Deuteronomy 1:9-18 The Weight of the Stars

Welcome to Recast Church, where we're growing in faith, community, and service. You're listening to a message by Pastor Kyle Douglas from the Book of Deuteronomy, from a series entitled, Clinging to God on the Way from Here to There.

If you'd like more information about Recast Church, check us out at recastchurch .com or you can find us on Facebook. Here's Pastor Kyle.

Good morning.

Welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Felsnick. I'm the lead pastor here. We're going to get started, so if you can find your seats, that would be great. Remember to check out the worship folder that you received when you walked in.

There's different announcements and activities that are there. You can check that out and see what's going on. You received a connection card when you walked in. If you're here with us for the first time and you fill out one of those connection cards, please turn it in the black box back there.

And then also do us another favor and take a free coffee mug back there, just our way of saying thank you for coming and joining with us this morning. I'm glad that you're here, and we want you to have that.

And then remember that if you're here on a regular basis, there is a place for prayer requests and suggestions and comments and things like that on the back of these, and the leadership does pray through the requests that are put on these sheets every week.

And so take advantage of that and update your own personal information through the connection card here would be great. Any offerings you would choose to give this morning, go in the black box back there on the desk.

We don't pass an offering plate here. The main reason for that is that we don't want it to be about the money here, and what it really is is that your offering should be between you and God. And we do see it as a spiritual act of worship to him.

And at the same time, I don't want anybody to feel pressured as a plate is passed in front of you like, oh, I guess I got to give something or whatever. So we want it to be an act between you and your Lord and that's back there.

Anything that's marked expansion fund goes towards our eventual goal of building a building and and or moving facilities. We're going to hear an announcement about right now on those of you who attend here for a while know that we don't give a lot of announcements, but we're going to have a little bit of an extended announcement this morning, kind of moving forward.

Take a few moments to set the stage for 2014, some big transitions that are coming up for us and some some new information and things that we need to be thinking through. Just want to set a little bit of the history here for recast church where we've been back in April of 2009.

We started meeting 14 people in a basement over in Trestle Creek actually is Greg who's on the soundboard back there. It was his basement and there were 14 of us if you counted kids there, I think there were 21.

So but 14 of us and the Lord has grown us. He's done a lot at that time. We were searching for a location to meet. Well, actually, we had already found this by the time that we're already being built out.

But when I first started looking in the Matawan area for a place to meet, our first conversation was with the superintendent of the schools. I was hopeful that that we might be able to meet there in the school and that we might be able to rent some some of the facility there.

I had blocked out a half an hour meeting with the superintendent and the meeting lasted maybe 10 minutes. Tops. I pitched the suggestion to him, hey, you know, maybe you could charge us some and we could use your facility.

And the answer was no. And we really didn't have much discussion after that. He was just very closed off to it. They had basically set a precedent of already having said no to several churches. And he said it just wouldn't be fair if we altered our stance on that at this time.

And having said no to other churches, we will not allow you to meet in the schools. End of discussion. And so I had an extra 20 minutes on my hands that day. So we looked around, we actually looked at maybe even buying a house with a big pole barn.

There are a couple of them for sale around, kind of looked at all different kinds of things, settled on this space. This space has served us very well over the last few years. It'll be five years and basically in September.

Well, five years, eight weeks from April, whatever. But basically four and a half years since we started meeting in this place. About a year ago, we as a congregation voted to purchase 12 acres on East McGillen with the hopes of putting up a modest facility for our church.

Zach is going to one of our elders and our treasurer is going to be walking us through some of the details of the finances on that. But there are many reasons why we began to look for a new facility. One of one of those reasons is that we've come up against our capacity in this building several times now.

Some of you might have noticed that just even right now, we've got about 180 seats in here. Not all the seats are full. Did anybody at any time before this service started feel like you were trying to get around somebody and had a hard time getting around them?

I did a couple of times. Am I the only one? OK, it can be a little bit hard to move around. And the more that we get these seats full, the worse that that gets. And so I don't want you to I want to make sure that you understand that when we say we're not up here trying to sell you something or trying to make a pitch that we're full when it comes down to it.

About this time last year, you'll see on the numbers we've got a graph we hit up against it in the second service to the point where we had people standing in the back waiting for chairs to be set up.

We've run up against that again a few times over the holidays. And it's not defined. Full is not defined as having every single seat occupied in this building. As a matter of fact, you know that meeting space is a function of sociology and psychology and less about mathematics.

So we can count 180 seats in here. We will never have 180 people sitting in these seats because you all like a place to set your Bible and your coat and all that kind of stuff. And so I can say as much as I want, scoot in, scoot in, scoot in.

But there's a limit. Would you agree with me on that? There's a limit to how much I can ask you to scoot in before you're able to identify the flavor of deodorant of the person next to you or the lack thereof.

And so we're Americans after all. Right. So, I mean, there's there's an aspect of that involved in all of this. So we're basically we've come up against that number where we believe that we've hit kind of the ceiling and we plateaued.

And I think that part of it is facility. Also, there's the fact that our current lease is a little bit tentative here right now. We are month to month after November. And so that means that we've got a standing agreement for the next 30 days at any given point to our current landlord.

But the thing that gets sticky there is that next door, Borges has actually purchased a first right of refusal, meaning that they've actually paid money to our landlord saying when the time is right and when you want us and we're ready to expand.

I think they want to put in an X-ray machine in here or something. But when it's all said and done, they have the right to basically kick us out with a month's notice. And so when Borges says, let's go, the landlord is actually bound by contract to give this area to them.

It's not a scary thing. I'm not scared. I believe that we're in the Lord's hands and he'll take care of us. But at the same time, we need to be making plans to move forward with something else at this point.

I would like to read for you at this time, Article two from our bylaws, a document that probably doesn't get read a whole lot. And yet at the same time, it focuses on the purpose and the vision of our church so that you can see and be thinking about the the way that the church wants to be moving forward in regard to our mission and our vision, our purpose statement, and then think about a facility in that regard.

So Article two, the purposes of recast, the purpose of recast church shall be to glorify God through worshiping him and seeking worshipers for his name. We are to be out seeking more. There are people out there in the Matawan area who do not yet worship him that we want to see come to an understanding and a knowledge to be able to come in and join with us in the worship of our great God.

And then the vision, the vision of recast church is to, one, proclaim the glory of God and the beauty of the gospel of Jesus Christ to to provide the residents of Matawan and surrounding communities with a welcoming place to come and meet with God and learn his word.

Three, intentionally train everyone to minister with a focus on reproducing believers in churches for show the love of Christ to our community through service and five measure success by deeper growth.

And so that is the vision of recast church. And how many of you here are worshipers of God? We found you. OK, that was that was that's our stated purpose is to find you and we found we found you, but we're not the purpose is to keep finding.

It's to keep going out and finding more for his name. And as I said earlier, there's we believe a host of people out in Matawan in the neighborhoods around here. When I go for a run, I don't just run.

I pray. I pray for houses and people. I pray for people that live in houses that I don't know who they are yet. But do we have a mindset of there are people out there that don't yet know that their heart longs to worship Christ and they don't even know that yet.

But our goal is to be reaching out that more would come in and join us to worship. And to be quite frank, we just need to have some seats for them and a comfortable space for them to come in and join us and be a part of us.

And so that's a part of the motivation for the things that we're talking about here. In a miraculous turn of events, we reopened a conversation with the administration of the schools. The former superintendent retired.

They hired a new superintendent who has been very favorable towards us, a new pharaoh in Egypt, if you will. And he is favorable to us. As a matter of fact, so favorable that the last email I received from him was saying if there's anything we can do to accommodate your church meeting in our facility, please let us know.

This is after we've been in discussions with them and kind of getting down to them drawing up a contract that we want to look over and check out. And he's saying, what can we do to sweeten this deal for you?

So everything is turned. And I would I would say that from my first conversation with the administration of that on school to now, it is I don't think it's an exaggeration to use a miraculous in the turn in the way that the school is now currently responding to us.

So in the next year, we have set before us both a challenge and a transition and I think an exciting challenge, an opportunity to see God move and work and do some amazing things. And the elders, after a lot of wrestling prayer, we've weighed a lot of pros and cons.

We believe that the next step for our church is to move to the schools. We have some details that are still being hammered out. We have some Q &A coming up that Zach's going to talk about, but we are confident that this is the direction that God has for us at this time.

We also have the challenge of raising funds. We have not yet given you a number. Zach is going to be sharing a number with you. That's a significant number. It is the number that we need, the financial amount that we need before we can break ground.

And so we're just going to put that number out as a challenge to us as a congregation and be thinking through that. So we have this challenge of raising funds, a transition in our future, but God is going to walk with us in 2014.

I think this is going to be an exciting year here at Recast. There will be challenges, there will be difficulties to overcome, but I think that's what makes an awesome year is when there are things that we have challenges set before us, that we get an opportunity to see God break through on those things.

I'm going to ask Zach Lloyd to come and share some of the he's the numbers guy. He's the treasurer and he's he's the guy with the the finances in hand.

Church Growth, Facilities, and the Mission to Seek Worshipers

All right, so I won't take much of your time, just kind of walk through a couple of different aspects. I'll talk about the schools and give a little bit more detail there, talk about the property, what's going on with that, and then just a current update of where we're at with our finances.

So Greg's going to help me kind of walk through the presentation. I just talked about the three topics. So maybe skip ahead a couple slides to the school if it's going to move or it goes no more. So schools will just talk about why we're going to the schools.

Don's kind of talked about that already. Where, when and then some of the details. So when we talk about why go ahead, advance the slide. This is the graph that he was alluding to. This is just a representation of graphical of our attendance over time.

And you can see it's a pretty good slope there. But you'll notice it's kind of hit that peak a couple times, gone down a valley and it's going up and down. And we perceive that to be sort of a downside, a psychological limitation to this facility.

We recognize that we can get more people in these seats, but we feel like we're up against sort of a physical limitation to how many people we can put here. So that's that's one of the why. So go ahead, move to the next slide.

And the where that we're thinking of is the elementary school. So if you're familiar with Matawan Elementary Schools, there's the later in the early L and there's that center building. And the next slide shows a picture.

Maybe Jack, you remember, this is the building that we're talking about meeting in. Right. We were really just blown away. And inside we would be meeting in a cafeteria. The next photo shows Brian Frank took a photo when we went and visited there a month or two ago.

And it's been actually quite helpful to have that. So that's what it looks like inside. There's a stage on the left may or may not use that. There's bleachers on the right. And normally the kids sit there and that's what it looks like when it's fully occupied.

We think that we could get 500 people in there pretty easily. So there'd be a lot of room to grow sort of in the interim before we can move to our building. And I'll kind of get to the timing of that building here when I get to that section.

So go ahead, advance the slide on the when we're going to do it as soon as we can. There's a number of details that we need to iron out, one being the contract with the schools, make sure that's locked in and we're comfortable with it.

But just a lot of logistics and what it would look like. So probably this winter I would almost I'm not going to say that we're shooting for as soon as we can, Lord willing. Next slide. And then the details, a lot of details that I just don't have time here to talk.

And there's probably a lot of questions in your mind. So we're just set up a couple of Q &A sessions, one this Wednesday evening there, 630 to 730, then another one next Sunday from one to two. And we invite everybody, as many of you that can come to come so that everyone is well informed.

And we've certainly not thought of everything. So we're open ourself up to hear some of those questions that we might be not thinking about. So please come and help us work through those details. So now I think we're going to go to an update on the property.

So we decided to build, we bought the property and we've been going back and forth for a better part of a year, more than a year, in fact, on what that facility should look like. And we've kind of landed on a facility.

It's going to cost one point seven million dollars. And that's a big number. And we we just don't like that number. We looked at let's just do some pole barns. But we just don't think that's wise. So we've kind of come back to this.

And the facility that we want, the size, there are others in the community that have similar facilities of what we would like in their mortgages are much bigger than that one point seven. So we feel like that's a pretty fair number and it's a quality building and it would serve our needs well.

We've agreed that we would take out a seventy five percent of that loan. That's how much we would go into debt. And we would not make that decision. That would be the church would make that decision. So that would require us to have twenty five percent down payment.

That's four hundred twenty five thousand is the math there. We've also committed to always having at least two months of operating cash in our bank account. We've never spend below that whatever is going on anticipating what our monthly expenses are.

That would be sixty four thousand dollars. That's anticipating what utility bills and and all that will look like in the new facility. So we need to have that on hand. So the total cash to start the building would be four hundred eighty nine thousand.

Currently we have one hundred sixty five thousand dollars in the bank. So our need then to start a building is three hundred twenty four thousand. So hopefully that's clear. If not, please. Speak with me.

But we've been saving. It looks like we're saving about one hundred thousand dollars a year. So that's where you can kind of get that time frame, maybe three years or so, unless the Lord really does something unique before we would be starting a building or perhaps moving in.

So that's where the schools will probably fill a nice maybe three year gap. But it's all the Lord's timing. Don't want to speak to that too clearly. And lastly, just to give you an update on the way things are going for us financially, we set up a budget.

We're halfway through the year, six months through December. We budgeted to spend one hundred thirty two thousand. We've actually spent one hundred eighteen thousand. We budgeted to bring in one hundred fifty thousand dollars in offerings and we brought in one hundred sixty six thousand.

And in addition to that one hundred sixty six, we've also received sixteen thousand three hundred dollars towards the expansion fund. So God is meeting our every need. We just are trying to be good stewards and we just thank God for him bringing people like yourselves that give him just ask that you continue to pray that he will bless us.

Thanks.

Thanks, Zach. Thanks, Don. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for channeling your inner Youper and making it out a takeoff hoser. All right. My name is Kyle. I'm the associate pastor. Happy to be speaking with you again this morning.

In 2005, I was a youth pastor at a church just south of here in Schoolcraft, Michigan. I had taken the position immediately after graduating from Western Michigan University with my bachelor's. I was newly married.

I had been accepted at Moody Bible Institute and was attending seminary there, taking one class a week, usually traveling up to Chicago for a day and spending the night and coming home. And the youth program that I inherited when I started there was at about six kids.

So just a handful. Haley might have been one of them. By the end of my two years there, it was up to 30 to 40 in attendance at with the high school group and around 20 or so for the junior high group.

But the key words there are by the end. I burned out of my first full time youth ministry position. My numbers were growing, and as far as I knew, everybody was really happy, but I wasn't. Despite having a handful of parent volunteers around me, I was in a miserable spiral of emotional and physical exhaustion.

Floundering in the responsibility of teaching and programming and counseling with the 75 kids or so that I was responsible for on a weekly basis. I think what led to this was a combination of factors, including having unfortunately high standards for myself.

A lack of personal discipline and a pride that said that I can handle anything that I get myself into. I was young. I was 22 years old by this point. I'd started in youth ministry when I was 19, but I'd been a college football player.

I was strong. I was big. I can do it all right. And so when I started to sense that some of the plates that I was trying to keep spinning were starting to wobble in fall, I just said, all right, I'll just work harder.

I'll get more organized. So then you go to what matters most. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, right? I just got to get my calendar down, Pat, right? Need better checklists, all that kind of stuff.

I would burst, give bursts of energy, putting time into making things really awesome, right? Because I mean, if I just if I could just get things back upright, then I'll be good. And usually that turned into spending a lot of time on things that made me feel productive, like making the handouts for youth group look really awesome, right?

Rather than doing the things that would actually make a difference and help me be effective and sustain me like prayer and sleep and managing volunteers. Right. So, of course, this didn't work. Putting more energy into the same activities and I got more and more tired.

I was embarrassed that I was failing, frankly. Kyle Douglas does not fail. I was voted most likely to succeed. OK, I got the yearbook to prove it. I'm still proud of that. I'm just like, yeah, not the sweater I was wearing in the picture, though.

So I finally got to a breaking point and I did an about face. I said I didn't think God had ever really called me to the ministry. I labeled myself a bad leader and I tried to run away from it all, including my wife and my new baby girl by joining the Marines.

I was going to go and I was going to join the military and just get away and go to boot camp and they'd really turn me into a leader. But really, it was just about escape. Obviously, I got back on track.

I'm here, right? The Marines fell through and God took me on a six year walk through a couple of different jobs to heal me up from my implosion and help undo the lies that I told myself in order to cope.

Have any of you ever seen a pastor burn out or maybe a ministry leader or a missionary? Maybe someone in the nonprofit world or your boss at work? It's not pretty, is it? Maybe when you hear my story, you go, yep, I've been there.

Maybe you're there right now. You've been or you are in a position of leadership where you're responsible for guiding or caring for some number of people and the responsibility has just gotten really, really heavy.

Maybe it broke you. Maybe it is breaking you. It broke me pretty bad. Frankly, I snapped under the weight. Again, maybe you're there right now and you just don't know how much more you can take. One more email, one more side comment, one more crisis at work, and you're out.

You're done. Check, please. Right. But I have good news. You don't have to burn out. You don't have to fade away. And duh, God's word gives us hope for what we can do to defend ourselves against a situation like I got myself into.

It's not a cheesy kind of hope, like God's just going to zap it all away, just, you know, really believe really hard and he's going to solve all your problems. But it's real, godly, biblical, practical hope for how to handle the increasing challenge of God's call and his blessing.

And I really believe that that's what our text is about this morning. Moses is on the verge of burnout. Not surprising, right? I wigged out with 75 junior hires. He has a million former slaves. Do the math.

But he's up front. But he is. He's still up front, right? He survives. In Deuteronomy, he's still in the position. He's up there giving this inspiring, insightful, passionate, zealous speech to help his people take the next step.

And he's into his 80s. I think this text tells us what he did and what some of the people around him had to do to help him succeed as a minister to God's people. So let's read this text this morning. Deuteronomy chapter 1, verses 9 through 18.

It's on page 125 in your seat back Bibles. Deuteronomy chapter 1, verses 9 through 18. At that time, I said to you, I am not able to bear you by myself. The Lord, your God has multiplied you and behold, you are today as numerous as the stars of heaven.

May the Lord, the God of your fathers, make you a thousand times as many as you are and bless you as he has promised you. How can I bear by myself the weight and burden of you and your strife? Choose for your tribes, wise, understanding and experienced men, and I will appoint them as your heads.

And you answered me, the thing that you have spoken is good for us to do. So I took the heads of your tribes, wise and experienced men, and set them as heads over you. Commanders of thousands, commanders of hundreds, commanders of fifties, commanders of ten, and officers throughout your tribes.

And I charged your judges at that time. Hear the cases between your brothers and judge righteously between a man and his brother or the alien who is with him. You shall not be partial in judgment. You shall hear the small and the great alike.

You shall not be intimidated by anyone for the judgment is God's. And the case that is too hard for you, you shall bring to me and I will hear it. And I commanded you at that time, all the things that you should do.

Let's pray. Father, as we get ready to worship and as we've just read your word from a book that maybe some of us don't spend much time in, God, I just pray that you would open our hearts to hear the message that you have for us this morning.

I thank you, God, for allowing us to come together to hear your word. And Father, we pray that we would fulfill our purpose as your church to worship you and to glorify you and to find worshipers for your name.

And as we gather here, God, we just open ourselves up to you, acknowledging how great you are, but also asking you to change us as necessary so that we can be obedient to you and faithful to you and follow you.

I pray, God, as we sing these words and as we go through these songs, that that would be where our heart is, that we would acknowledge you, but that we'd also open ourselves up to be changed for you to minister to us and show us what we need to do, God.

And it's in Jesus' name that we pray.

Amen.

Thanks, Rob and the band. Always appreciate it.

All right.

Feel free to keep your Bibles open. It might be helpful to refer to the different verses, and I'll try and point those out as we go. If you were here last week, you know that I started a series on the book of Deuteronomy.

This is my second week I have to preach, and then I'll have two more in February. And I figured, hey, let's just go Old Testament and join with Don and Genesis there and add to it. But I think that part of my reason for picking the book is that I do think that there are parallels to where our church is at and kind of what the people are going to.

Lots of differences, but certainly some things that apply. And Israel is no longer a traveling band of nomads with a few families and a couple of camel station wagons, right? But they're a multitude. They're a nation at this point.

This was a fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham. And as we'll look at that again this morning, we will see that Deuteronomy takes place right on the verge of God fulfilling the other part of God's promise to Abraham.

So he's already made them kind of as numerous as the stars. He'll continue to grow them, but he also promised to give them a land of their own. And in the context of Deuteronomy, they're getting ready to move into that land.

