In the presence of Christ Jesus at that moment, experiencing the love of God. It's that love of God that I wish for each of you today. Many of you, I know, have been living in that love for a long time. And some of you, I know for a fact, have not accepted that yet. But before you leave here today, you're going to be faced with a decision.

That decision is, do I recognize that God loves me or not? Do I? Do I accept that? That's true. Whether you can give your life over to that and submit your life to him yet or not, I can't tell you.

But you're going to have to make that decision today. I'm not a lawyer prosecuting a trial here. I'm not going to bring you a whole bunch of evidence to prove it. We can have a talk about that sometime. There's plenty of evidence about the love of God for us.

But I want to share a story with you from the scriptures from the Old Testament. Going to look in the book of Deuteronomy. It's a big, long word. Don't try to spell it, because your computer will give you that little red line every time that says, no, you spelled it wrong. Even when I think about it, I still spell it wrong.

But it's the fifth book of your Bible, and these are books called the Torah. And we believe that Moses wrote them, at least most of it. There's, like, the end where it talks about him dying. I don't think he wrote that part, you know, but maybe God gave him a vision of what was about to happen and he wrote it anyway. I'm not sure.

But In Deuteronomy, chapter 7, I want to tell you a little bit about what's going on here. Moses had lived his life in three stages. The first stage lasted 40 years. He lived as a prince in Egypt. He was adopted by Pharaoh's daughter.

So he's the grandson of the Pharaoh of Egypt. But this guy also had bad things in store for Moses. Kinfolk, the Israelites. He'd been killing off Hebrew babies. Moses was supposed to have been one of them.

But his mother saved him from that. And by the grace of God, he survived and was adopted by Pharaoh's daughter. I think it's interesting that Pharaoh's daughter looked at what her father was doing to these Hebrew children. I believe she thought it was despicable. She looked at her father's decrees and actions and said, nah, I can't abide that.

But she's not in a position of power where she can change It. But what she can do is save one. She can save one baby. And so she decided to do that. I don't know if she did it because she had compassion for that child or if she did it because she was like, hey, you know what?

I want to make a message. I want to make. This is my protest to my dad. I don't know what it is, but anytime we can do that, we will save one. Amen.

That's what a true pro life looks like. And so we're looking at that. And so, so, so, so there they are. Moses is raised in Egypt as a prince for 40 years. Then he goes among his people, like his.

His kinfolk, even though he's dressed like an Egyptian and he's. He's got the. The. The style of an Egyptian, he knows that he's a Hebrew child, and he goes to where his people are. He's 40 years old, and that's what it took for him to wake up.

I don't mean, like, woke. Like we talk about today. Like, that's what it took for him to be like, oh, like, now I see what's happening. Some of us don't get there until we're 40. Some people are, like, real young, and they're like, hey, I think they're lying to me, you know?

Like, who? Like, the media, the government, everything. Everyone. Like, everything, everyone is lying. You know, I saw a shirt this past week, and it's like, it just said everything is a lie.

And I really wanted to buy it, but it was 35 bucks. And I'm like, I think Michelle could make me one for like 12, you know, and so, like, including the shirt. So I was like, you know what? Maybe I'll do that. But, um, the, the, you know, the thing is, like, I, I read the Bible, and I'm like, I don't.

I don't see the lies in here, but I see the lies everywhere around me. So I want to look at where. Where I'm being lied to and where I'm being told the truth. And I'm going to dig into the truth. Amen.

So Moses starts finding the truth. He realizes that his people are being mistreated, and so he decides to take actions into his own hands. Now, I think that at this point, God had been putting a desire in Moses heart, but he hadn't yet said, God, go. Have you ever gotten ahead of God in your life? Have you ever said, okay, God, I'm going to do this?

And he's like, hold on a sec. I'm preparing you for that moment, but you're not ready yet. I'm preparing you for something that might be big, but you're not there yet. And so you got to wait on God for those things. But Moses, he decides he's going to do this now.

You know what ends up happening. Some of you know the story. He lays a guy out, kills him. Like, he's an Egyptian guy. He's beating one of the Hebrews.

He's probably not a good dude. He went home every night thinking, I just followed orders. I was just doing what I was told. Like, I either had to beat that guy or I get, like, beaten, you know, like. So he passed the beating on to the other guy.

That's not cool. He's just one guy. What can he do to stand up to it? I guess that's probably how he fell asleep at night. I'm not sure.

But Moses decides, like, he doesn't like how he's mistreating one of these Hebrew slaves. So he ends. The guy digs a light hole in the sand, like a shallow hole. As a comedian, neighbor gods, he said, like, if you're going to dig a hole to bury a body, that's the most important hole of your life, Dig it nice and deep. But digging is hard, and nobody ever digs deep enough.

So they find out that Moses has done this. Like, it's. It gets known, like, who killed this guy? That was Moses. You know, one of the guys snitched.

That's another rule, right? Who knows what happens to snitches? Stitches or ditches, either one. You know, snitches get stitches, though. If you don't know that, now you do.

And so somebody ratted Moses out. Somebody saw and like, yeah, Moses did that. He's like, well, that's not cool. Now Pharaoh hates me and he's trying to kill me. I gotta leave.

He heads out of there, goes and rescues some chicks at a well that are shepherdesses. And they're like, hey, cool, this Egyptian guy helped us. Nah, I get it. Like, there's some people. You're like, where are they from?

And you get it wrong sometimes. So they got it wrong. He's really a Hebrew, but he was. He ran away in his Hebrew or his Egyptian clothes. So they're like, this Egyptian guy helped us, and their dad's like, cool.

Where is he? They're like, ah, we left him at the well. He's like, no, we should probably at least give the guy some food, you know? Well, Moses goes for dinner, ends up getting given one of the girls as a wife. So that's a pretty good deal for helping them water their.

Their flock, you know. And so Moses ends up spending the next portion of his life, 40 more years as a shepherd. Now, I don't know if it would have been different if he hadn't killed that Egyptian guy and waited on God to say, you're ready. But he spent 40 years in the wilderness taking care of sheep. A job that was usually, despite what we think it was usually for women and children, like, that was who shepherds usually were.

We picture like the Christmas story, like all these male shepherds, you know, with beards and stuff, coming to meet Jesus. Probably not. I mean, there was probably a couple, but, you know, back in the day, the hierarchy was the men were like, kind of in charge of the operation, and they would hang out under a shade tree somewhere while everybody else did the work of taking care of the sheep. Cool if you're that guy, not cool if you're everyone else, you know. But that's how it was.

These shepherds, Moses is hanging out as, like, the guy that should be in charge. And maybe he is, but he's still taking care of sheep. And sheep are stupid. Like, they are annoying. They're terrible.

Like, we were just joking about this in the lobby, Tom, like, like, because they got some, some goats and, and they're kind of dumb too, you know, Right? I mean, they're fun. But let's be honest, there's some people like that. There's some people that are there for. They're a good time to hang around.

Don't count on them for like, the real thinky thinky stuff, you know what I'm saying? Like, just sometimes that's the way people are and that's how God created them. So that's okay. But so Moses, he. He's hanging out with the sheep and, and, and sheep like you, you.

You can pull one out of a hole and you turn around and like, it jumped back in. You're like, okay, out, you know? Jesus told a story about a sheep that gets away. And he's like, when the guy finally finds it, he puts it on his shoulders because you can't lead a sheep. You have to like, drive a sheep or drag a sheep or hang on to it, you know?

So he puts the sheep on his shoulders, carries it back. He's like, there. You stay with everyone else. So I think there's a lesson in that. But not for today.

So Moses, he spends the next, the second 40 year period of his life taking care of Sheep. And then finally, God meets him. There's a bush that's on fire. Maybe it's like one of those things, like in the desert, like a tumbleweed. I think they know what it is.

I don't. I didn't look it up. I didn't actually plan on spending this long here. But never, never, you know, oh, well, we're here. So God talks to Moses, and he's like.

He's. He's speaking out of this bush that's burning but not being consumed. I think there's another lesson in that. Be on fire for God. You won't get burned up.

You won't get, like. You is all gone, but. But God will be burning within you. I think there's something there. I'm not sure.

And so, anyway, so Moses, he's like, I gotta see why the bush is on fire but doesn't get consumed. I don't know if he said it that eloquently, but that's how he wrote it down. He wanted to sound smart. I think he was like. And he walked over, like any guy would be like, what's happening here?

And he goes, there. And God's like, hey, take off your shoes. This is holy ground. He's like, I thought it was the wilderness with sheep, but okay, it's holy ground. God's here.

So he talks with God, and God says, now is the time. It's been 40 years since Moses had that fire in him to do something. But now God has said, now's the time. Some of you have had something burning within you, and you don't know what it is. It might be a longing.

It might be just a pressure in your chest where you're like, I need an answer for this. But I don't know what that answer is. Whatever it is, there's. There's something burning within you. And.

And finally God gets a hold of you and says, I have the answer for you. I've been calling you to this. I've been preparing you for this. Now you're ready for this. So, Moses, God sends him out.

He sends him to go back to Egypt. Now, I believe that. That Pharaoh had died. Another one's in place. But he's just as bad of a guy.

He's mistreating the Hebrew people, even worse. And what he's doing is. He's saying. He's saying, moses, I want you to go there and lead my people out. And so there's a big, long story there.

We'll actually get to that in a few weeks in the Upcoming sermon series that we're going to be doing that'll last a year. And don't worry, it's in nine units, so it'll be broken up. And I have, like, a book that goes with it that I'm writing. And hopefully it'll be finished because I've got seven days until you need it. And we start that next week.

It's going to be a good time. It's starting in Genesis, working through to Revelation, and looking about how all of it is talking about Jesus all the way through. So it'll be a good journey. You don't want to miss it. And if you do miss it, you'll have the book and you can watch it online.

So you still don't miss it, right? You know, we do that, right? Everything's online. Audio, YouTube, all of it is good stuff. So Moses, he goes back to Egypt.

He leads them out of there. All the plagues, all this stuff, the Passover meal, all these things. They leave there and they go out. They cross through the Red Sea. Pharaoh's army's trying to kill them because they regretted letting them go.

God opens the sea up, they cross through on dry ground. They. The Egyptians are like, well, we've never seen this before, but let's do it. And they're like, they're going to follow with the walls of water on either side of them. And then God's like, nah.

Because he had told Moses, look behind you at these Egyptians. The Egyptians you see today you'll never have to deal with again. God closes the waters and over the Egyptians. They didn't ask God's permission to go through. They should have waited like, is it okay if we go too?

He's like, no. And they went anyway. Done. Now they get through there. And the Israelites, a couple months later, God's like, okay, it's time to go into the land that I promised over 400 years ago to Abraham.

He promised over 400 years before to Abraham that he would have descendants that would be very numerous and that they would possess this land. They would dwell in this land and that. And that they would be in there. And that. That that would be God's gift to them.

And that as long as they followed God, they would be blessed by God while they lived there. The problem was they sent some spies into the land. They sent one from every tribe. There's 12 tribes, and they sent one person from each tribe representing them to go walk through the land, north to south, east to west, to check it all out and to see what it was like to see if God was true. What he had said was, it was a great land.

It was a beautiful land. And so they said, okay, let's go check it out. They said, hey, it is a great land. They brought samples of the fruit back. The clusters of grapes they said were so large that they had to hang them over a pole.

And two men had to carry it. It was that big. And they brought evidence of it back. Today. We would just take a picture with our phone.

