And I want to start this journey, this, this little 3-part series looking at it by looking at the people of Israel, the nation of Israel, and a specific time that Moses had on the mountain with God, and just a little history of what was going on. See, God had led the people out of Egypt. They had been slaves for a long time in the land of Egypt, and and he leads them out with a— it's a good story, it's a long story, but to summarize it, it's the 10 plagues and God's mighty right hand through the person of Moses speaking to Pharaoh. He leads them out. They go and they journey just a little ways.

Pharaoh's army is just riding behind them, cloud of dust coming up from them, and the people all of a sudden they're marching and they're like, "Big, huge amount of water, we can't get around." They're coming after us. What do we do? God parts the Red Sea. They go through it on dry ground. Pharaoh is like, "I guess we go too." God has other plans.

There's this great verse that is in the Bible where Moses and the people are worried about them, and God says, "Hey, those Egyptians that you see today, you're never going to see again." What He didn't say was like, "No one's ever going to see them again." But that's what happened. Water, pshh! It's rough. Okay. By the way, it's so fun.

All of their technology, like, we think of technology as like our phones and our computers and all that stuff. They had chariots. That was big tech back then. Like, that was a big deal. They had chariots.

They had the pinnacle of, like, the war machine technology in Egypt. And God made the chariot wheels fall off, get stuck in the mud. Everything was going wrong, and they're like, "I think we're on the wrong side of things." You know, how many of Pharaoh's soldiers at that point had been like, "We knew this was a bad idea. Like, we just watched God destroy everything in Egypt and we still chased after Him." Like, how much are you going to fight against the will of God in your life, you know? Well, so the water flows over them.

Now Moses and the children of Israel, they're on the other side of the Red Sea. They're walking. It takes a long time. They've got women that are, you know, nursing children. You've got older men and women.

You know, things move slowly, you've got animals, but they're journeying. They're not in a hurry. They're in this, like, honeymoon period with God where they're beginning to understand who He is. They have not been a free people in a long time. For generations, they have not been free, and so these people are learning what it means to be free.

This is a new concept for them. For some of us, it might be a new phase in your life where you've been bound by certain things, you've been bound by sin, you've been bound by the past, you've been bound by hurts that people have done to you. You've been bound by so many things, and it's time to be freed of those things. And as you find that freedom that God gives you, you might find yourself in a place where you're like, "I don't even know what to do now." The Israelites hit that stage where they didn't know what to do, and they start complaining to Moses. They did that a lot.

Like, they were constantly finding something to complain about. Some of it we can relate to, like, "I'm thirsty." They sounded like petulant children, you know, like, "Ah." You just had a drink, you know? Like, now you're going to have to go to the bathroom, and we know how— well, I guess we're in the wilderness, so it doesn't matter, but there's no roadside. The whole thing is a roadside, so I guess that's okay. But like, seriously, no, you know?

Just hold it for a bit. And so they would complain about all this stuff, but they start looking back at Egypt with these like rose-colored lenses saying, "It was so good there. We had all this great food. We had leeks, and melons, and garlic, and onion, and fish, and all this stuff." And you're like, I don't know that I would combine all those things together, like maybe some of the melon, but the leeks and the onions and the melons and the fish, no, what are you talking about? That's not a good meal, guys.

And then on top of that, it's like, it was at the cost of like 14-hour workdays, 7 days a week. You know, God's giving you a whole day off, you know, like He says you work for 6 days. Some of us complain we don't have enough time and we're only working 5-day weeks. So it's like, you know, God actually told us to work 6, so you guys are lazy. But anyway, so He leads them.

He's leading them, and they're looking back and saying, "We're missing all this stuff." And it's like, yeah, you're working so much, you had a whip across your back. Like, it wasn't good. It wasn't free. Just because you had good food and water every day doesn't mean it was the life you were designed to lead. And so God is teaching them as they're learning about Him.

He's showing His nature to them. And He's telling them how to live in this new freedom that He's given them. And so one of the things He does is He begins giving them some laws. Now it's not just laws to keep them in line. It's actually laws and commandments for them to understand who God is and who He's calling them to be or creating them to be.

Their identity is going to become new. And so He gives them these commands. It's kind of funny almost in an ironic way. Ironic kind of way. The first, you know, there's Ten Commandments, the stone tablets, but there was two different sets of them.

The first set, God carved them out, engraved them out himself, hands them to Moses up on a mountain. Mountains were considered like a holy thing, right? So they're up on the mountain, it's a holy place. And Moses, he's got his helper Joshua with him, and they're up on this mountain. And God gives them the stuff.

They had this great time with God up there, and then they're leaving, and Joshua is like, "Sounds like I hear war, sounds of war, battle in the camp." And Moses is like, "Uh-uh, that's not war. That is the sound of revelry. Revelry is sin. It's that people have already broken the covenant that God has just given me, like these stone tablets." Moses comes down, Some of you guys struggle with anger, right? Yeah, Moses did too.