So here Moses stands preparing the people for God's next phase on the move from here to there. In their context, here was Kadesh Barnea. They're moving there to the promised land. And what was the key to their success on the way from there here to there?

It was to cling closely to God, knowing that he had already set the land before.

Them.

He had already guaranteed that it was going to take place and they were to walk in obedience and faithfulness to that promise, knowing that it was he that would make them able to succeed. And that starts to touch on the most important movement of all, which wasn't just a move from one physical place to another, but it was a move in their hearts.

From a place of doubt or fear or lack of trust to a place of wholehearted trust and faithfulness and obedience to God. And isn't that what God is trying to do in all of our lives? He's trying to move us from where we're at, which is always just a little too far away from him.

And he's trying to move us to a place where we are close with him, in relationship with him, trusting in him fully to do what he promises to do in our lives. In our text this morning, we continue in what I'm calling the historical prologue of Moses's sermon.

So Moses is there giving this big sermon and he decides to go back in time and share with them some of the events that brought them to the place where they're at right now. He's going to highlight the important things that God had done in order to show God's faithfulness and remind them, hey, this is the God that you're serving.

And he'll continue to be faithful just like he's been faithful in the past as you move forward in trust with him. So last week was the first part of that where God gave the mission again, which was defining the boundaries of the land that he was giving to them and reminding them that he would make it happen.

And, you know, so he starts with this kind of grand visionary opening, right? You know, see, I've set the land before you go and take it. You know, it's like, yeah, the mission, rah, rah, rah. Well, today he's going to get a little bit more practical.

Right. And how many of you would maybe consider yourself kind of the visionary type? You know, you're the one that sees the big idea. You know where everyone's got to go. You know, you can see the grand scheme.

Right. And then how many of you are the administrative person that like just shakes their head when that person starts talking? Right. It's like, you know, how many bottles of water this is going to take?

You know, this is like impossible. Right. So he starts with the big high level vision. And now we're going to really get into how Israel had to change and be set up in order to move into the land in the way that God wanted them to.

As we look at 1, 9 through 18, and this is just kind of setting the stage aside, it can look like a parenthetical. Right. So verse 8, we have God saying, go. And then verse 19, it says we set out. So why take this time here in the middle to just kind of throw in this administrative detail?

Right. It almost seems like an interruption of the narrative story of how they were moving into the promised land. But I think we'll see that it sets the tone as a reminder both of how God was being faithful to keep his promise, and he would continue to do so, and also how God desired to establish a fair and equitable society.

So the laws that would come later are in the spirit of that, that you people are to structure yourselves so that when you land in the there of the place that I'm taking you, you're the type of people I want you to be.

So I'm OK trusting that Moses had a reason for these nine verses here and placing it here rather than seeing it as a later addition, maybe by an editor or the narrator. So where does it all begin? If you look at verse nine, it's such an important starting point.

Moses begins by admitting his own personal limits. He confesses that he isn't enough by himself. Moses is considered a humble man, incredibly meek, and this is why, right? He's quick to recognize his weakness and can admit when enough is enough.

How hard is this, right? Anyone just love pointing out your own weaknesses, right? For many of us, it's really hard. I've already admitted that I think this is part of where I went wrong, and I'm still tempted to go wrong, thinking I can do it all.

But I think there's another side to this, and it's when we're tempted by pride to land on the other side, which is self-loathing, and to berate ourselves as an excuse to quit. So you see the difference between those two?

Both kind of like sides of the same coin. On one side, we can think that we're strong enough to take it all on and just keep piling it on ourselves. The other side is that we get to a point where we snap and we just say, oh, I'm just so pathetic.

I'm a terrible person. You know, God can never use me. I'm out. Someone else can take it over. You're much better than me, right? Moses, I think, and we'll see this as we continue to unpack this text, lands in the.

Middle.

He's strongly and confidently simply saying, I'm at my end. I'm not strong enough to keep going, but I still know that God has called me to this.

Place.

So he finds the balance. Proverbs 11 .2 says, when pride comes, then comes disgrace. But with the humble is wisdom. How many pastors and leaders have gotten into trouble trying to be a one-man show, who can't admit that they need help, or when they finally get to that point where it's unavoidable, they see it as a sign of failure.