They didn't have that yet. I think they were still on the flip phones with no cameras. I'm not sure. And so does anybody else. Ms. Nextels, by the way, where you could just beat somebody and talk to them.

Those were great. Some of you weren't even alive yet, you know. Anyway, so the, the, the, the, the spies come back. Ten of them say, the problem is we can't do it. See, we were just slaves.

Like, we're good workers, but we're not fighters. We don't have weapons. We're not an army. And they've got giants in there. Like, they weren't being metaphorical.

They're like, these guys are literally nine feet tall, and they're strong. Like, we can't do it. Their cities are fortified. We don't have battering rams. You know, like, we can't do it.

And two of the guys, Joshua and Caleb, said, yeah, we can. Did you see the Red Sea thing? Like, did you see all this other stuff God did with the plagues? Like, these guys ain't nothing for God. Nobody would go along with them.

They didn't have faith. And so they didn't trust God. They didn't have the faith to do what God was telling them to do. And so he said, okay, you guys aren't going to make it there. You're right.

You're not going to. For 40 years, we're going to be here. You guys are going to die, but you're going to have children that raise up, and those kids will have the faith to do it. Now, for 40 years, God took care of them. This is the third period of Moses life, by the way.

He lives to be 120 years old, and he doesn't get to see the promised land. He had not followed the word of God on one big issue. And God said, okay, that's going to cost you something. You're not going to be the one that leads them into the land. You'll die here in the wilderness on the eastern side of the Jordan River.

The Israelites, though, were led by One of the two guys that believed they could go into the promised land 40 years before, named Joshua. And Joshua has been the servant, the not servant, but the disciple of Moses. The one that is always with him, that that went up with him on the mountain when he met with God. The one that was there all the time. And Joshua is the one that has seen all these things.

And he's heard God's voice speaking to Moses. And it even says that when God would talk to Moses in the tent of meeting, face to face, as a man talks with his friend. When Moses would leave the tent to go talk to lead the people, it says Joshua stayed behind at the tent. I believe he had a hunger for God that couldn't be quenched. And he says, God, I want more of you.

And so all this happens. And then Moses dies. But just before he dies, he's giving us his like his wrap up. He's. He's telling this younger generation everything they need to know.

And he's reminding them of these stories. I want to read in Deuteronomy, chapter 7, verses 9 through 26. So this is Moses again, kind of doing a recap for them. He says, so realize that the Lord your God is the true God, the faithful God who keeps covenant faithfully with those who love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations. But he pays back those who hate him as they deserve, and destroys them.

He will not ignore those who hate him, but will repay them as they deserve. So keep the commandments, statutes and ordinances that today I am commanding you to do. If you obey these ordinances and are careful to do them, the Lord your God will faithfully keep covenant love with you as he has promised your ancestors. He will love and bless you and make you numerous. He will bless you with many children, with the produce of your soil, your grain, your new wine, your oil, the offspring of your oxen and the young of your flocks in the land which he promised your ancestors to give to you.

You will be blessed beyond all peoples. There will be no barrenness among you or your livestock. The Lord will protect you from all sickness. And you will not experience any of the terrible diseases that you knew in Egypt. Instead, he will inflict them on all those who hate you.

Now you must destroy. This is verse 16. You must destroy all the people whom the Lord your God is about to deliver over to you. You must not pity them or worship their gods, for that will be a snare to you. I want to pause right here.

This isn't in my notes, but I want to address it. So many people get hung up on that idea right there. God says, I want you to destroy all these people around you. But you miss the rest of the story if you only get hung up right there for 400 years. God had left a witness with them.

It started all the way back when Abraham was in the land and he shared witness of who God was, and he called people to salvation and they didn't receive it. Then there was a priest in the town of Salem, which later becomes Jerusalem. His name is Melchizedek. The Bible talks a lot about him. He's legendary.

And Melchizedek was a priest of God most high in that area. And he was sharing the witness of God. And the people that were pagans in this land decided they would rather follow their pagan idols than to follow the God who allowed them to live in that land. So they had over 400 years to repent and follow God. And they never took up on that.

