Christ as it's shown forth in the Gospels and our life.
We're to comprehend our life in the life of Christ. We're to find the patterns and the example and the guidance and the inspiration for our life in the life of Christ. We encounter the risen Christ. And as a result of encountering the risen Christ, we become sent.
You'll know that you've encountered something of the glory and the beauty and the holiness of God if it corresponds to this urgent sense of being sent by God as a result. It could not be that Paul had experienced the risen Lord Jesus if he could keep going the way he was going on the road to Damascus.
To encounter the risen Lord Jesus is to stop Him dead in His tracks, turn Him around, and rather than being sent toward the wicked course of the world, to make Him one sent by God. Sent for God. And then to go and build churches and plant churches so that more believers would be sent to accomplish the will of God.
This is the result of encountering Christ. In other words, if you have experienced the risen Lord Jesus, you will have no choice but to be sent. If you have encountered the risen Lord Jesus, you will have no choice but to be sent.
There's so much talk lately about revival, isn't there? A lot of talk about what may or may not be going on in Asbury. For my part, if you're wondering, I prefer to be charitable in these things. I think the Monday morning quarterbacks come out in their ranks whenever something is reported along this, and I prefer to be patient and charitable.
Love hopes all things. I certainly hope that God is doing something surprising and intervening in a strangely warming way in Kentucky. I hate that it attracts probably all sorts of charlatans and people that are seeking the wrong things in the wrong way for the wrong reason.
But how will we know? How will we know if there has truly been an encounter with the glory.
And the holiness.
And the presence of God in a unique, set-apart way that we could characterize as a revival? Well, how has that happened in history? How have we looked at revivals? What has been the fruit of revivals?
Almost everything I've read in the past few weeks has highlighted the personal dimensions of genuine religious revival. The conviction of sin. The desire for sanctification. The resultant fruitfulness in a believer's life.
And that's all well and good. But what's not highlighted in these discussions is the fact that genuine revival of God has always resulted in being sent by God. And if you want to know whether the Lord's presence is really in Asbury, Kentucky, it will be shown.
And if these men and women are then sent out with an almost insatiable hunger to advance the kingdom in any and every way possible, that's what it looks like to encounter the risen Christ. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of sending in the Old Testament is Isaiah chapter 6.
You remember the scene where Isaiah does what he had done a thousand times before. Just like Moses, over 40 years shepherding a flock in the Midian wilderness, had seen brush fire countless times, had walked by a bush probably a thousand or more times.
But on this day, it was a day like no other. This encounter was something unexpected, unimagined. And so it was for Isaiah when he entered into the temple and God's glory began to fill the temple. And His robe began to unfurl and smoke filled the inner sanctuary.
And Isaiah was as one struck dead when he encountered the holiness of God. And you remember how he had cried out,.
I am undone!
He instantly felt what Moses had felt. Get back what Peter had felt on the boat! Get away! I'm a sinful man! But then what does God do? We read, one of the seraphim flew, having in his hand a live coal.
You have this image of burning, right? In Exodus 3, the burning presence of God. Here's this burning coal. It's a coal that is going to burn or purify the sacrifice, right? The burning coal coming from the altar.
And what's the sacrifice? It's Isaiah. Particularly his mouthpiece. He's now a sacrificial servant of God and he must be cleansed just as the sacrifice was consumed by the burning coals. So it's a picture of atonement.
Sacrificial imagery. It's a picture of purification. Again, sacrificial imagery. And he touched my mouth with it. Have you ever seen a video of a cattle being branded? Cattle being branded? What happens when you take that hot iron and sear flesh and the smoke that begins to pour out of it as all of the flesh begins to deaden and bubble over?
Here's the live coal and it's burning out on Isaiah's mouth. His mouth now being purified. And the seraphim said, Behold, this has touched your lips. Your iniquity is taken away and your sin is purged.
And then I heard the voice of the Lord say, Whom shall I send?
Who will go for us?
And I said, Here I am!
Send me!
Do you notice what happens before Isaiah can respond? It's what happens every Sunday. It's what happens, I'm sure what's happening in Asbury. These sort of long, drawn out days and people there coming.
You can be brought into the most incredible display of God's holiness and God's glory. A tangible, almost visceral encounter with God. Something that is occupying every fiber of your being in the moment and that still will not be enough for you to be sent if Isaiah was left in his sin.
He would not say, Here I am. He would not say, Send me. The vision of God's glory is not all that you need. Corresponding to that vision of the glory and the beauty of God, you must have a supernatural understanding of God's mercy upon you.
My sin, which is now more visible and more guilty and more vile than it has ever been in my life, now stands before me as I see your light and your radiance and your glory, I am consumed by my own wretchedness and filth.
And therefore, when the Lord says in that state,.
Who will go? Who will go?
What will Isaiah do but hang his head down in shame? What will a believer do on a Sunday morning when they encounter something of the supernatural, something of the glory of God, and it begins to well up within them their own sinfulness?
What will they do? They'll look down. They'll cast their eyes to the side. When will this be over? It's not until that gospel glory of the forgiveness of sin, which comes so effortlessly, so freely to Isaiah.
What has Isaiah done? Has he seen this and thought, I've got to go apologize to these eight people and I'm going to go home and this week's going to be a great week and I'll come back to the temple, Lord.
No, what does he do? He just shows up in his wretchedness, in his guilt, in his rebellion. He shows up wearing it and all he can do is cry out, I'm undone. And in that very cry, the Lord has already sent the seraphim to cleanse him, to purge him.
And so now he stands forgiven and because he's forgiven, because he's been made right with God, because he is now made holy in God's sight by that atoning, sacrificial imagery, by the atoning sacrifice, now he can say, send me.
If it had been anything less than that, Isaiah would not have said, send me. We look sideways. We hang our head in shame. We do not want to be sent. We don't want to disturb our life. We don't want to cast aside our current schemes and ambitions for more comfort and more stability and more time for me.
She's not here so I'll bring this up, only because it's been so funny in my mind. It's really, it's on me, it's not on Alicia. Some weeks ago I had something that I was wanting to do and I was trying to drag her along, her and the kids along to it.
And she was giving me eight or nine really good reasons not to do it. And all I had in my defense was, I still need to live my life, you know. And now I wish I had never said those words because it's all I ever hear.
And she'll come around with a kind of a half smile and she'll poke my ribs and go,.
You still need to live your life? You still need a life for us?
Or when she's got all these kids hanging baby vomit down her back and she goes, when do I get a life for us? We do all these things to pat our own little desires and ambitions. Such a small view of the glory of God.
But even that is not enough to send us. Maybe that's enough to make us fearful and okay, we'll do it. But what really will send us is the glory and the beauty of God, not only as our Creator, not only as God enthroned and transcendent, but as our Redeemer, as our Savior.
When He says, by My blood I have bought you. What else is the response but,.
Send me God, send me.
What can I do for you, Lord?
Until we are undone by sin, and until that sin that we are undone by.
Is forgiven,.
And until that forgiveness begins to reverberate in our conscience and in our life, and we truly know the depth of our crime, and we truly know the cost of forgiveness, and we truly know that it has been applied to us, only then will we cry out, here I am, Lord, send me.
Make me half as willing as You were willing to forgive. Make me half as willing to be sent as You were willing to be sent. Not even into the world, but to the cross. Make me as willing as You are.
Jesus says,.
Even as the Father has sent me, so I send you. And how willing is He? I was reflecting on this with Caleb and Kenny earlier in the week.
How willing is He?
We have this glorious hymn, don't we? There is a fountain filled with blood. And I don't know that I've ever really reflected on that word fountain, but it's such a well-chosen word. Here you are in the desert of Midian, and water is at a premium.
In fact, anything edible and anything nourishing is at a premium. It's hard to come by, and so it's very costly. It's what makes a promised land flowing with milk and honey so attractive. This is as good as it gets in a region like this.
But Moses,.
What happened when he came into Midian? He watched the seven daughters of Jethro trudging up wooden buckets from a deep well. And just when they finally are taking turns, drenched in sweat, just about to get the fruit of all that labor, these hirelings rush in and grab it from them, and Moses has to jump in and defend them.
And it just shows you how there was all these fights that would take place at wells. Why? Because the water is so precious, and it's not easy to come by. It takes a lot of labor to draw it up. What's the last thing you'd expect to find in Midian?
Maybe something that Moses experienced as a child in the courts of Egypt.
A fountain.
A fountain is saying, we have so much water, we don't even know what to do with it. So we just let it flow into this big thing, and it just flies up 15 feet in the air and sprays everywhere, splashes and spills everywhere.
We've got so much water, we don't know what to do with it. We just have fountains. It's an expression of excess and abundance. So when we say there's a fountain filled with blood, we're not meant to understand that though one drop of the precious, sacrificial blood of our Savior would be enough to cleanse the world entire, if but one drop of that precious blood was enough to forgive me for all of my sins, past, present, future, God forbid.
And that one drop was held out to me as something so precious. I ought to have the greatest admiration, the greatest affection for the Lord. Even if that one drop was buried 100 feet deep in the earth, and I had to do an equivalent of cranking up a wooden bucket arduously with my life.
Working years and years to get that precious forgiveness. Oh, I'm so close to being forgiven. How many more Hail Marys? How many more beads do I have to rub? When will I finally get absolution? How many trillions of years in purgatory before I'm finally forgiven?
Even that would be precious, Lord.
But to say it's a fountain.
It's a fountain of this.
It's excessive.
Come, stand, saturate, drench. Do you see how bountiful my mercy is? A fountain filled with His blood. No more let sin and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make His blessings flow.
As far as the curse is found. As far as the curse is found. As far as the curse is found.
As the hymn says. But we could modify it. No more let sin and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He sends to make His blessings flow. He sends to make His blessings flow. As the Father sent the Son to make this curse-redeeming blessing flow, so the Son sends His followers.
Jesus sends us to make His blessings flow. And how do those blessings begin to flow? By believers encountering the glory of the risen Savior, and being forgiven by standing under the fountain of His redeeming blood.
That's how you desire to be sent. God's call to Moses is not in the form of a question. It's actually a command. It's an imperative in Hebrew. So now go. It's a lot like the Great Commission, which though it's not an imperative there, it's rightfully translated as an imperative in Matthew 28.
Therefore, go.
And that brings us to the second focus. We talked about the God who sends, and the Christian life is ultimately a sent life. But notice that just like the Great Commission and that command, go, what does God promise to Moses that Jesus promises to His followers?
I will be with you. And that takes us not only to the God who sends us, but He sends us even as He is with us. Moses said to God, Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, that I should bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?
So He said, I will certainly be with you, and there shall be a sign to you that I have sent you. When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain. So God's sending corresponds to God's promised presence.
You can see the anxious fear well up within Moses. Who am I? Who am I to be sent? Who am I to go to Pharaoh? This is not the same Pharaoh of chapters 1 and 2. But perhaps this is still a Pharaoh that Moses knew 40 years prior.
Who am I to go? Who am I that I would deliver the children of Israel out of Egypt? And God in so many words says, it's not who you are, Moses. Who are you? Nobody. It's not who you are, Moses. It's who I am.
I will be with you.
That is what will make the difference. I will be with you because this is my deliverance. This is my judgment. This is my redemption, Moses. And so it is for the Christian. Whenever we have those anxious thoughts emerge, who am I to be able to do this?
Jesus says, it's not who you are. It's who I am that you would do this. You see the blessing here of insufficiency. There is something to say about that. There's a blessing to feeling insufficient. You ought to feel insufficient as a Christian.
Christianity is a well-honed philosophy of insufficiency. That's essentially what Christianity is. All the ways that we are insufficient, all of the glorious ways that God is sufficient. God is more than enough for all that we need in this life for the next.
And the greatest of God's servants have a parallel awareness of their own insufficiency. Let me say that again. The greatest of God's servants have a parallel awareness with being the great servants. They are the great servants.
Why? Because they understand just how insufficient they are. Here I am, Lord, a prideful, bumbling fool. Would you be pleased to even use me? That in my insufficiency, your excellency would show forth.
The nearer we are brought to God, the less fit we feel to serve him. What does Isaiah scream out? Before he says, here I am, send me, what does he say? Woe is me, I am undone. The nearer we are brought to God, the less sufficient we feel to actually serve God.
And that actually helps us to serve God rightly, because we're more prone to work in the way of God, seeking the presence of God, rather than after our own strength and our own fleshly devisement of things.