You're in good company, okay? Moses, he comes down, he breaks, he throws down the tablets that God had just given him. God's like, "Man, I just made those." I don't know if He said that, but anyway, Moses throws them down because the people have made a golden calf. Moses is like, "Literally the first thing! I'm bringing you this list and it's the first thing and you've already broken the first thing." Now, to be fair, they didn't know.

They hadn't seen the Commandments yet. He wasn't able to send a text like, "Hey, Here's the new rules, you know, and his brother Aaron's down there like, "Oh guys, cancel the golden calf thing." He wasn't able to do that, so in all fairness, they didn't know exactly that God was about to tell them not to do this. But their hearts weren't with God fully, and so at that point, God's like, "Moses, stand back. I'm ready to start over. I'm going to destroy them.

I'm going to start over. I'm going to use your kids." Moses is like, "Hold up, God. Let's hold off on this a little bit." I, you know, your name is on them. You've already kind of stamped your reputation on these people, so please go with them for a little bit. So God brings Moses back up the mountain.

He tells Moses this time to bring a couple stone tablets and a chisel, basically, like, you're gonna have to chisel this one out. You broke the first ones, you're fixing it, you're making the next set. And so God tells him what to put on there, but while Moses is there on the mountain with God, he's having this time with God where he says, I just, I just, I don't want to lead these people alone, God. I don't have the strength to do this on my own. I need you to be with me.

Like, God, I don't just want like you to say, oh, you know what? Everything's going to be fine. I actually want you there. I want your presence with me, not just your presence, but the fullness of you, who you are. God, I've seen you on this mountain.

Now we say face to face. The Scripture tells us that Moses would talk with God face to face as a man talks with his brother. But we see in Exodus chapters 33 and 34 that it wasn't the fullness of God, because Moses wasn't able to behold, and none of us are able to behold, the complete and utter fullness of God, who He is. We can't see God and live. See, God is holy.

God is righteous. God is just. And we're not. We are sinners. Now, we've been saved.

If you're a believer in Christ, you've been saved by the blood of Christ. You've been called away from that life of sin. Amen? But we still have that sin, that iniquity, that sinful nature that was in us, and we cannot stand before God on our own because if we stand immediately in His presence, it'll obliterate us. It'll wipe us out.

God cannot have the presence of that sinfulness in front of Him. And so God God's talking with Moses and Moses says, "Lord, I really want to see you." And God says, "Impossible, brother, but I'll tell you what, here's what we'll do. Like, I'm gonna hide you in the cleft of the rock." We've even written songs about this. "I'm gonna hide you in the cleft of the rock. I'm gonna put my hand over you.

I'm gonna pass you. You'll get to see my fading glory behind me, my trail of glory behind me. You'll get to witness that, something that no one else can say they've ever been able to do." Moses, I'm going to give this to you because you have found favor or grace in my sight. And he says, I'll proclaim my name. I'll proclaim my name.

Now, there's power in the name of God. Like, in the name of God, there's power. Now, your name might have a meaning. You know, like everybody's name technically has some meaning behind it. I've known people, they love to do that.

They'll tell you, you know, you'll say what your name is and they're like, ooh, that one means blah, blah, blah. I'm like, I don't think I've lived up to that. I forget what mine even means. Somebody will probably tell me later, but it's like, I don't know if I've lived up to it or not, you know, maybe. I don't know if I was named for a purpose or not.

I think my mom just liked the name and my dad said it was good enough, you know? And so he's like, I can handle that. But God's name has more than just a meaning, which it does have. He goes by the name Yahweh, sometimes just spelled Y-H-W-H. If you want a real nerdy thing, it's called the Tetragrammaton.

That is like actually It's the opposite of a nickname. It's like making it longer. I don't know why we would do that, but we did. I'm just kidding, I do know, but anyway.

So the name of God kind of means— it's weird to translate— it loosely means, "I'll be what I'll be," or "I am who I am," or simply shortened, "The I Am." And so God refers to Himself as the I AM. I don't know if that brings comfort to you or not. You're like, "Why? What does that even mean?" He simply says, "I AM." See, some of you have been living your life in such a way that you're like, "I don't even know if this God thing is real." His name is I AM. Can't get around that.

I AM. The first step that you need to take is acknowledge that God is real. You might have been running from Him, you might have been ignoring Him, you might have been saying, "You know, I want to go back to Egypt. I want to go back to this old way of things." But God is, period. Now then He also says though, He says, "I am who I am," or "I will be what I will be," meaning you don't get to tell God who He is.