Although the people of Israel didn't live there. God had left a witness of himself to those people and. And they chose to reject it. And he said, this is a holy land. The people that live here must worship me.

And if you won't worship me, you won't live here either. Years and years and years later, the Israelites would go what we call into exile, or what the Bible calls into exile. And that was when God said, you have been disobedient, and I'm going to remove you from this land for a time until you repent and return to me. And so God even does that with his children of Israel in the land. And that's what Moses is going to talk about here, verse 17.

If you think, well, these nations are more numerous than I am, how can I dispossess them? You must not fear them. You must carefully recall what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and all of Egypt. The great judgments you saw and the signs and wonders, the strength and power by which he brought you out. Thus the Lord your God will do to all the people you fear.

Furthermore, the Lord your God will release the hornet among them until the very last ones who hide from you perish. Have you ever been chased down by, like, some hornets that you kind of poke the nest? Those things, you know, like, you can run. You're like, I gotta find some water to jump into so that they don't sting me all over the place. This is something that I like.

Hardly ever appears in Scripture, but God says, I'll send the hornet there. I don't think he's talking about an actual hornet. He's saying, I'm going to use everything at my power and to just kind of keep poking them out of there until they leave and the land is yours.

You must not tremble in their presence. For the Lord God who is present among you is a great and awesome God. He is the God who leads you and who will expel you or expel the nations little by little. You will not be allowed to destroy them all at once, lest the wild animals overrun you. In other words, there's so many of them.

If you just try to kick them all out at once, there's not enough of you to settle all of those lands. And it'll get taken over by wild animals and weeds and all that stuff. Like, I can't even keep my yard free of weeds if I'm gone for a couple weeks. You know what I'm saying? So God's like, you can't take the whole thing at once.

You're going to edge into it a little bit at a time. The Lord your God will give them over to you. He will throw them into a great panic until they are destroyed. He will hand over their kings to you, and you will erase their very names from memory. Nobody will be able to resist you until you destroy them.

You must burn the images of their gods. Listen to these last few verses. Do not covet the silver and gold that covers them so much that you take it for yourself and thus become ensnared by it, for it is abhorrent to the Lord your God. You must not bring any abhorrent thing into your house and thereby become an object of divine wrath along with it. You must absolutely detest and abhor it, for it is an object of divine wrath.

In the few minutes that we have, I want to mention a couple things about these verses here. You see, Moses uses a word to describe God's love for the people. And he says that God has covenant love with them. There's a Hebrew word, and I don't always do this, but it's important. Today there's a few words that we need to understand translated into English really, really clearly.

And the problem is, this one isn't easily translated into English, but it's a Hebrew word called hesed. And I'm not good with the sound, but it's that throat sound, hesed, at the beginning of it. And it is either C H or just H E S E D is how it's usually spelled. What that word means is that God has made a covenant with us like like, it's like more than just a promise is sometimes we might think of it almost like a legal contract, but it's. It's even different from that.

And he's made this covenant with the people. In fact, there was five different covenants over time. One he had made with Noah, one he had made with Abraham, one he had made with David, one he had made with all the people of Israel. Oh, and then one that he had made with the. Just after Adam and Eve, with all of humanity.

And so he makes all these different covenants with them, and he makes these covenants. But what he's saying is, in his covenants, he has promised to love us. Now, some of you might recognize that, like, say, a marriage vow. You made a marriage vow, and you say, I'm going to stay married to you no matter what. I think we miss the point of that sometimes.

Part of that marriage vow is also, I'm going to love you, too. See, a lot of people give up on that love part, and they. They have a problem sticking with it after that because it's really hard to stay with somebody that you really don't love. And so the biggest thing in a marriage vow is that you need to recognize that you're saying, I am going to love you and you're going to change, and I'm going to change. One of the things people sometimes don't think about when they're like, say, in their 20s or 30s and they're looking at marriage, and they're like, okay, I love you so much right now.

