Than you can imagine. All right, we're going to be in a book that's the fifth book in your scriptures. It's Deuteronomy. It'll be in chapter 18 today. And so I'd invite you to turn there.

There should be a Bible in the rack in front of you if you don't have one, or if you don't have one on your phone. And we're going to be looking at some words that Moses had. And Moses was this guy. He was at times, he was a leader or a judge over Israel. He was the one that gave them the law as God had given it to him.

But Moses was also kind of sometimes God's mouthpiece. In this case, he's speaking for God, and he's speaking some words that are kind of prophetic. So In Deuteronomy, chapter 18, we're going to start in verse 14 and read through the end of the chapter. And then after that, we'll pray. And I'll give you a little background on what was happening.

Moses speaking here. He says, those nations that you are about to dispossess, they listen to omen readers and diviners. But the Lord your God has not given you permission to do such things. The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your fellow Israelites. You must listen to him.

This accords with what happened at Horeb in the day of the assembly. You ask the Lord your God, Please do not make us hear the voice of the Lord, our God any more or see this great fire anymore, lest we die. The Lord then said to me, what they have said is good. I will raise up a prophet like you for them from among their fellow Israelites. I will put my words in his mouth and he will speak to them.

Whatever I command, I will personally hold responsible. Anyone who pays no attention to the words that that prophet speaks speaks in my name. But if any prophet presumes to speak anything in my name that I have not authorized him to speak, or he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet must die. For if. Now, if you say to yourselves, how can we tell that a message is not from the Lord?

Whenever a prophet speaks in my name and the prediction is not fulfilled, then I have not spoken it if the prophet has presumed to speak it. So you need to fear him. All right, let's pray. God, we thank you today. We thank you for your word.

We thank you for men and women that you have raised up, like Moses, to speak. But more than anything, we thank you that you raised up your son Jesus Christ, to speak to us, to share with us on behalf of you who you are and what you want in our lives and what you want in this world. Lord, show us today what it is that you have for us in your word, for our lives, and for this world. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.

On Sunday mornings, I usually listen to a couple preachers before I come up to preach. I need to be ministered to in the word of God before I'm ready to do that, before you all. And one of them that I listened to, I hadn't heard him in a couple weeks. He'd been out on vacation, I guess. His name is Joby Martin, and he preaches at a church in Jacksonville.

But it was something that was really interesting. And one of the verses just kind of triggered it in my mind as I was speaking. In fact, I kind of paused there, wondering, well, what do I do next? Because my brain just stopped on that. Like, if you have that attention deficit disorder and you see the squirrel kind of thing, and it just takes your focus away.

But it was something about how it says that you need to be able to discern if a prophet is speaking in God's name. In other words, you need to be able to discern the voice of God through those who are ministering or claiming to minister on behalf of God. But one of the things that Pastor Martin said in this message I was listening to was he was talking about the way. Well, he was talking about worry, but he was talking about how we handle our money and our finances. And it was really interesting because he mentioned something that was.

It was intriguing to me to do this. He said, you can do this in proportion to whatever your ability is. He says it might be between anywhere between 220 or $2 and $200. But every week, take whatever portion of money that you can reasonably do on top of any other giving that you do, take that money and just put it in your wallet book and keep it there throughout the week and pray that God would show you who is in need, that you can bless with that, that you can give that to. And I thought about that as he was saying it, and it was interesting because I thought, there's a lot of times that people have come to me as a pastor, maybe in a class or something, and they say, how can I hear the voice of God in my life?

And I thought about that, and I thought, what a beautiful way to be able to discern God's voice amongst all the Other noise. And believe me, I'm sure you're aware of it, we have more noise in our lives and in our world than probably any other generation ever had. In fact, I don't remember. It's been something I learned a long time ago, so I can't tell you the stats on it. But for people that do recordings for just, you know, movies or whatever it might be, if they're actually trying to record like, silence, which is a weird concept to record silence.

But to get clean, you know, clean audio with no intruding sounds into it from aircraft, vehicles, humans of any kind, to just get natural sound takes a good number of hours just to get a few minutes of clear recording. There's just hardly anywhere on this earth that you can actually hear quiet. And in the midst of that, we're saying, how can I hear and discern the voice of God? And so I thought it was a brilliant thing to do. Even if it only cost me two bucks a week or whatever it is.

I'm willing to invest that not only to bless others, but to say, God, I've got this money burning a hole in my wallet. Not for me to use for me, but for me to give to someone else. But I don't want to do it of my own leading. I want you to lead me in this God. And you don't dare give that away until you clearly hear God say that.

Can you imagine if you start there and be able to discern God's voice in areas of giving, then what you might be able to do in other areas where you say, no, no, no, that wasn't God speaking to me. That wasn't his word, that wasn't his spirit. That was something else. That was my thoughts. That was the intruding thoughts of Satan trying to lead me astray.

That was the voice of maybe a friend, a coworker, a boss, a parent, whoever it is, that their voice rattles around in your brain and lives there rent free, as we say today, some of us, you know, just living in your brain and not even paying you rent, you know, you don't owe it anything, and yet all of a sudden you're listening to your beholden, to that voice speaking to you instead. If you could be attuned to the voice of God more and more every day, that investment of those few dollars a week might be a blessing to someone else. But can you imagine also what it does for you to be able to hear God in everyday situations? Either way, that was for free. That wasn't even part of the Message that just as I was reading the scripture that had been in my brain and it just kind of rattled around in there and it had to come out.

But a little bit of background about what was going on with Moses and the Israelites. You see, Moses had probably most of you know, but I want to give you just a little background. He had been this guy that started out, he started out, he was born that was normal. Except the abnormal thing that none of us, I believe have ever experienced was he was already on a wanted list and it was a kill on order list. The Pharaoh king of Egypt had decided that any Jewish Hebrew babies that were born, the Jewish people were slaves at this time to the Egyptians.

He had decided that any Hebrew boys that were born needed to be slayed, to be slaughtered, to be killed, eliminated. There was too many Israelites and he figured that was the easiest way to do it. But Moses parents, and if you've been in our Bible study on Wednesdays at what time? I messed it up last week. 11.

It's at 11. I said 10. It was not right. It's at 11. So anyway, Wednesdays at 11, we've got our Bible study and we've been going through the book of Hebrews and Hebrews chapter 11 for a couple weeks.

Because there's a lot in there we saw this past week. I think we discussed it. If not my mind was there, if we didn't get to it yet, that Moses parents, they were commended in Hebrews chapter 11 for being people of great faith. Not just what they believed in their mind, but what they actually did with their actions. Because it says that they recognized that this baby that was born to them was no ordinary child, that he was a beautiful child, that God had some special plans for him.

So rather than allowing him to be found out and to be killed by the Egyptians, he was hidden in their home until they couldn't do it any longer. Probably got a little fussy, probably couldn't hide him anymore. So Moses mother made a basket and made it waterproof and just sent him off and entrusted him to God and put him in this basket in the Nile River. Well, his sister Miriam was a few years older and she was watching after him from kind of the background. And the basket floated down near and he started crying, of course.

And none other than the daughter of Pharaoh himself saw Moses. She valued life more than her father did. Her father that had given the order to kill these children. She valued life more than her father did. And she defied his father's orders.

Now listen to this, she could not stop all of the babies from being killed. Okay, we can't either. We can't stop everyone from desiring to have an abortion. We can't stop every war or genocide from happening around the world. But the places that we can make a difference, we will.

Amen. Pharaoh's daughter understood this. Now, whether she had a fear of God or not, we don't know. But she looked at what her father was doing and said, I can't stop all of it. I don't have that standing, but I do have the ability to save one, and I'm going to do it.

So she did. And so she got actually Moses birth mother to help raise him and to nurture him and feed him. And then a few years later, when he was old enough, he was turned over. He grew up in the palace of Egypt. But when he was 40 years old, he decided that even though he had had the education of an Egyptian, he wore the outfit of an Egyptian.

Probably the hairstyle, the ornaments and decorations that they would put on that showed that he was an Egyptian royalty, a prince, as the Disney movie calls it, the Prince of Egypt. He was this guy, and yet he went out because he knew that his people were the Hebrew people. And he began to identify with them rather than with the people of the palace and the people of the nation of Egypt. And as he did that, he took pity on them. He felt something welling up within him, that God was stirring in him to say, you're going to bring deliverance to these people.

But rather than hearing everything God had to say, and I identify with this, sometimes he just jumped forward and started to act. Peter was one of Jesus disciples. He did this all the time. He's the guy with the. You could identify him because his mouth was shaped like a foot.

You know, he always had his foot in his mouth. He was the first one to answer stuff. And he would get it wrong more often than he got it right. But sometimes he'd really get it right. And Jesus would kind of give him a thumbs up, like, good job, Peter.

You nailed it on this one. He's like, finally, you know, Moses, he jumps the gun. He sees some of his people being mistreated. He sees some of the Hebrew people. One of them is getting cruelly beaten by one of the Egyptian taskmasters.

So what does Moses do? He takes matters into his own hands and he decides, I can take care of this. He kills the Egyptian guy. Now, whether Moses was stronger than he realized, I don't know. But whatever it was, he took Care of the situation.

And then he's like, shoot body. Gotta get rid of that. So he digs apparently a pretty shallow hole because other people found out about it. And as comedian Nate Bergazzi says, this is the most important hole you're ever gonna dig when you're trying to hide a body, like make that hole deep. But digging is so hard, you know, sometimes I guess that's why people get found out, you know, like a shallow grave on a body.

Anyway, it's a good joke. So Moses kills this guy and then the next day he's out and he sees two Hebrew guys fighting. He's like, hey guys, why are you fighting? You're brothers, you're supposed to be on each other's side. And they said, what are you going to do?

Kill us like you killed the Egyptian yesterday? And Moses is like, oh, this isn't good. There's going to be wanted posters for me. I need to get out of here. Eventually one of them is going to be in a situation where they're going to snitch on me to the Egyptians to get out of their, you know, their beating or their punishment.

And now I'm going to be a wanted man. Sure enough, Pharaoh found out about it and Pharaoh starts wanting to hunt Moses down, which is like his adopted grandson. And so Moses takes off. Now this not listening to God and jumping the gun and killing a guy cost him 40 years in the wilderness. Now can you think about this?

40 years, 40 years of, of what? We might think like he's raising sheep. We might think that that's pointless, almost. That what? How is that a redemptive thing that God can redeem something good out of that?

And yet God was taking those 40 years to prepare and train Moses for the next 40 years of his life. He lived to be 120. He's an old guy at this point. By the time he is done with ministry and life, he's done three 40 year phases of life. 40 years in the palace.

40 years as a shepherd. Now 40 years as a shepherd. But not just any old shepherd. He was the one who had led the children of Israel out of Egypt by the mighty hand of God. And he led them into what was supposed to be the promised land.

But they didn't have the faith to go in. So now he's spending 40 years in a different wilderness leading sheeple. Sheep. They're people, but they're kind of like sheep, man. They're dumb.

They're always getting into trouble. He constantly has to do something to help them. Out. And that's the story of what Moses is doing with them. Now, a couple neat things happen along the way while they're in the wilderness.

One of the things that happens is that Moses, he begins revealing to them what God had revealed to him up on the mountain. Moses would go up on the mountain and would receive the word from God, the law of God, the Ten Commandments, the other laws that he gave them. And then Moses would come down and speak to them. The reason Moses would go up on the mountain to listen to God was because the people had. When they had heard God speak before, just speaking from the cloud and speaking to them, they trembled in fear.

Can you believe it? God is speaking directly to them, and they don't want to hear it. If we raised our hands, I bet every single one of us would raise our hand to say, at some point, I've asked God, why can't I just hear your voice? Why don't you just speak clearly to me, God, have you ever done it? Oh, okay.

The rest of you guys, I guess your arms can't do this anyway. So watch, you know, driving. You know, sometimes you have to lift that arm around the wheel. So I think you can. You've done it, right?

Admit it. Come on. You want it? Yes. Some of you.

Okay. All right, fine, man. All right. They wanted to hear God. We want to hear God.

They didn't want to hear him directly. They got that opportunity. They said, no, thank you, Moses. You go listen to God for us, and then you just come tell us. As if that wasn't bad enough or saddening enough that that was the condition of their hearts.

They would send Moses. Moses would go up the mountain, he'd talk with God. He'd come back down, and his face would be shining. His face was radiating the glory of the presence of God. And they said, moses, your face is too bright.

You've been in the presence of God. And maybe they recognize their sin and that they're unholy and they can't stand in the presence of God. But either way, they said, moses, can you put a bag over your face? Now, I know we've all been out and about somewhere and thought there were some people that should have done that for the good of all of us that have good vision. We don't need to see their face.

I heard a speaker one time when I was a teenager. She said there was this guy, it was her neighbor named Max. And she said his face looked like a tractor had run over it and backed up and done it again. But she also said he had a personality to match. He was just an ornery old guy, but she was able to lead him to Christ.

And that was the point of that story. I don't know why, but that stuck with me since I was a teenager. And I figured that's pretty true. You seen people with some snarly faces and you're like, could you cover that thing up? You know, well, Moses, they said that to him.

They actually said it out loud. Can you believe that? They said, moses, though, your face is shining. And we're not used to that. Cover that up.

Have you ever been around somebody that you said, they're, you know, we call it holier than thou? They're. They're. Yeah, yeah. But have you ever been around somebody that just acted like that, but they really were a pretty lousy person?

That's fair to tell them, like, ah, you, holier than thou, holy roller, whatever. But have you ever actually been around people that truly are holier than you, and you just don't know how to actually be in their company because you don't. You recognize the stuff that. That is entertaining to you, exciting to you, thrilling to you, and you recognize that it's not really things of God. And so you don't know how to be around that truly holy person.

And so you just say, you just stay over there. I'll be over here. Like, kind of, can you cover up that holiness? Can you put a bag over your head, so to speak? That's what they were doing with Moses.

They realized that he had been in the presence of God, and they kind of liked their sin a little more. And also they knew if Moses had gone to see God, he was probably going to come back with more laws. They end up with 613 of them. So, like, they know there's going to be more rules for them to follow because their hearts aren't clean. And so they have to have these guidelines for God to say, this is how you live a righteous life.

So Moses has been in the presence of God. His face is shiny. They tell him to put a bag over his face and to just wait until that glow wears off and then to share the words of God with them. You know, the irony in this whole thing, besides anything I just mentioned, is that when God called Moses, when he was a shepherd in the wilderness, Moses sees God not in some human form or form that we might think he sees a bush that catches fire. Now, there's a certain kind of bush out there.

I forget its name, but apparently it has some type Of a. Like an alcohol content within it. Like, some of you guys don't go looking for it. Like, you're not going to just be able to break it open, you know? Anyway, I'm just kidding.

Oh, if you laugh, you're one of them. Got it. I'm just kidding. So anyway, that was a good test. I love it.

So, no. But these bushes would sometimes catch fire in the heat of the desert. And because of the alcohol content within the bush itself that it creates, it would poof. But it would burn quickly and be gone. Except this one didn't like.

The idea that a bush was on fire was nothing new to Moses. The idea that one was on fire and yet not consumed was what was intriguing to him. So he approached it to investigate. By the way, this is a different sermon altogether, but you can live that life where you're on fire by the presence of the spirit of God and yet not consumed by him. You see, there's a life that leads to being consumed by a fire of judgment in eternity, but there's a life that leads to being consumed by the.

By the all encompassing, all loving, holy presence of God and yet does not burn you up. It's a fire that is good to be on fire that way. Moses goes over to investigate this bush and God speaks to him out of it. It's actually real awesome. The way it's written, it says, when God noticed that Moses had seen him.

It's like I picture God hiding in the bush. Like, is he going to see it? Is he going to pay attention? Moses, are you awake? Are you guys awake?

I don't mean this morning. I mean in your spiritual life. Have you spent enough time in the wilderness that you're hungry for more of God? And you say, okay, God, I'm tired of this dry area around me in my life, and I'm ready for more. What do you have for me, God?

And he sees this bush on fire and he says, I'm gonna go check it out. When God saw that Moses had noticed, God says, moses, you can approach, but just know you're on holy ground. Take off your shoes. I don't know what was wrong with his shoes, but he wanted him to touch that ground, to just be so grounded there in that moment that he says, moses, come to me with nothing on. Come to me.

Take your shoes off. You're on holy ground. God spoke to him, and now he said, moses, I have heard the cry of my children who are in bondage. Moses is thinking, God, I saw that 40 years ago. Why didn't you do something then?

Moses wasn't ready for it yet. Forty years ago, Moses wasn't ready. And now at this point, God is speaking to Moses and he's saying, and I've chosen you, Moses. Moses has had 40 years of self doubt. He's had 40 years of saying, I thought I was the guy, but apparently all I am is a murderer.

And now I'm a shepherd. I'm not the guy. And so then God says to Moses, here's what I'm gonna have you do. I'm gonna free my people. I've heard of their suffering, and I'm gonna free them.

But I'm gonna use. And I'm going to have you go talk to Pharaoh. Now, this is a different one. Like his grandfather has died. This is another Pharaoh that's taken place.

But Moses, I'm going to have you go talk to that guy. And Moses is thinking, I left as a murderer. I don't know what the Egyptian statute of limitations is on that. But moreover, I'm not very good at speaking. I'm not very good around people.

I just, I'm not the guy. He keeps going through all these reasons he can't do it, and God tells him how he'll do it through him. And finally Moses just simply says, pick someone else. I won't have you raise your hands if you've ever done that to God, but I bet you have. At some point, you might not have recognized that you were doing it, but there was somebody somewhere that needed, maybe they just needed that couple bucks or a sandwich, or it was a neighbor that you just didn't even share the gospel with or even invite them to Christ.

And God was saying, you go talk to them. And you said, nah, somebody else will handle it. Now, I don't know how to do that. So it's not me. I could invite them to Christmas Eve service, but I probably won't do that.

Somebody else might invite them somewhere else and that'll take care of it. You see, we've all been where Moses was. And in this moment, God says to him, moses, no, you're probably not the best guy, but you're my guy and you're the one that I've chosen, and you're going to do it. And so through that, as much as Moses said, I'm not the one to speak. Now here's the irony.

You see, he's the one that the people said, moses, we don't want to hear God's voice. Why don't you just speak to us? Moses Isn't that something? The guy that thought he couldn't do it, now the people are begging him to be the voice of God. And in that moment now, here, what we are reading in the book of Deuteronomy is what we might call Moses swan song.

It's the last things that Moses is saying in his 40 years of leading them. And what he's doing is he's preparing them for the thing that they should have done nearly 40 years ago to what we call the conquest of the Canaan land. He was supposed to go into this land that God had promised 400 and some years before to Abraham, and to say that his descendants would live there. And that the people that lived there were evil, ungodly folks. And that they had had their chance to repent and they hadn't done that.

That they had polluted the land with sin and sinful practices, idol worship and child sacrifice, and that that wouldn't fly anymore. So that God was driving them out of the land and giving it to his chosen people, Israel, that through them, they would be a blessing to all the world. And that one day, through one of the offspring of Abraham and David and so on and so forth, there would be one who would be a blessing to the entire world. And in this thing, Moses is now preparing them and saying, 40 years ago, you guys didn't have the faith to go in. You saw that there were giants.

There was a difficult thing to do with fortified cities. You'd come with no weapons, as slaves. And now you're supposed to fight standing armies in fortified cities. And I know you didn't have the faith to do it, even though God could have done it through you. But he's going to do it now.

And he's going to raise up my immediate successor, which would be Joshua. He's going to raise up my successor who will lead you into this. And you should listen to him. But Moses is also telling them something else. He's saying that one day far in the future, there would be another prophet, someone like him.