You don't get to create God in your image, in the image that you have in your mind that you want God to be. See, we get to these places where we think, "Okay, you know, I like my God." It's kind of like, I can't believe I'm going to quote this, that Talladega Nights movie, you know, like Ricky Bobby, The Legend of Ricky Bobby or whatever it was. It was so long ago, I'm going to get in trouble. I'm probably going to say the wrong thing. But they're talking, they're having this like prayer time, and it's real kind of sacrilegious, but they start talking about how they like to picture Jesus.

And yeah, I get it, like that's probably the wrong thing to talk about, but seriously, that's how we live so many times. We say, "Well, here's how I like to picture Jesus," you know? And one of them, he says like, "I like to picture Jesus with that tuxedo t-shirt, you know, like he's formal, but he still knows how to get down and party, you know?" And that's what he says, and it's like, we do the same thing though. And God, in this whole time, he's been saying, I will be who I will be. You don't get to choose who I am.

I am who I am. So Moses is on the mountain with God. God says, here's what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to pass before you. I'm going to, I'm going to cover you up so that you don't die.

I'm going to do this for your sake, for your protection, Moses. But I'm going to give you a gift that nobody else has experienced. And then we're going to read here in Exodus 34. Verses 5 through 9, this is so beautiful. Moses now has in his hand the two tablets of stone, the second set of them.

This is the Ten Commandments on them, it's the covenant of the law of God to be, for Him to be their God and them to be His people. Exodus 34:5, "The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed, 'The Lord by name. By the way, when you're reading in your scriptures and you see a large capital L and then a little bit smaller but capitalized O-R-D, Lord, that is when the specific name Yahweh is used. Now, when you just see God, capital G-O-D, that's El, E-L, and El is it can reference any kind of divine being, but it's used specifically of God the Father, talking about Him. And so you're going to see here in a moment, he repeats His name twice.

Listen to this. It says, "The Lord passed by before him and proclaimed." I'm going to just— I'm not good with Hebrew, but I'm going to do two things here. Yahweh, Yahweh, the compassionate and gracious El. '"The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness, keeping loyal love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but by no means leaves the guilty unpunished, responding to the transgression of fathers by dealing with the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation." Moses quickly bowed to the ground and worshiped. And said, "If now I have found favor in Your sight, O Lord, let my lord go among us, for we are stiff-necked people.

Pardon our iniquity and sin, and take us for Your inheritance." There's this interesting thing.

I'd heard about it years ago. I had to look it up. Sometimes the internet doesn't want to give you the things that you want that you know are true. And sometimes it'll like gaslight you and say, "Nah, that never happened," or, "No, that's not accurate." I finally found it. I've been trying to find this for years.

There was a tribe of people called the Karen tribe, or Karen tribe, and they, I believe they're in Bangladesh if I remember right. There's a couple different ones with similar stories. But they believed that there was the name of a god that had— not the godhead, but the name had fallen or come down from the heavens and spread out to the whole earth. And they believed that there was a perfect book that was written that their people had had knowledge of, but at one point had lost. And that they believed that one day there would be a white man that would bring this book, this word, back to them.

By the way, they called this god YHWH. It sounds a lot like Yahweh, Y-H-W-H. They were like Y-W-A or something like that, Y'-W-A. And so they had actually— now they weren't like perfect. They didn't understand it very well.

They worshiped a lot of other gods. They were animists too. You know, they did a lot of things believing there were spirits of gods in animals and they would worship them. So like, by no means am I like elevating them and saying, oh, they had perfect knowledge and understanding and practice. They didn't.

In fact, they needed the revelation of God by somebody to proclaim the gospel, in this case a missionary, to bring the gospel to them. And so there was a missionary, Southern Baptist missionary, happened to be a white guy that brings this gospel to them in fulfillment of what they had believed would happen, and he begins showing them the Word of God from the Bible. They're like, "That's the book! That's the one that we thought had existed and was lost to us, and now you're proclaiming it to us." And so there's a strong Christian population amongst that people to this day. And what I truly believe, and have believed for a long time, and now have like the people group knowing their story again, what I believe happened when God proclaimed His name to Moses was that Moses, and maybe Joshua was there nearby as his helper, that Moses and Joshua weren't the only ones to hear this.

I believe that God caused His name to go out over the entire world. And that there are people that were going to respond to that and some that were going to reject that, and that perhaps this people group held on to a little bit of a remnant belief in the name of God, and they trusted in Him some way, and at some point there was a missionary that brought them a fuller knowledge of the Gospel to them. So Moses had asked to see God. God said, "This isn't possible, but I'll give you a glimpse of the glory that trails behind Me. I'll proclaim My name." And then Moses gives God— sorry, God gives Moses some of His own personal attributes, His character, His nature.

And as He does this, He proclaims these things that we just read. And He says that He's gracious and compassionate, He's slow to anger, He's long-suffering in love, He has covenant faithfulness with them. In the Hebrew language, your Old Testament is written in Hebrew. Probably most of you know that, but it's always a good reminder for anybody that doesn't, and that's okay. