Well, we're going to be looking today in Ezekiel, chapter 20, which is skipping ahead quite a bit in the scriptures from where we had been. We'd been kind of early on in, like, Genesis and Exodus. So far as we started this series, the unit that we're on, or we. There we go. The unit that we're on is called Israel.

And it's looking at God's people with a purpose, why he had called out a special people, what their job was or their vocation was for him, and some of the struggles they had along the way. And today we'll specifically look at the difficulty they had in maintaining their faithfulness to following God and the laws that he had given them. And then we'll also see that we kind of find ourselves in the same boat many times as they were. But fortunately, Jesus Christ our Savior is the one who has both set the example and. And who lives in us and enables us to follow Him.

One of the things that God has been schooling me on and teaching me about is something that Jesus revealed God as. As Father, you see through the Scriptures. And when you look in, especially the parts in the Old Testament that we're looking at, and we see things like how God is revealed as the one who gave Israel, kind of gave birth to them. He birthed them, he formed them, he created them. We see Scriptures where God is revealed almost as a husband to them, and they are the cheating wife that keeps running away from Him.

There's all kinds of different ways. But then God goes and sends his son Jesus to this earth. And Jesus teaches us that God is Father and that as Father, we can relate to him that way. And I know there's supposed to be an asterisk after saying that because some people didn't have great fathers or don't have good fathers, some people didn't know their Father, all these things. I'm sorry for that.

But that's not what we're looking to God as. We're looking to God as the loving heavenly Father who cares about you, who wants to walk with you. But one of the things that a father does is they teach their children and they discipline their children. And you must be willing to come under the discipline of your heavenly Father for Him to form you into the person that he wants you to be. And discipline.

The Scripture tells us at the time is painful as you're receiving it, but we reap a harvest of righteousness from it. So as you're walking through the discipline that your Heavenly Father gives you, receive that. Don't argue with him, like say, an almost nine year old child might with their parents sometimes and test their patience. Fortunately, God has infinitely more patience than we do. We although we'll see today in the Scripture where there's a time where God's patience not comes to an end, but where he puts an end to it.

And he says, I've given you this much time and you haven't responded, so now don't come and talk to me about it. Now is the time for discipline, for judgment. So let's read the Scripture today. Ezekiel, chapter 20.

And in Ezekiel 20, what we see is, is him giving. Ezekiel, being a prophet of God, we see him giving a bit of a walk through history of the people of God, of the children of Israel. And he tells them some of the things. I encourage you. I'm not going to read the whole chapter, but I encourage you to go later and read.

Or if you get bored with listening to me talk, read the rest of the chapter. You were supposed to laugh. That was okay. And, and go through the whole chapter and read the whole thing. It's quite interesting, but I'm going to start in verse 1 and read down through verse 12.

In the seventh year, in the fifth month, on the tenth of the month, some of the elders of Israel came to seek the Lord, and they sat down in front of me. The word of the Lord came to me. Son of man, speak to the elders of Israel and tell them this is what the Sovereign Lord says. Are you coming to seek me? As surely as I live, I will not allow you to seek me, declares the Sovereign Lord.

Are you willing to pronounce judgment? He's speaking to Ezekiel now. Are you willing to pronounce judgment, Son of man? Then confront them with the abominable practices of their fathers and say to them, this is what the Sovereign Lord. On the day I chose Israel, I swore to the descendants of the house of Jacob and made myself known to them.

In the land of Egypt, I swore to them, I am the Lord your God. On the day I swore to bring them out of the land of Egypt to a land which I had picked out for them, a land flowing with milk and honey, the most beautiful of all lands. I said to them, each of you must get rid of the detestable idols you keep before you, and do not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. But they rebelled against me.

They refused to listen to me. No one got rid of their detestable idols, nor did they abandon the idols of Egypt. Then I decided to pour out my rage on them and fully vent my anger against them in the midst of the land of Egypt. I acted for the sake of my reputation so that I would not be profaned before the nations who whom they live, before whom I revealed myself by bringing them out of the land of Egypt. So I brought them out of the land of Egypt and led them to the wilderness.