Now, when he says someone like Moses, what he means is there's a job that Moses did that was very specific and unique. In fact, Moses had a couple jobs. One of his roles was to be kind of the leader over the people. He shepherded them, he guided them. He wasn't their king, but he ruled over them and gave them the law of God and decided over cases.

He set different levels of judges and decision makers so that anytime they had a dispute or an argument, they could bring it to them. And so Moses was leading the leaders and he was leading the people. And he said, there will be other prophets who do that. For sure there was guys like one that was really well known was a man named Samuel. He's what they called the judges.

This came in the next few decades after Moses had died and Joshua died. They had a period of what was called the judges. And they weren't a judge like the guy or gal in the black robe, you know, that we have today, your honor. But they would be somebody usually that when Israel had fallen back into their ways of sin, had been handed into the hands of their enemies, God would raise up a judge to fight against them, that they wouldn't have to pay the taxes and things like that to this ruler anymore. And that they would be freed from that burden and freed from the heavy handed rule that was placed on them.

And that they would be restored not only to their land and all the good things in it, but also that they would be restored in their worship of God in a proper way. And so God would have this judge both rule over them, deliver them, but also to lead them in godliness. Except for Samson. Don't follow that guy's example. He was terrible.

He did a lot of bad things. If you don't know what I'm talking about, come to Sunday school. We'll have a great time talking about Samson. Oh, man. Anyway, none of you guys, nobody's like, you guys really don't know that much about Samson, do you?

You just know he was strong and he shaved his hair out. You know some stuff, right? All right, Jeff, it'll be a good time. We'll talk about Samson in class. We have Sunday school right after the service, so you should come and be part of that.

We meet in a room down at the end of the hall called the gathering room. You would have to know that because it doesn't even say that anywhere. But if you're at a bathroom or an exit door, it's in between those two. Anyway, just past the drinking fountain. It's literally right over there.

You're not even going to be that hungry. There's snacks out here. I don't see why you wouldn't come. And if there's too many of you, we'll just come back in here and we'll do it from this room. Wouldn't it be great?

So the judges, though, they did this. They were like Moses in a way, but yet that wasn't who Moses was talking about. Even throughout the times when they had a king and they would have all these kings, there would be people who would speak. There were prophets who were ministering specifically to the king. Every king in the Israel and Jewish history had almost like a personal prophet.

Sure, that prophet had ministry beyond speaking to the king, but they all had someone that would speak to them, especially when they sinned or when they needed the guidance of God. And that prophet would minister to them. For instance, David had the prophet Nathan. Nathan spoke to him many times, especially after David had sinned. He would actually call him out on his sin, which is a scary thing to do.

If you're telling the king that he's the one that messed up. You might find yourself without your head resting where it normally rests. You know, like, the king has the power to do that. But Nathan, he had the. The business of calling David out on that.

Surely Moses was speaking of people like the prophet Nathan. We have in our scriptures, if you flip quite a little bit closer towards the New Testament, you see guys like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, a bunch of guys that we call the minor prophets. I don't think anybody called them that to their face. That's kind of rude, right? It'd be like calling guys in a church the size of ours, like calling me a minor pastor.

You know, like, that's just rude, you know, like, you're a minor pastor. You don't. You're not a mega church pastor. You're a minor pastor. But that's what they call these guys.

Now. I don't know if they would have liked that. But hey, we all play the role God's given us. Amen. So they have these prophets, and they were for sure what Moses was speaking of to some degree.

They would be raised up and God would speak through them for what the people needed to hear in those times. Because, remember, the people still didn't really want to hear the voice of God directly. He was speaking through the prophets. There was also the role that Moses provided that was somewhat of a priestly role. Although his brother Aaron was the high priest, Moses still was the mediator between the people and between God.

He would speak to God for them and speak to them for God, and God would raise up priests throughout the years. That would be the mediator between God and humankind. But eventually, when we get down to it, and this is what Moses was referring to, and of course, he said for those who would. Who would dare to speak in the name of God, he said, those people, you got to pay attention to whether what they say comes true or not. Now, for sure, some of those prophets spoke of things well into the future.

Some of those prophets spoke of things well beyond their lifetime, generations after them. Obviously, you can't hold them to account for that, whether or not they were telling the truth. But some of them would speak of something that would be happening in the next year or two or the next decade, and if it failed to come true, you don't listen to that prophet. He didn't speak on his own behalf. He didn't speak the words of God, so don't listen to him.

But then, even if it's a prophet that spoke well into the future and said what things were to come, then we have the ability to look back at what they said. And if the things they spoke of have come true, we can know that they were speaking on behalf of God. So the other things that they say, we know that those things will also come to pass. So the prophets had been speaking of the coming Messiah. They expected that God was going to raise up, much like Moses, someone who would not only lead the people out of slavery, but lead the people into the promised land, that he would bring the salvation of God to them.

And for sure, the people understood that they had been living as slaves to sin, that sin ruled their lives, that sin consumed them every day, and that the only thoughts of their hearts was evil all the time, as it said in Genesis for the flood time. We start having echoes of that throughout history and throughout, even up into our timeline. We recognize that when we look at the righteousness and holiness of God and then we look at our own record, we realize that we seem to treasure sin more than we treasure God. And yet God has done something about that. You see, he sent this one that Moses had spoken of.

He sent this prophet to come there. He sent this, not just a prophet, but one that would come and take care of that problem of sin. See, Jesus, when he shows up as the Messiah when he's born, not as anybody would have expected, this promised one of God to show up on earth, Born in a humble, lowly place when he's born there and when he is raised up in a poor family living in a backwoods neighborhood. I mean, seriously, Nazareth, where Jesus was raised as a child, was about as redneck as it comes. This our modern kind of parlance.

We were helping set up for the event last night. And Delia that we've talked about, that's kind of helping run it. She's like half Puerto Rican, half Mexican. And so she makes some jokes about that sometimes with me. And she said she saw me putting this stand together for a Christmas Tree.

That wasn't the right one, but we made it work. She said, see, you are Mexican, aren't you? I said, no, no, no, you guys misunderstood. You guys are actually rednecks. You just didn't understand what it was.

So we just kind of went back and forth on that. So whatever era it is, there's rednecks everywhere. I mean, it's, it's. It's a way of, like, cobbling stuff together, making it work. And we've always had them in every society.

And Nazareth was one of those societies, man. You never heard anybody say Jesus grew up as a redneck. I'm not saying he did. I'm just saying he grew up in a redneck town, okay? And so he does that also.

By the way, I recognize when I lived in the north, we called ourselves rednecks. It means we were out in the sun all the time and our necks were sunburned and we had a lot of junk laying around, but we could make it work. I moved to, like, the real south, like Tennessee. I know this is southern latitude, but there's a lot of northerners here. And I also learned that sometimes for some people, when you say redneck, it means something hateful and racial.

And I don't mean that at all. I just mean the other stuff, you know? So anyway, I just wanted to be clear about that. Nothing. I never thought, and I still don't.

I think it's a misunderstanding to say redneck is a racial thing. It's not. You guys just got it wrong if you believe that. Anyway, so where was I at? I just wanted to throw that disclaimer out there.

And now I'm. Now I forgot where I was. Jesus grew up in Nazareth. He's there. That's where he's raised.

We don't expect the salvation of God to look that way. And yet this is how God chose to do it. And so as we look to what these prophets had said throughout our Scriptures, as we look to what they all spoke of when the ones that spoke well beyond their. Their time on Earth, their life on Earth, they can't be judged in their lifetime for what they said to come true or not. Because it wouldn't come true until the birth and coming of Jesus Christ.

It takes discernment. It takes us to be able to hear the voice of God in our life and in our world. And once you've been able to discern that voice, you can see that the things that God truly speaks through another person, if they come true, you can trust what that person says so we see the words that those prophets have written throughout our scriptures. And as we see that the ones they spoke of Jesus Christ, and there's hundreds of prophecies about his coming. As we can see that those came true, we can trust the other things that those prophets have said.

It's interesting as we look at our scriptures. In Ephesians 4:11, it says that Jesus gave the church five gifts. Did you know this? We talk about giving gifts, you know, at Christmastime, we talk about the gift of Christ, his birth. But Jesus came bringing gifts, or as he left, he gave gifts.

He gave five gifts to the church. He gave apostles, he gave prophets, he gave evangelists, and he gave shepherds, and he gave teachers. Those are five things that Jesus decided his church needs. Now, it'd be an error for us to believe for a moment, for any time that God stopped giving apostles, prophets, or even evangelists. And yet, so many times the church has highly valued shepherds and teachers.

In fact, I've known churches where they called a pastor to lead them. And it was a pastor that was great at bringing the word of God. But then after several years of being there, the people said, ah, that pastor, though, after he left, he wasn't a very good shepherd. He never just came over to my house and sat for an hour drinking coffee or tea or something. You know, there was a time I was at the hospital and he didn't show up to my bedside.

I had a severe hangnail, and he wasn't there for me or whatever it was, you know. And so, like, you know, we need a good shepherd pastor. And so then they would flip a 180 and they would call somebody who was great at shepherding the people, being that caregiver over them. But then they would say, after that, they're like, man, five years have passed and we haven't really been challenged by the word of God. We've got to kind of move back over this way.

Wow. Nobody ever thought maybe you could get some folks from the pews to study the word of God and say, pastor, can I lead a discipleship group? Can I teach a class? Can I have a small group that meets in my home or at the church and I'll come teach it, whatever it might be, because the word of God is boiling up within me. He's raising me up to speak.

And I want to. I just want to help teach people. It's not about me. It's about what God has placed in me to give to others. And, Pastor, I know you are.

You're so good at shepherding us. Can I help teach? I don't, I'm not asking to preach. I'm just asking, can I help teach? God might be raising up those teachers within the congregation and vice versa.

If somebody's good at preaching, God might be raising up really great shepherds to say, you know what, Pastor, I want to go visit people. I want to go call on them. I want to go. And we have some of that here. We have some of you that are, that are working on.

You do visits, you do cards, you do calls, you do ministry of that kind. And I'm so grateful for that because sometimes that's the area that I'm weakest in. I can write notes and thank you cards. They'll sit on my desk for a long, long time because I hate putting them in an envelope, addressing it and stamping it. I don't know what the breakdown in my mind is.

I just, I gave up. I'm. I'm tired of throwing cards away that have sat there for three months because I never sent them. You know what I mean? I still have a letter that I never mailed to my grandparents in 1992.

I really can't mail it to them anymore. Mail doesn't go where they reside these days. But, but it was stamped. I mean, it had everything on it and I just didn't. I mean, stamps were like 19 cents back then, you know what I'm saying?

Like there was, that's how long ago it was. I think they're a dollar and a half now. I'm not sure.

God still, though, has apostles. See the apostles, the job of an apostle, it's not exactly like what we see. You know, Peter, Paul, some of those guys in the New Testament. The ministry of an apostle these days is somebody who sees the need for the gospel in areas and contexts where it currently is not. In other words, the church isn't reaching a group of people.

And more and more we are there. Now, I want to tell you there's some hope that the evangelical church in North America has been on a 20 year slump, but we're starting to curve back up where the church is being effective again in reaching folks who don't know Jesus Christ. And I praise God for that. That means we have more work to do than ever. And the job that God has raised apostles up to do is to recognize the places where the church is not being effective.

And they recognize that and they say, I'm going to do whatever it takes to get the gospel to them. Guys like the apostle Paul in the New Testament had this idea nailed. Paul would go out and he would go to places that seemed weird. Like he'd just go down to the river and see if people were there praying. Now, it might not be like they were kneeling and had their hands clasped.

It might be people like me that find that if I just get out to a quiet place in nature, that somehow there I can feel like I'm connecting with God. And so whatever it was, Paul would just go to the places where people were, where the gospel hadn't already been. Some of those places, it was where we might think of it like our modern coffee shop. But they had it a little more organized than that. And they were just sitting there talking about the latest things, the latest gossip, the latest news in the world, and he would go and share the gospel with them.

Paul was that kind of guy. And before you know it, there's a church that's meeting there. He didn't just go say, I'm going to start a church in this community. He just went and he found people that didn't know Jesus and he shared the gospel with them. They believed, they were baptized and they started gathering others.

They grabbed their friends and say, I'm following Jesus now. This is the best thing that ever happened to me. That's the work that an apostle does now, for sure. Paul kept. Kept track of the churches, the people that he had been with, and he would write to them, he would visit them.

He was a busy guy, and he wasn't married and he didn't have kids, so he could do all this. In fact, there's a verse that Paul is quoted in one of his writings where he says, I will gladly spend and be spent for your souls. In other words, he's saying, like, everything I have can be yours. People with families are a little more, you know, they have a little more restriction on their life and their time than that, and they should. But Paul, man, he is like, I'll give my entire life for you guys.

But then you have prophets, and prophets today still exist. And there are. Sometimes people take that moniker name on themselves, and I think it's a little hokey sometimes. I. It's not my job to judge that.

I don't know. I just kind of look at it. I'm like, really? But what a prophet does is they look at the condition, the spiritual condition of the world, and they look at those conditions and they say, this isn't how God created us to live for the people of God. That's not how he has called us to live.

And this is how we ought to be doing it. That is what a prophet does today. It's not necessarily foretelling the future and saying these things are going to happen exactly like this. What they're doing is they're saying, if we continue on this path, it leads us farther from God. He calls us to repent.

He calls us to serve the poor, to serve those who can't serve themselves, and to take care of folks in that way. Widows, orphans, aliens. Over and over and over, he says that in the scriptures. And so the job of the prophets is to look at the spiritual condition of the people and to call them into the places of holiness and righteousness that God is leading his people to be in. And so one of the things that we see in that is in our country, or in any country probably is like this.

But I'm familiar with this land. There might be something that the collective conscience of the people doesn't agree with. In other words, we'll just take a simple one. Murder. We don't believe in murder.

Right, Amen. We can agree with that. But let's just say there was a vocal minority that started saying, well, but I mean, what about. What about a few, you know, like, what about some people that really deserved it? What about that guy that cut me off?

I keep coming back to that every time I give these examples. I hate when people drive like they're the only person that matters. What about that guy? You know, it starts when we stop caring about them and say, I hope, I hope I see their car tangled up on the side of the road in a mile. Oh, come on.

Okay, I'm the only one. All right, all right. We stop caring about the value of human life. And I think I'm justified because they clearly didn't care. They were driving like an idiot.

So clearly they don't care about their own life, right?

Probably not. They just. They're arrogant. I don't know. Anyway, when we start caring less about the value of that human life, we're one step closer to saying, maybe some people can be killed.

And I'm being a little extreme with that example. But look where we've done that in this world. Look at the things like where we've made laws that say, well, we think that there should be a couple cases where it's okay for a woman to end the life of a pregnancy because it threatens her life because of this or that. And a lot of people said, no, that's not okay. Then they start accepting that once it becomes law, because A vocal minority got it to pass, and then it became the law of the land.

And everybody said, well, okay, that's okay. I guess I can accept that it's legal now. As long as it doesn't become like more than this many weeks of the child's gestation period, or as long as it doesn't, you know, as long as it's not just by choice for convenience, I can be okay with that. And then it gets to the point where there was somebody running for presidency, that that was their entire platform by the grace of God, that's not becoming the law of our land. I also stand with and grieve with those who have had that experience in their lives where they felt like that was their only option because the will of the people started shifting so much as the laws shifted that they believed that this was the way that they could live.

Statistically, that's some of us in this room. But thanks to the scriptures, they say there's things like liars, murderers, adulterers, idolaters, all kinds of things. And the Bible says, and such were some of you. But you have been called, you have been washed, you've been cleansed by the blood of Christ. See, no matter what we've been caught up in, no matter what lies we've believed, God has been there to bring healing and redemption to our lives because such were some of us.

But now we've been washed and cleansed. Amen. There's other laws that are passed and being passed in different areas that show that once it becomes a vocal minority speaks about it, once the laws begin to change, people get softer towards it and they get more accepting of these things. The job of the prophet is to call that out and to say, no, the people of God don't live that way. We're a people of the book.

We're a people of the Scriptures, the Word of God. This isn't just an outdated thing that was written a long time ago and has no power in our lives today. You see, this is the way that God spoken to us. He still speaks to us today through His Holy Spirit. But he reveals things to us from His Word.

And he says that he hasn't changed. See, his value of life has stayed the same. And it's the job of the prophets to call that out. It's the job of the prophets to call out in this world when people are saying, we just need to go ahead and do these gender surgeries on children and we need to take away their hope, not only of a future, but their hope of reproduction in the future. Satan has come to steal, kill and destroy.

And if he can take away the ability of children's bodies physically to conceive when they're older, then he's happy to do that. And he laughs in delight. And meanwhile, the people of God stand there wondering, what is our response to this? The prophets call out from among us and they call these things and they say, I don't care what the law says. The word of God informs us that that is not how we love one another.

Those are just a few examples that are going on today. But God is still raising up apostles, prophets, and then there's evangelists. Oh, we should all be sharing the good news of Jesus with the world. But there are evangelists, people specifically called by God. And I don't just mean those who we've considered itinerant evangelists.

They go around to different churches. They go around holding revival services and things like that. I mean, there are people that have the specific gift and calling of finding people that don't know Jesus Christ as our savior, that haven't stepped across that line of faith. And they just. They're able to connect with them and to connect those people with Jesus Christ.

And God is still calling and gifting the church with evangelists. The thing is, the church so often has only considered that there's two things, shepherds and teachers. And they try to call pastors to do all of it. They try to call pastor. Well, we need you to be a shepherd and a teacher and occasionally speak prophetically and call out those things and occasionally be evangelistic.

We need somebody to reach the lost. Like if I bring my friends to the church, you should lead them to Christ. That's not me. I'm not the person. Pastor, you do it by all means.

I'm glad to do it if I can do that from here. But you're the one that lives near them. And Christ has given you that ability in ways that I don't have. And then, and then the apostolic thing, like take the church to places where the church isn't. And so often we have called the pastor of the church to do all these jobs.

But Jesus didn't say, I gave the church one gift. And they are supposed to do fivefold ministry. He Sundays, I gave five gifts to the church. See, some of you, yeah, some of you might be in those areas. You might be an apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, or teacher, and you haven't even known it yet.

Moses said that God was going to raise up people like him, People that do the things Like Moses. And God hasn't stopped doing that today. But he of course, was ultimately speaking of Jesus Christ, who would ultimately fulfill not just the things that Moses had been doing, but Jesus would lead the people out of bondage to sin, being enslaved to sin. And like Moses had redeemed the people from Egypt by the mighty hand of God, Jesus would be our redemption from sin. You see the cost that it took to buy us from slavery.

I mean, if you go back to any country, and it's not just America that has the stain of human slavery, chattel type slavery, on our history, on our history books, every group of people has done this at some point. Everyone's been enslaved, everyone has had slaves at some point. Fortunately, our world is moving beyond that. And yet at the same time, what it took, if you bought a slave and owned them, for them to be free, either their owner had to write them a certificate that made them a free man, or somebody had to purchase them and set them free. And that's exactly what Jesus did with us.

See, when we were living as slaves to sin, Jesus said, my life will be their ransom. I will die in their place and I will pay the debt that their sin incurred and I will release them from all bondage that they had. And you're no longer slaves to sin if you are in Christ. Amen. That's worth an amen from every single one of us.

And because of that, what we see Jesus doing is giving from himself five gifts to the church. And like Moses said, God's going to keep raising up those people. God's going to keep gifting the church with those. Perhaps our more than you can imagine for today is that God has called you to serve in one of those areas or capacities. And if God has called you to serve in some way or another, then by all means you ought to do it.

I'm here to help you in that. I'm here to help guide you along the way and say, what is it that God has called you to do now? Live out that purpose in him. Amen.