And so it's a necessary thing that we feel unfit. And of course, the fact that we're unfit, and the fact that God is sufficient, should compel us to the work. Jesus says, don't pray that the fields are white unto harvest.
They are white unto harvest. Pray for laborers. The laborers are saying, who's sufficient for this work? God is. Pray that you'd be thrust into the vineyards. Why? Because you're meant to be sent. That's what the faith is about.
Remember in the church at Corinth, how Paul was encountering sort of the cold shoulder from that church in between 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians. He references in 2 Corinthians a letter of tears, and it seemed that the church at Corinth had maneuvered to cut ties with Paul, or at the very least say, all right, we've got these teachers, and they're vouched, they're men of letters, they have good rapport among the church, and Paul, we need your sort of CV, we need your resume, we're going to kind of pit you against these other, what he calls super apostles, and see who comes out on top, who will be able to claim and lead the church of Corinth.
And so Paul sort of plays along with this sort of cruel distance that the Corinthians have built. And in 2 Corinthians 3, he's using really heavy irony, but see the sorrow in his heart as he says this.
2 Corinthians 3, he says, oh, we need to commend ourselves to you. You need an epistle from us? Our little resume to show why we have authority in the church and why you ought to heed our teaching rather than the teaching of the super apostles?
He says, we don't have a need of a letter to send to you. You are our letter. He's speaking of him and his co-workers. He says, you're our letter. You want our resume? You're our resume. Where did you come from?
How were you planted? Then he goes on to say, we have such trust through Christ toward God, not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of any of this as being from us, but our sufficiency is from God who made us sufficient when we ministered the new covenant.
Do you see what he's saying? Our sufficiency comes from God. Paul recognizes the greatest things that we've accomplished, paralleling or even exceeding the claims of the super apostles. He says, it wasn't even from us anyway.
It was from God who made us sufficient for His call. God, as he says later on in the letter, God is able to make all grace abound toward you that you, having always all sufficiency in all things, may have an abundance for every good work.
Don't you love that? That concatenation of alls. God is able to make all grace abound toward you that you, always having all sufficiency in all things, may have an abundance for every good work. God is sufficient.
Moses is insufficient. Because he's feeling insufficient, not by a way of faith, but by a way of fear, God moves to encourage him. And how does God encourage him? He does two things to encourage Moses.
First, he gives a promise of his presence. And second, he gives a promise of a sign. So the first is his promised presence. He says, I will be with you.
It's meant to comfort Moses in the calling that God has upon his life. Spurgeon, in his great commentary, says, if I go on the Lord's task with a simple reliance upon His power and a singular eye to His glory, it is certain that He will be with me.
His sending me binds Him to back me. Is this not enough? What more could I want? If all of the angels and archangels were with me,.
I could still fail.
But if God is with me, I must succeed. Only let me take care that I act according to His promise. Let me not go timidly. Let me not go half-heartedly. Let me not go carelessly or presumptuously. What manner of person ought I be if God is with me?
Sort of the Nehemiah complex. Should such a man as I flee if God is with me? Not only does God promise His presence, He promises a sign, and this is an interesting sign because it's not a sign that is given to Moses, it's a sign that is promised to be given to Moses.
In other words, it's a future-pointing sign that requires Moses to act in obedience and faith in order to receive it. This will be the sign that I give to you. You will be standing on this mountain with all of the children of Israel, and you will be worshiping me.
That's the sign that you're going to do this, Lord?
Yeah.
How's that sign going to come about? By obeying and faithfully trusting the fact that I have sent you for this very purpose. If you obey what I have called you to do, the sign will be the result. In other words, here's the promised sign.
It will be the very thing that I said will happen if you will go in the way that I have sent you. And so here we have a sign that requires obedience and faith. And I think it's interesting that God will often give signs that require still obedience and faith.
I wonder if you, as a believer, have sometimes prayed for God to give a sign. And what you mean by that is, Lord, in a spontaneous and unexpected way, show me something to confirm whether I'm meant to walk in this way or whether I'm truly walking according to your purpose.
Can you sit there? Any time, Lord. I'm ready. Any time now. What's it going to be? Look carefully here at Exodus 3. An adulterous generation seeks after a sign. No sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah, Jesus says.
It's a sign that you'll see after the fact. And I think we also should not necessarily look for a sign but rather look for the fact that God's will will be accomplished when we have faith and obey. And that's the sign.
Trust me and walk with me and you'll see the very thing I've promised. Give me a sign of the promise. Trust me and walk with me and you'll see what I've promised. That'll be the sign to you. It's essentially circling them back to the very beginning.
How will I know that you'll do this? Because when I do it, you'll see that I have done it. There's your sign. Now walk with me and do it. That's what God is essentially saying to Moses. So it's glorious.
The ultimate proof of Moses' divine calling will be the creation of a worshipping body at the mountain of God. And in some ways, this sign, it doesn't just point us forward to God completing the promised deliverance and bringing the people to the mountain, but it points us even well beyond the divine calling that the sun has.
It's shown forth in a sign that he has gathered people from every tribe and tongue and they ascend to the worship of God at Mount Zion, the heavenly enthronement of God. And so it's pointing us, perhaps even typologically, to a further promised sign of the sun, the exalted sun, who gathers a people that they might worship and serve God on the mount.
Well, let's focus on our time left on some application. And I have four points of application. It all turns around this idea of God being with us and how that, at the very end, the fourth point, how that relates to God sending us.
Okay, so the first point is simply this. If we want to understand the God who is with us, we must also remember the God who is without us. Don't start theologizing of the God who is with you, the God who took on flesh.
You first begin with the God who is without us, the God who did not take on flesh, the God who is utterly transcendent, utterly other, totally other than what he has made. He is the creator. He is the archetype.
We are the ectotype. All that is has its being from him, and yet in no way is his being contingent upon anything that he has made. In no way is his freedom bound by anything that he has brought into being.
He is utterly other. So we begin on God without us, and we start there so that we can be struck by the profoundness of God then being made with us, our Emmanuel, the one, God the Son, taking on human nature into his divine nature such that he becomes the God-man, not in any way disrupting the eternal relations he had with the Father and the Spirit, but rather entering into this relationship toward humanity as a human man, fully God, fully man.
So we begin with the God without us, and that brings us to the God who is with us. Secondly, God with us. There's something mysterious about what it means for God to be with us. It's not just the identification that takes place at the incarnation, God identifying himself with sinners, God taking on flesh and dwelling among us.
There's something deeper that this Emmanuel.
Points us toward.
It's not just with us, around us, but even still we have this union with Christ. So Emmanuel, God with us, takes on an even deeper meaning for the Christian because though Christ is not present in the flesh here, among us, nevertheless he is with us in a deeper and more profound sense than he has been otherwise.
So it has this incredible relationship, this what we call in sometimes systematic theology unio Christi, union with Christ, the mystical union with Christ, and I was reading Abraham Kuyper on this point.
I've mentioned him before, the great Dutch theologian. And I love the imagery he uses to describe the union that we have with our Emmanuel, God with us. He says this union has a nature peculiar to itself.
It can be compared to other unions, but it's never fully explained by them. So he's going to give some images here. Here's a few pieces of it, but it's so much more. No picture can fully capture the depth of what this union we have with Christ looks like.
He says consider the union between the body and the soul. How perfect is that union? We live in a world where body and soul are divided. Everything's materialistic to a lot of people in our culture. The ancient Greeks had this dualistic view where what was material was corrupted and it needed to be dispensed with, and what was pure and spiritual and everlasting was not physical.
Of course, Christianity said no, the body and the soul are both made by God. The body and the soul are both redeemed by God. And there's this unity, this union, however it may look, between the body and the soul.
How much of the soul is left off the body or vice versa? How does this intermingle and intertwine? It's hard to say. There's something mysterious about it. But human beings are bodies and souls. That's what we are.
We're not a body with a soul or a soul that has a body so much as we are body and soul. Another image. The vital union between a mother and a child or the vine with growing branches or the union that takes place through marriage or the union we have with the Holy Spirit through his indwelling.
And yet still, the union we have with Christ is distinct from all of these. Listen to what Kuyper says. It's a union invisible, intangible. The ear cannot hear it. It eludes all investigation, and yet it is real.
And the life of the Lord Jesus in it directly affects and controls us. Even as an unborn child lives on its mother's blood and yet has the heartbeat outside of Him. So also we live on in Christ through the heartbeat that is not in our soul, but is rather outside of us in Heaven above.
See what he's saying?
In union, wholly dependent and bound, and yet distinct, separate. Not cut off, but not closed in. This union we have with the Christ who is yet to be revealed. And he says there's a gradual increase of our realization of this.
Think of that child being born. For a while that child is unaware of the mother's love, though the mother's love and care is constantly being attended to the child. But eventually that child, as it matures, will become more and more conscious and be able to see more and more of the love and the care that the mother has provided.
And this consciousness becomes the enjoyment of the child's relationship with the mother. So it is, Kuyper says, with our Savior. When we're first converted, we don't know anything of the love and the care of the Father.
We're simply just crying for more,.
More milk, more milk, more milk.
But we become, as we mature, more conscious of His love and His care, His patience, His long-suffering, and it becomes the joy of the Christian life to have this personal relationship with Him. Now I see, and I can recount, the manifold ways you have been faithful and patient and loving to me, and I love you, Lord.
And for that reason, I seek to serve you and obey you. Does this necessarily mean we have a felt presence of the Lord at all times? Is that what the union we have with Christ means? Not necessarily. That was something I wrestled with as a believer for many years.
Should I feel the Lord's presence more than I do? And I found it strangely encouraging when I heard that other people didn't encounter that felt presence as often either. Reading R .C. Sproul in The Holiness of God, he talks about that encounter with God as being something very rare in his life.
So we mean this radical encounter with God is not what we mean by a conscious awareness of the union we have with Christ. It's a deeper knowledge. It's an assurance that rests beneath the emotions, and at times, that may fuel the emotions.
But it's deeper than the emotions. It's deeper than affections, which are fickle and they change. The emotional life is subject to all sorts of change. The union we have with Christ, the knowledge that we have of that union, it's deeper than our emotional life.
It's a profound assurance that's deep within our life, that our life is hidden with Christ in God. It's a knowledge that often comes out, an awareness, an assurance that often comes out when trial or difficulty presses us.
So where are those rare encounters when we know something of the Lord's presence? It's in a felt way, in a surprising encounter. So often, it is through a deep valley or a deep trial. Now, even there, you may walk through that valley for a long time and not encounter the Lord's presence, and he may faithfully bring you through that valley without ever having anything quite like a remarkable encounter with his felt presence.
But I think David is onto something when he says, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me. And he's not just saying that from a place where he says, oh yes, you're always with me.
Deep down, I know I'm always with you, Lord, and your presence is always with me. In some abstract theological sense, he's saying, even in this valley of evil, you are with me. Things have been stripped away from my mind and my imagination and my heart.
The trial has stripped away things that I once found pleasure in, things that I once leaned on. All is dark, all is miserable, all is crashing around me, and because all of that is being withdrawn from me, I'm more and more aware than ever before of your presence in my life.
Even in evil, you are with me. So one's emotions may feel fear like Moses felt fear, but what Moses is going to encounter in these next chapters is what it means for God's presence to be with him. And this is not something that's only held out to seasoned saints.
You may have had encounters with the Lord in this surprising way, what Lloyd-Jones describes as being filled with the Holy Spirit. A lot of debate in the Reformed circles about whether Lloyd-Jones is right on that, but he's getting at what Stuart Elyot, if you were at the Bolton conference this past October, called experiential Calvinism, that we're not intellectually assenting to certain doctrines about the presence of Christ or our relationship with Christ.
It's an experiential life that we have with Christ which is articulated by doctrine. We're given better words and handles on what we're experiencing. The words are not the experience. The doctrines are not the experience.
Something that Calvinists fall into all of the time. They equate the doctrine and the text and the systematic page to be the experience. Those are the ways by which you articulate accurately and biblically the experience, but you ought to hunger and thirst for the experience.
Do you want God to be with you? Recognize that, thirdly, God is with you because God has gone before you. So you begin with God who is without you, utterly other, and yet has come near that he may be, Emmanuel, God with you.
And how is he God with you? By becoming the God who went before you. This brings us right to Exodus. What have we seen with Moses? I've already highlighted this. You'll see this as we move forward in the book.
Moses is anticipating what God is going to do with Israel. Moses is, in his own self, experiencing what God is going to do in Israel's experience. So Moses is saved through the waters, as it were, brought out of Egypt then into the wilderness where he meets with the Lord and receives the law of the Lord, the burning presence of God.
He anticipates all of that in his own life. So Exodus 1 -3 is an early example of what Israel is then going to accomplish. I was reading a very helpful book by Michael Morales on this. Moses had been delivered through the waters and brought into the wilderness where he met the fearful burning presence on the mountain of God.
God had told Moses earlier, this is what we have in our text this morning, when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God upon this mountain. It's interesting in the Hebrew that verb, that pronoun you is plural.
When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you all will worship God on this mountain. So he's giving Moses the sign of what's going to be fulfilled. The point is that the mediator for God's people must first experience the journey himself for their sake to lead them in the same path.
Why does God move in Moses' life in this way? Because this will allow him to be faithful in his leading of Israel. Because he has personally experienced in some emblematic way what Israel is going to experience, he will fully sympathize with them in their struggle.
He will have pity upon them. He will be patient with them, long-suffering for them, merciful toward them. He will be faithful in every respect in his leadership of them because he has experienced what they must experience.
Does that sound familiar to you? The Lord Jesus went through the Exodus pattern as well, being delivered from death and through the grave, withstanding sin and temptation and trial at every turn. He went through these things because His people would have to go through these things.
Because we as believers, as followers, would have to be tempted and tried and scorned and spat upon and blasphemed and ridiculed and mocked. Because we would have to suffer daily to obey rather than compromise.
To seek the Lord's face rather than give way to the corruptions of the world and the way around us. Because we would have to experience the sorrows that accompany the Christian life. Because we would have to walk bloody footstep by bloody footstep to get through the gate.
Jesus Himself entered and walked before us. That's why He is faithful when we call Him Emmanuel, God with us. He's trod the way before. So no believer in the height of their suffering can cry out, God, you don't understand!
Like the Israelites grumbling, Moses, you don't get it! Moses says, this is my second round. And I did it all alone the first time so that I can lead you this time. And that's Jesus saying, I get it. I know my people's sorrows.
And I did it alone the first time so that I can lead you this time. He's the God who is with us because He's the God who went before us. And therefore, we can sing, the rivers of woe shall not thee overflow, for I will be with you.
Your troubles to bless, sanctify to you your deepest distress. Even down to old age, all my people shall prove. Don't you love that? That little phrase, my people, that's the first time so far in the reading of Scripture up to Exodus 3 that God has used this phrase, my people.
We have it here in Exodus 3. My people. Now, God has through this unfolding of His redemptive promise from Genesis 3 .15 all the way up to Exodus 3, now He has His people, my people, that I will deliver.
Even down to old age, all my people shall prove my sovereign, eternal, unchangeable love. And when hoary hairs shall their temples adorn like lambs, they shall still in my bosom be born. The soul that on Jesus has leaned for repose, I will not, I will not desert to its foes.
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake, I'll never, no never, no never forsake. So the fourth point, and we close with this, God sends us because He is with us. That's how these two relate.
God will not send us without His presence. God sends us because He will be with us. God sends us because He is with us. So we begin with the God who is without us so that we can comprehend the awe of the God who made Himself with us.
And the God who made Himself with us is the God who went before us. And the God who went before us sends us because He is with us. I mentioned that great passage from John 20 where Jesus says, even as the Father has sent me, so send I you, as the famous hymn puts it.
And I read a little about this hymn this week and I was so two for two over the past couple weeks learning things about hymns that I never knew. If you've ever heard that, I'll read it to you. It's a wonderful hymn, unfortunately not in our blue hymnal, written by Margaret Clarkson in the mid -50s.
And Margaret Clarkson wrote this hymn, So Send I You. It's considered, widely considered, one of the finest missionary hymns ever written, certainly of the 20th century. And she was only 22 years old when she wrote it.
And she was born in Saskatchewan. Margaret grew up in Toronto. In her time, seeking to be a teacher, a sort of school teaching missionary, which was common for single women in those days. She was looking for jobs and jobs were scarce.
And so she moved to the far north of Ontario, which was very sparsely populated. And she spent seven years there. First at a lumber camp and then in the gold mining area. And it was during this time that she wrote, I experience deep loneliness of every kind.