Yeah, you do. They're going to be so different in just a few short years, you're going to learn things about them. As soon as you move in after you get married, you're going to move in together, and you're going to be like, oh, my goodness. Some of these habits you have are so annoying. I'll say.

20 years later, it's even that way sometimes you're like, oh, my goodness, would you stop it? You know, and so, like, I don't like the way you're breathing. You know, that kind of stuff. And so, like, like, sometimes I wish you'd do it last. No, I'm just kidding.

Anyway, um, that was dark. I'm sorry. And so. So it's like, you know, so. So you, you.

You say that you think those things, and it's like, oh, I get it. That marriage vow wasn't just like, until death do we part, but. But until death, I love you. No matter what changes happen, like, most people don't look at a picture of somebody. Like, you don't look at yourself at.

At your current man. I look so much better than I did when I was 22. You know, like, most of us know, some of us took a few years to get into, like, looking decent, you know, so it's like 22. Maybe it was like 25, 28. You're like, yeah, that was the peak for me.

You know, some of you might not feel that way. That's how I feel about myself. I look at some, like, teenage pictures. I'm like, well, that was awkward. You know, like, it wasn't just the way I was feeling at the time.

It really was pretty awkward. And then, like, in the 20s, it's like, you're a little, like, skinny, and your face looked weird, you know, but then, like, why. Why the weird, like, thing with the mustache and the goatee? It just didn't work, you know? And it's like.

And some of you are like, why the beard now? I don't know. I just like it. Okay, this is fine. But it's like, you know, it takes a while.

And you come into it, you're like, that was the peak right there. Most of you don't think, like, yeah, by the time I hit 70, I was really getting my looks in. You know what I'm saying? I'm not trying to make fun of you, any of you guys that are there. I'm just saying we don't feel that way.

But, but. But I've heard so many people say, my wife, my husband looks more attractive to me now than ever before. I love her. I love him so much more than I ever did before. You can't tell me that that's just based on our physical appearance.

That's based on something that we committed to, and that's, I'm going to love you forever now. God loves you like that. God loves you in that way so much that he says, even when you mess up, even when you sin against me, I still love you because I've committed to loving you in that way. However, he did tell the Israelites that if you continually reject me, I will remove you from the land for a while. I don't have a marriage analogy to that.

I guess we might call that separation. But the problem is when somebody says, we're having some problems, so we're separated. Oh, so you've just, like, divorced 1.0. Like, you just haven't filed the paperwork yet. Nobody ever says, oh, we're separated so that we can work.

Like, so that I can Talk to God about me and my problems and then get fixed. Like God fix me and then I'll be a better spouse. Nobody ever says it that way. They always say like they're really ticking me off and I can't handle it anymore, I'm out. Or you're really ticking me off, I can't handle any more, get out.

But either way, it's like nobody has like a plan to say, but we're coming back into this, we're coming back together. Nobody ever works through it like that. Maybe like once or twice. And so God says though, he's like, here's our plan. Like, like if, if you don't obey me in this land, if you don't have faith in me, I will remove you from the land too.

I'm going to start by removing these faithless people that are there. And they worship idols and I don't want you to bring those idols into your home. Like, like if you, if somebody gets driven out, remember I'm sending the hornet before you. Many times people left, God didn't have them fight them. He just like threw them into a panic and they checked out on their own.

They fled from the land because they believed that something dangerous, something terrible is going to happen. And they said, we're out of here. And so like if you're walking around, you're like, do, do, do, do. I was just talking with somebody like earlier this week and they were up in Maine and they were hiking and they made some wrong turns and they were gone for like hours. Like many, many hours.

It's getting dark and they found a cabin. And you're allowed to like get into a cabin up there if it's in the middle of nowhere because it's life and death with like bears and moose and stuff like that. And so she was like, we were going to try to get in the cabin but we decided we were. Thought we were almost back and we. They did like, she's alive to tell the story but there they are and somebody rescued them on the last mile of their many mile trip.