I gave them my statutes and revealed my regulations to them. The one who carries them out will live by them. I also gave them my Sabbaths as a reminder of our relationship so they would know that I, the Lord, sanctify them. I let's pray. God, we just thank you for this day.

I thank you for the burden you've placed on my heart for these folks in front of me. The times that you've called me to pray for them this week have been special. And Lord, I just pray that you would reveal yourself to your children. Reveal yourself as a heavenly father who loves them, as their heavenly father who desires to draw them into a deeper relationship with you. Jesus, show them that you're not only their savior, but you are the one that is calling them to serve you, to share the news about you, the witness about who you are and what you've done in their lives.

Pray that you would fill them. Holy Spirit, come and speak to us this morning. Speak to us throughout this week. We don't want to live without your presence in our lives. We don't want to go another day unless you yourself are dwelling in our midst.

We thank you this morning that we can open your word and read it freely and without fear of persecution or fear of reprisal of some kind. But we pray also that you would open our ears and our hearts and our minds to receive the word of God. Lord, speak through me. May my words be clear this morning. In Christ's name.

Amen. As we've been looking through this scripture the last few weeks, we've seen, starting with Abraham and then Isaac and Jacob and his 12 sons, especially Joseph. We've seen what God was doing as he started out with Abraham and said, I'm going to use you to have some offspring, numerous offspring. I'm going to bless them. I'm going to have a covenant with you.

A covenant is the agreement that you make that's binding, and if somebody breaks that covenant, then there are some type of consequences for that. And so he had his covenant with Abraham and his descendants thereafter. And as he did that, as Abraham and God set up this covenant, then he said, okay, I'm going to Bless you with offspring. I'm going to bless you with, with wealth. I'm going to bless you with all these things.

I'm going to give you a land to live in. Now, for a guy that didn't have land and didn't have children, that's pretty impressive. It's quite staggering. And so Abraham was given this blessing and his son Isaac. At one point, God called him to sacrifice his son.

And as Abraham's about to do it, he ends up saying, okay, hold on, you don't have to do that. I know that you won't even withhold your son from me. Of course, God himself did not withhold his only son from us. As we concluded that message, as we're doing in each one of these, this series is all about Jesus, is showing how everything in the scriptures is pointing us to Jesus Christ. And as we saw on that message, Abraham was, was willing to sacrifice his only son, the son that he loved.

And yet God said, I'm not going to require you to do that, but I will do that. One day, on that same mountain that God had called Abraham to, on that same mountain, God's son was sacrificed for you and for me. And so what we've been looking at as we go through this is we see that God was forming a special people. And he gave them this calling for a big reason. It wasn't just because God wanted to favor one group of people over another.

He doesn't play that way. In fact, we'd see when Jesus came and, and taught the people, he would say things that really got his fellow Israelites riled up. He would talk about how much God was desiring to reach the Gentiles. And that part of what Jesus mission was was to reach those who were not of the Jewish lineage of Abraham, the children of Abraham. In fact, he was saying that out of mere rocks on the ground, God could raise up children for Abraham if he needed to.

And so what it was was, was that, that, that Jesus was showing us that he had not come just to save the lost children of Israel, but to use them and go from there to reach all peoples. And so Jesus took a lot of criticism for that. In fact, in his own hometown, they were about to stone him to death because he had proclaimed such a thing. They really didn't like that. But what God was doing was he wasn't just creating a special people just so that he could elevate them to some particular status just for their own sake, he says.

And what we saw in Ezekiel was he said he acted for the sake of his own reputation or his own name. In other words, God was sharing this because he wanted to make his name great among the earth. By the way, that's what our job is. It's not to make my name great or to grow a church or to do this or that. It's to make the name of God great in our land.

And if we're working for another goal than that, then we need to come to God and we need to submit ourselves to him and say, lord, how is it that I should be living before you today? How is it that I can serve you today? And so what. What God was doing was he is creating the special people. And we see that he had given them some laws.

He gave them laws. Now, we didn't. We can't cover everything in this series that we're doing, but in the intervening time between what we saw last week when Moses was coming to Pharaoh and saying, let my people go, God provides Moses and Aaron with the ability to. To perform a bunch of miracles and miraculous signs and wonders. And each one of them is to show that the gods of Egypt, which there were many, to show that the gods of Egypt are powerless against the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Israel.

His name was Yahweh. And Yahweh says, I am superior to anything. Your gods aren't real, and I'm going to prove it. And so he goes through all of this, through these different plagues, and shows that the gods that the Egyptians worship are worthless and pointless. And so as Moses leads them away from there, God is telling them through Moses to get rid of the idols.

Clearly, they hadn't done that. And even if they got rid of the physical idols of wood and stone and metal, they still had the idols in their hearts. So many times we look around our houses, you might say, look, there's no idols in here. Look in your heart. See what idols might be in your heart.

The things that you still are worshiping. What worship is, is something that you devote your life to, that you give your life to. Anything that you are focusing the efforts and energy of your life can become an idol to you. And so what is going on with the Israelites is they. They leave Egypt, they go into the wilderness, and God is preparing to take them into this land of Canaan, what he calls the Promised land.

He has promised it to Abraham a few centuries before, and now he's saying, I'm going to take you in there. Now they go through the Red Sea. You've heard that story you know, they. They cross through on dry ground. Really cool part that we usually forget to mention is that the Egyptian army comes in behind him and God's like, oh, no, it doesn't work for you guys.

And just. And I guess they failed their swim test at the pool, you know, they didn't make it out of there. And it's this cool verse that God says to Moses. He says, look behind you, the Egyptians you see today. In other words, that represents the thing that you're worried about, the thing that's enslaved you, the thing that's held you hostage.

The Egyptians you see today, you'll never ever see again. I didn't hear an amen on that. What God said to Moses was, the Egyptians, you see today the thing that has just held you bound, captive for so long. Today is your day of deliverance. The thing that the Egyptians, you see today, you won't have to see that again.

Do you believe that God can do that in your life? See, this is what he was doing in the life of the Israelites. And so he leads them out of there. They go through on dry ground, the waters cover the Egyptian army. It protects them, it reduces the Egyptian army.

And now Israel's home, free, so to speak. Except the problem is they don't have the faith to go where God is calling them to go. Now. See, it's just one obstacle after another in our faith, isn't it? We can trust God to get rid of the Egyptians, but now can we trust God to take us to the place that we believe he's called us to go?

Do you know that place in your life? Do you know the place that God has called you? Like, where is God wanting to place you in his service to his kingdom? Where is God trying to utilize you for his glory? Are you willing to go there?

And do you believe that God has what it takes to. To get you there? Because I think some of us don't. Some of us are content to say, well, God, you saved me, but I don't know if you can get me all the way to the point of holiness. Well, God, you saved me.

But that whole thing where Jesus says, be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect, I don't know if you can do that. In my life, you don't know some of the stuff that I've gotten involved in. You can't quite get me there. And so we're content with salvation but not holiness. We're content with salvation but not sanctification.

And so we don't think that God has what it takes to get us all the way over the line to being fully sanctified, which is set apart for him. Is it just me, or do you guys sometimes feel like that's how Christians live? And so the Israelites were living that way, and they. They said, well, we'll send some spies out into this land that God has promised us to go into, and we'll send those spies there and. And one from each tribe.

So each tribe, there's 12 tribes. Each of the 12 sons of Jacob had a tribe, and they're all represented that way. And that way, everybody goes in. They tell us what they think about it. Well, 10 out of 12 said, hey, it's a great place, but we aren't strong enough to do it.

We were slaves. We aren't fighters. We can't go in there and fight these people and move into the land and take our residency there. In other words, God promised to get us there, but we don't think God has what it takes to make it happen. We just went through the Red Sea on dry ground.

We were just released. A whole nation of people that had been enslaved by the superior kingdom of the day. And we got released by the mighty hand of God. And yet now we think that God's done.

It's a struggle, isn't it? Every day. Every day it seems like our faith is tested. Every day our resolve to follow God seems to be tested. And how are you going to react to that each day?

Well, God says, okay, we need some schooling time. You need to learn who I am. You need to learn to trust me. They spent 40 years in the wilderness. We read that so many times as it was like, just a punishment for them.

Like, well, you didn't think that you could trust God, so you'll just spend 40 years in time out in the middle of nowhere. Is that how you thought it was? Kind of sounds right, doesn't it? You know, no, that's not exactly what it was. For sure.

It was some of it that is punishment. But it was because God was saying, I'm going to give you my laws before you ever go into the land. I want to give you my laws because those people who live in that chosen land, that promised land, need to abide by God's laws. And that was one of the reasons why the people were being driven out from there, was they had never observed the laws of God or the ways of God. And so he is sending.

He's going to keep the Israelites there before sending them into the promised land now. And he's going to reveal his laws to them. It starts with 10. 10 commandments. We're familiar with those.

You've broken. Hopefully not all of them. You know, like, there's a few of them that it's like, I really hope you didn't break some of those. You know, like the whole murder thing. Please don't.

They. These. He gives them these commandments, they break them. So he gives them more. You break this commandment, let's give you more commandments.

But yet that's what God does. And it's like, commandments, failure, commandments, failure. He keeps giving them more commandments. They get up to 613 commandments. That's the total number of the laws that God gave his people.

Now he gives them all those laws and all those commandments. Interestingly enough, King David summarizes it down into 11 laws in one of his psalms. He kind of hones in on 11 things that he believes or are the most important. And then after that, I gotta look at my notes on this one. Isaiah lists eight principles for the people of God that they should be following.

And then Micah, one of the later prophets, summarizes it down into three of them. And I love this. There's actually a big metal cutout thing above our little coffee station out in the lobby. Do justice, act mercifully, Walk humbly with your God. Micah summarizes it into those three things.

As he looks at the law of God, he says, if we can just do these three things, like live with justice in our lives, act justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God. That kind of summarizes it. When they asked Jesus about it and he. They said, what are. What's the greatest commandment?

Religious people are fun. Don't you love religious people? Who, who just loves religious people? I don't mean people that have a religion that they subscribe to. I mean religious people, people that just know everything about their religion and nothing about their Savior and nothing about his word.

And you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, we've. We've run into them. Some of us have been them. Maybe you've been one and you've repented of that.

Praise God. Jesus bumps into these religious people all the time, and they would argue over what's the most important commandment. Well, it's quite obvious to the Jewish people. They recited it every day. There was a prayer called the Shema.

And in it it says that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might, and with all your Strength. And Jesus says that's the greatest commandment. And there's a second one like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus says that the whole law and the prophets, like, everything that was ever said in the scriptures hangs on those two things.

Love God, love others. Of course, I had a problem with that. They're like, well, okay, but, like, who's my neighbor? Must have been a lawyer. You know, like wanting to find the clause.

You know, like the little. Like the little legal loophole. Like, how can I wiggle through that? The religious people are always looking for the loophole. Well, how is that commandment for them but not for me?

Well, we've all seen some religious people, some teachers or some famous folks that are speaking, and we find out after they die or when they get kicked out of their ministry position that they were leading this whole double life in one area because all those things they taught were for the congregation. But the pastor is different. The same rules don't apply to them. They found some loophole, they thought, and it doesn't work that way as much as people try to make it so. But Jesus, he was questioned because the guy said, okay, that's great.

Love God. I can get behind that. Love my neighbor. Okay, I've got pretty decent neighbors. But, like, who do you mean?

Is my neighbor like, the house next door to me? But what about on the other side of them? What if that house is a duplex? Do I have to love the neighbor on the second, like on the A or, you know, instead of the B, where does it end? What if I live in an apartment?

Do I have to love everybody on the floor above me? What about the floor below me? Some of those people are really loud and obnoxious. You know, like, do I have to. Who's my neighbor?

Jesus. So he tells a story. People sometimes think I give long answers to stuff. Jesus gave a long answer. He told a story for an answer.

He could have said, anyone you meet. But he told the story what we know, the parable of the Good Samaritan. And he basically says, there's a guy left for dead. A religious guy passes him and walks around him and ignores him. And another religious guy passes him and walks around and ignores them because they think they're important.

They have an important job to do. He said, finally, a Samaritan, in other words. Let me translate. A half breed with a mixed religion that they don't like. And the Jews look down on and probably would have spit on if they had the opportunity.