She's a young woman, she's in her 20s. All of life burgeoning ahead of her. And here she is in some desolate forest in the north of Ontario, seeking to serve the Lord and be a missionary and really seeing very little fruit and just feeling utterly alone.
And she said, I experience deep loneliness of every kind. Mental, cultural, but most of all spiritual. I had no Bible teaching church fellowship. Only one or two Christians, but they were isolated from me.
In those years, I experienced the deepest loneliness. Studying the word one night and thinking of the loneliness of my situation, I came to John 20 in these words, so send I you. Because of a certain physical disability, I knew I could never go on the mission field.
And I understood that this was the mission where God had sent me. I had written verse all of my life. And when I came across so send I you, it was natural for me to express my thoughts in a poem. And so this is the hymn.
So send I you, 22 years old, alone, trying to serve the Lord because she recognizes she's been sent. So send I you to labor unrewarded, to serve unpaid, unloved, unsought, unknown, to bear rebuke, to suffer scorn and scoffing.
So send I you to toil for me alone. So send I you to bind the bruised and broken, or wandering souls to work, to weep, to wake, to bear the burdens of a world weary. So send I you to suffer for my sake.
So send I you to loneliness and longing, with heart hungering for the loved and known, forsaking home and kindred, friend and dear one. So send I you to know my love alone. So send I you to leave your life ambition, to die to dear desire, self-will resign, to labor long in love where men revile you.
So send I you to lose your life in mine. So send I you to hearts made hard by hatred, to eyes made blind because they will not see, to spend, though it be blood, to spend and spare not. So send I you to taste of Calvary.
What I didn't know about Margaret Clarkson that warmed my heart when I discovered it, is that after she had grown, spending those seven years in isolation in service to the Lord and had opportunity to return to the city and come to Toronto and then teach for about 30 years before she retired, was she looked back on the hymn that she had wrote, which is the only version that circulates, and she saw something of an immaturity in her outlook at the time.
Not that anything she said was wrong. It was all gloriously true. But she had come in the intervening years to recognize something slightly different. And if I could put it like this, when she wrote that hymn in 1954 and was highlighting her loneliness and her suffering and trying to find its recompense in the one who had sent her, the crucified Savior, and trying to bind her sorrows to his and her life to his, that she was viewing it as if she had only been sent.
But then in 1963, after she had grown and walked through those years and even encountered other missionaries and even the work of her being sent, she understood the difference between just being sent and being sent with God's presence.
And so she said, I realize this was very one-sided. It only told of the sorrow and privation of the missionary call, and none of its triumph. And so I immediately wrote another song, setting forth the glory and the hope of the calling.
So send I You by grace made strong to triumph or hosts of hell or darkness, death, and sin. My name to bear and in that name to conquer. So send I You my victory to win. So send I You to take souls in bondage.
The word of truth to set captives free, to break the bonds of sin, to loose death's fetters. So send I You to bring the lost to me. So send I You my strength to know in weakness, my joy in grief, my perfect peace in pain, to prove my power, my grace, my promised presence.
So send I You eternal fruit to gain. So send I You to bear my cross with patience and then one day with joy to lay it down, to hear my voice, well done, faithful servant, come share my throne, my kingdom, and my crown.
That's the difference between being sent by God and being sent with God's presence. This is the God who sends us and is with us.
Let's pray.
Father, we pray as Your people that we would see more of our life bound up in Your call, bound up in Your sending us to wherever we are and whoever we're with and whatever we face. That it is You who has sent us.
It is You who has eternal purposes to work out in these very things, though they seem so small and unrelated. Forgive us for the ways that anxious fears prevent us, sins and guilt, Lord, bind us, paralyze us.
Forgive us for not having hearts and affections that long to behold You, long to have the fountain of blood poured out upon us that we could cry out like Isaiah, here we are, Lord, send us, that we wouldn't have to be shoved into the harvest fields, Lord, that we would come running, eagerly running to the work that You have purposed.
As You have been sent by the Father, Lord, we pray even this way You would send us. We pray for Your presence. We pray for Your power. We pray that You would equip us in all the ways that we are insufficient and show us the greater depths of our insufficiency.
Let us not operate out of presumption or pride. Not, but by my Spirit, says the Lord. May it be these things we ask in Your Son's name.
Amen.