They drove a vehicle up the trail and they're like, there you guys are. We've been looking for you. Where were you eight hours ago when? We were just starting to get lost, but I forgot where I was going with that. Don't you love it?

So whatever it was, help. No. Okay, cool. So the hornet driving out of the land. So you go into a house.

That's what it was, the cabin thing. So you find this like empty home. The people have left the town is empty. You go into this empty home, it's like, cool, I've got a house I can live in. It's already got stuff in it.

There's still food in the cabinet. Like, I can learn to like that food. That sounds great. Oh, silver, gold, idols. Household gods, maybe.

Well, I shouldn't worship those. I have the ten commandments that says not to have those things. What if I just melt this, the silver and gold off of them, and I can do something else with it? But then you start thinking, well, I don't really have a melter thing, you know, so maybe I'll just keep it around for a while. It's kind of cool looking.

Then you start dusting it. For those of you that do that, Women, men don't see dust usually. And so I think my thing, I would bring the air compressor in with the little blow gun and just, you know, what goes up must come down though. That's the problem, right? So we're.

I don't know. Anyway, so that's why we just let women do it or don't. And, and so that you, you're going to be tempted to keep those shiny things. And at first you don't think there's anything to it. It's just shiny metal.

It looks like a trophy. I got it for bowling. Let's say. No, it's a God. And then you start thinking, why did they worship this God?

Maybe this God gives them something that my God doesn't. And you're in a culture that believes that deities are localized, that gods are from a local area. So you think, well, maybe I can worship Yahweh, the God of Abraham. But what if this idol has some power in this little region right here? What if it can protect my home?

What if it can help my kids not to get sick? What if it can help my. My chickens lay more eggs or my, my sheep have more wool or whatever it might be. And so you start to say, well, maybe I'll just honor it a little bit. It started with, I just wanted the metal off of it to make some fancy stuff or jewelry or money or whatever.

And then it turned into this thing that snared you into worshiping it. Moses says those idols have to be destroyed no matter how shiny they are and how much they look like they're worth something. See, in our lives today, just like God was driving out the Canaanites from the land. But he did it a little bit at a time. He did it slowly because they couldn't replace all the people in the land that were leaving.

There's sin in your life that you've built a foundation on those sins. You're like, I'm going to do these things. This is what I like. This is what I enjoy. This is what people around me are doing.

These are the idols that they worship. And so I'm going to rest my life on those things. But you come to God and he starts saying, now, hey, hang on a second. You see, there's this area in your life that I don't like. It's not good for you.

It's not how I designed you to live. And it needs to go. I thank God that he doesn't do it all at once. He did it all at once. I feel like I would just crumble.

Like I would have literally no skeleton. Even though. Even though I would be built up with the things of God, I feel like somehow all these things are good or bad. This is what my life has been built on. And so what God does is he starts pulling it one thing at a time.

Because if it was all at once, we would. Wouldn't have enough faith in him to stay with him during that process. We would say, God, it's too much. I give up. You don't have what it takes to get me clean.

You don't have what it takes to make me holy. So I just give up on the process. Have any of you ever been there at a moment? Have any of you ever been at a moment where you said God, I don't know. I see Christ and how holy he is, and I see me and how messed up and sinful I am.

I can't ever get there. Your Word says to be holy as God is holy, but I can't be. I can't be that holy. Right? And so we give up on God because we don't believe that he has what it takes to make us holy.

Just like some of the Israelites didn't believe that God had what it took to bring them into the promised land. But God is willing to work with you a little bit at a time to. To. To remove that sin from your life, to cleanse you of that, to pull those things out. It might be small things, but it's in increments.

There's so much of it that is built up. And he says, I'm going to start pulling these things out of your life. And as he starts doing that, we begin to look more and more like him. And he does this because of his covenant love for us. His covenant love is something like there's, there's words about this, this hesed that I talked about where it's love, it's loyalty, it's generosity.

These are just some of the ways to define or describe that word that's hard to describe in our language. And as we look at those things and as we look at God's covenant love with us, we start to recognize that he gave us His Son, Jesus Christ as the full expression of his covenanted love for us, that he sent Jesus Christ to be the one that would die for us and also the one that would rise to new life, to give us his new life and make us holy. So as he's doing that, as he's working on that, he's. He's. He's pulling the evil out of our lives.

He's pulling the evil things out of our homes. And why is he doing this? Because the Bible tells us that those who are in Christ who have accepted the love of God through the death of Jesus Christ and believe that his death matters for you. Listen to me, the death of Christ matters for you. And those who believe that, we call it being born again.

You have a new life now. And that new life that being born again means you've been adopted into a new family. You've been adopted into the family of God. If you didn't get a handout today, we tried to get them to everybody, but I don't usually do one, but there's a little folded handout sheet of paper. It's got a bunch of scriptures that talks about everything surrounding everything I talked about today.

And I even printed the verses on there. Like, not just the reference, so you can just read them. And you don't have to open your Bible because I know that's too much work for us to do that every day to open our Bible and read this gift that God gave us. Sorry to mock you. I didn't.

I didn't mean to be too mocking there, but sometimes that helps with me. That's how God talks to me. Like he uses sarcasm to get to me. Maybe that'll work with a couple of you.

So God is speaking to us and he's telling us through His Word, I love you. Not just as God in heaven who loves this little pissing human being down here on earth. No, no, no. He's saying, I love you like a son, I love you like a daughter. He never ever says, I love you like a grandchild.

In other words, you can't say, well, my, My parents followed God, and so that's cool for Me, you're not God's grandkid. You have to accept Christ on your own. If you don't accept Jesus Christ with your own level of faith, with your own life, and say, I recognize your life was given for me and your life matters, your death matters for me. If that's the case, you don't recognize that, then you won't ever be adopted as his daughter, as his son. But if you have received Christ, you are his child.

You've been adopted into the family of God. That is the love that God the Father has for us.

I told you when I started that you would have a decision to make today. That. That decision that you make would be an important one. You have to say, have I accepted this in faith or not? Have I received this from God or not?

Because if you haven't received that in faith from God and said, I want to be your child, I want to serve you, I want to live for you. If you haven't done that, then all of the covenant love of God, all that means to you is that you can witness it from the outside, but you can't ever enter into that. Like Moses got to see the promised land, but he didn't get to live in it. You might see the promises and blessings of God, but you won't be able to live in them. And you'll just have to watch others enjoying that.

Today is the day that salvation is offered to you, not by me. I can't do that. It's not mine to offer, it's just mine to point you to it. God is the one that has offered it to you. It's the free gift that he gives you.

But just like Christmas presents on. Under the tree on Christmas morning, they're just pretty. If they're just sitting there, you actually have to rip them open. You have to open them up to use them, to receive them, to enjoy them. And if you haven't received the gift of God that leads to salvation, to new life, to adoption, you'll never walk in those blessings.

But the blessings that God gives you if you receive him is far beyond anything you could ever ask or imagine other than the grace of God that is giving it to you. Elaine, could you play a couple. Just some. Some music real softly. And I want to lead you in a prayer.

I want to lead you and guide you, but I'm not going to say, oh, repeat after me. I don't like doing that. You got to talk to God in your own words. But I want to pray for you this morning. And I know I talked a lot about salvation, but there's a lot of other things that are in this message, too.

You see, you have these things in your life that you might need to get rid of, these idols that have shown up. And you say, well, it's just shiny, and I like it. And God says, no, it's sin, and it needs to go away. You might have given your life to Christ, but you say, you know what? I'm not ready to allow him to make me holy.

No, now is the time for you to do that. Now is the time for you to let Christ be not just your savior, but the Lord of your life, the one who's in charge.

Sam.