And he says, the Samaritan guy Goes up, puts the man on his own animal, in other words, like he has to walk now. And he puts the guy on the donkey, bandages his wounds, pours oil on him and stuff, carries him to an inn, pays the guy to take care of him and says, I'm going to be coming back through on my return. If there's any extra cost, I'll pay for it out of my own pocket. Like, open a line of credit for me. I'll pay for this guy.

You know, the one that they were supposed to hate. He's the one that gives help. Jesus says, so who was the neighbor to the man who was lying there half dead on the side of the road where the robbers had beaten him to almost to death. And the guy is like the one who had mercy on him. He couldn't even look Jesus in the eye and say the Samaritan.

It would have hurt his heart to say those words out loud that the Samaritan was more of a neighbor than the priest and the rabbi. And so Jesus sets that example. He says, your neighbor is anyone that you come across, especially those who are in need, in some way reach out to them and show them the love of God. And so God was teaching these, these things to the Israelites as they were in the wilderness. And as they're in the wilderness, God is revealing his plan to them that he had as the descendants of Abraham.

He had a mission for them. Part of that mission we can see in Exodus 19, 5, 6. And he tells them three things. He says, there's three things that I want for you people. He says, I want you to be my treasured possession.

A treasured possession. In other words, God says, when I look at the children of Israel, I have so much love in my heart for you. I have so much love for the Jewish people that I want to share with you guys. But it's not just to keep it to themselves. Because he says the next thing is he wants them to be a kingdom of priests.

Now, when you think about what is a priest, a priest is supposed to be the person who is the middleman, the mediator between God in heaven and people on earth. And he is the connection point between them. He's the one that takes the. The burdens, concerns the sacrifices and offerings of the people and, and takes care of those things and submits that to God. He's the one that intercedes on behalf of them.

In other words, he's also the one that receives the word from God, receives the blessing from God, and pronounces that out over the people. There's other things, but essentially that's what the priest does. They're the mediator between them. Of course, we learn in the New Testament that Jesus is our great mediator because after making atonement through his sacrificial death on the cross, he is atoned for our sins. In other words, atonement is at 1 ment, making us at one with God.

And he himself is the bridge that connects us to the Father. But the priest's job is supposed to be the mediator between God and people. And as such, the Israelite people, he says, were to be an entire nation of priests. In other words, there's not a priest class and a common folks class. Every one of you is supposed to be a priest between God and the rest of the nations around you.

In other words, it was supposed to be through the Israelite people. Their vocation, their job was to be found in sharing who God is with the rest of the nations around them. They were supposed to be these missionary people to the whole world. That was their role. That was their job.

The third thing, kingdom of priests, a treasured possession and a holy nation. It's hard to be the person who is sharing about God with others if you're not leading a holy life yourself. Amen. Like, if you're, you know, if you're doing all kinds of stuff that looks like the rest of the world, and yet God is trying to get you to share who he is with others, you're not really sharing a good example of who God is when you're living like the world. So the job or goal of the people of God was to be a holy people.

Holy meaning set apart, Meaning everything profane or everything evil is pushed out, away. And you are living a life that is set and devoted to God, set on God and devoted on God. And so those were the kind of three main identity markers of the children of Israel. A treasured people, a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. Now, one of those relies on God, the treasured people, that status.

And that still hasn't changed. In fact, one of the things that gets talked about a lot today, especially every time the nation of Israel that we have today, the nation state of Israel that we have, every time that comes up, somehow something going on with the war that they're in or this or that, it seems like nobody can even have anything that they say that disagrees with the course of the nation state of Israel without being called anti Semitic. You ever heard somebody say this, you get online or whatever, you're like, oh, they're anti Semitic. They said something negative about Israel. It's like, yeah, their government.

I can say bad things about the government of this country, Maybe even people I voted for. And I'm like, that doesn't mean I'm not patriotic. That doesn't mean I'm unamerican. It doesn't. It actually means I want America to be the best America that it can be.

I think we're the good guys, but we do a lot of bad guy stuff, right? Like, there's a lot of bad guy stuff that America gets involved in, both here and in other countries. And I wish we would stop.

Yeah, I got one. All right. I'll take one. Amen on that. I really wish it would come to an end, because I do believe that as this country and the people that founded it and started it, we have such a good foundation for being a witness to the things of God and encouraging people to live their Christian faith.

And I love that. I want so bad for when I say the Pledge of Allegiance, when I'm somewhere and they're reciting the Pledge. I want so bad for those last three things that they say, you know, one nation under God. I want that to be so true still. What is it with liberty and justice for all?

I want that to be so true. And there's one other one that I forget that I struggle with sometimes. Indivisible. Thanks. Yeah.

Indivisible. Like what? We're quite divided, aren't we? Like, we literally had a civil war, you know, they were trying to divide anyway. It's like.

Like we're a very divisible country. And so many times it feels like we're not under God. And yet I have so much hope seeing sparks of revival fire happening around our country. And I'm like, lord, yes, spread that flame of revival around. We want to see this one nation be under God.

We want to see the divisions erased. We do want to see justice for all. And so I believe that we have the best foundation for living those things out of any nation on this earth. And yet I can still speak candidly about the things that we get wrong. It's the beauty of our amendments.

The First Amendment says we can do that, right? And so I can also look at and kind of separate the people of God, the Jewish people, who I believe God loves very much and who I love as well. And we can look at them as a people and say they are a special people to God and we ought to love them very much. I can also separate Things that the nation of Israel might do if I wanted to and talk about that. But that's not what we're discussing here today.

I just want to say you have, you have like biblical permission to be honest about a country and its government. And that doesn't mean you're talking bad about its citizenry or the people that come from that nation. So there's, there's this interesting thing that we see as we study the scriptures, we see over and over that this chosen people of God still struggle with living out their God given identity. That's not anti Semitic to say, it's not hating Jewish people to say these things. It's literally the words of God through his prophets that we see over and over.

And you can't say, oh well, that's the New Testament. No, we're reading the Old Testament where God is saying that to them. And so as we look at that, as we talk about that stuff and as we see, see it going on, Ezekiel is a prophet who spoke years and years and years just centuries after Moses time. And he's looking back and he's saying the things that Moses was doing. We weren't living up to the things that Moses was, was initiating and leading.

We failed then and we keep failing now. And so what was God's answer for them? God's answer in the short term was that he was going to have them in Moses time in a wilderness period for 40 years. And we don't like the wilderness period. In that wilderness time, we sometimes feel like we're struggling, like we're not quite making it.

In those wilderness times we feel like we just wish we would get out of there. But in the meantime, God is still teaching us something and God is showing us how he wants us to live. But also we see that after many times and cycles of falling away from God and coming back and falling away and coming back and falling away again, God finally took the Israelites out of the land and took them into what we call exile. And that's the time in which Ezekiel writes when, where the people are removed from the promised land, they're carried off to another kingdom for a while and God will eventually let them migrate back to the promised land to renew their interest in serving Him. I think so many times we struggle with things like that in the modern world.

As Christians, we see that God has called us to a certain identity. Jesus gave us a mission to go out into all the world and proclaim the gospel. And yet we're so slow to carry out doing that. Jesus told us to be holy as our Heavenly Father is holy. And yet we so much don't look like that so often.

We fail at that. And so even though we know what we're called to do and we fail to do it, God will sometimes put us in what we call a spiritual dry season. You're looking to God, and yet you somehow think I'm not hearing from him so many times. What's going on is God is just trying to get you to get so desperate for him that you'll just say, I don't want to do anything else until I have more of you. God, the psalmist, the psalms, he says, as a deer pants for water, in that same way, my.

My soul is longing after you. A deer gets real thirsty before it starts panting, I guess. And if a deer has been going for days looking for water until it finally finds a spring or a stream or something, that deer is really like, if I don't get some water soon, I'm not going to make it. We're the same way. Spiritually speaking.

You might be in what we call a dry spell, but until you get so desperate for God, he might stay a little bit quiet because he doesn't want you to just settle for a little bit. He wants you to keep pushing until you receive the fullness of the presence of God. So push through those dry spells and keep seeking the face of God. Focusing on Jesus for our closing few minutes here. Where Israel failed at following through on their vocation for who God had called them to be, where they failed at living that out, Jesus succeeded in every way.

In every way, Jesus succeeded in living out the vocation of the people of Israel. And then he opened it up not just to people who were Jewish by blood, but he said, this is for all people. In the Great Commission, he says, go therefore into all the world and make disciples of all nations. Starting in Jerusalem and then in the region of Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. What Jesus is saying is that that gospel was for you and me.

What he was saying, it was for both the Jewish people and for the Gentiles. And as he opened the gospel up, the good news up to everyone, as he did that, he was. He was calling you and me to something. He was calling us to share in the vocation of Israel. Although we don't replace them as the chosen people, the scriptures tell us that we are like branches that were grafted in to a tree.

Israel is this tree that God has grown. And now you and I have been grafted In. I always wanted to get into grafting trees, by the way. It sounds so fun. And there's still time.

I can still do this. But you can take a tree and then you can put a different variety into it. And you just drill this hole and you pack it and you put the branch in there. You take care of it, and you dress it until it becomes part of that tree. And now the.

The. The roots and the trunk of that original tree are what's supporting that new branch. But it grows strong and it becomes part of it. And I love the concept of that. And I love the idea that God, through his scriptures, that he was building this.

This. This family tree of the nation of Israel, but he has invited Gentiles as well to be grafted in as part of that family, as part of that tree. And. And one of the beautiful things about that, too, is that the song we sang in Sunday school that I sang at least, was, Father Abraham had many sons, and many sons have Father Abraham, and I am one of them, and so are you. I didn't quite understand that as a kid.

We just sang it. It was a fun song. I also, you know, we sang the one about being in the Lord's army and shooting the artillery and all that. That was a fun song, too. And I have this cheesy line, like, if you go to a store and they're like, do you have a military discount?

And I always say, we. Well, I served in the Lord's army, you know, because. And nobody's ever given me a discount. And that's fine. But I just.

I try, you know, so we're grafted in. We're sons and daughters of Abraham, and that puts us in a special status. God's promised you some things in your life. I believe he's done that. He had promised Abraham these things.

He promised the children of Israel those things. What things has he promised you? What things has God promised you personally? But I believe that God has promised you something. There's something that he promised me, and it hasn't, as far as I know, happened yet.

And I keep talking to him about it and saying, okay, God, tell me when. Like, just. I don't want to miss it. Let me know when that's happening. Whatever those things are, don't give up on that.

Because there's always a component of that that relies on us as well. Whether it's your whole household or your health or whatever it might be, you still have to share that witness with them. You still have to live as healthy as you can there's things that rely on your part, but don't ever forget what God's part is and hold him to it. Do you know I do that to God? I tell them, God, we need a roof, but it's your church, not mine.

I'm just supposed to manage it. You bring the money in for it. You provide the contractor for it. You know, like, Lord, you make it happen. Keep the, keep it from leaking until we can get a new roof, put on those kind of things.

I tell them stuff like that all the time. But, you know, I've had to go up on that roof and patch some holes here and there. I've had to replace a few shingles here and there, but I still remind him it's his roof. Isn't it great when you can do that to God? God is your roof.

You fix it. Use me as you need to. I want to close with that and I want to mention a couple things. We're going to be having baptisms pretty soon and later this month, I believe. And I've got one person already lined up that's ready to be baptized, and I'm looking for anybody else that God might put that on your heart.

If you've never been baptized, but you have put your faith in Jesus Christ, I'd invite you to come talk with me and see about that. Or if you are maybe baptized as an infant at some point, but you're like, or a small child, you're like, I don't remember that. I'd be willing to talk to you about that as well. But if you, if you feel that God is leading you to being baptized, then absolutely do that. It's time for people who call God their Savior to be activated.

See, there's a war going on around us, and that war is a spiritual battle. Our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the powers and principalities and evil forces in this world. And so it's time to be activated to serve and fight in that capacity. We do that on our knees before God. We do that by sharing the faith of our witness with Him.

And so I would encourage you to start this week spending time with God and saying if you aren't serving him to the fullest capacity that he's called you to right now, say, God, how do I need to serve you more? If you're joining us online but you have never attended in person, let us know that you're watching by leaving a comment. And please give us a thumbs up on the video if there's any way we can pray for you. Or if you would like to know a little bit more about this church or relationship with Jesus, text us at 833-339-7926 and be sure to check out our website at CFN family.org Thanks for watching and we pray that God blesses you.

Sam.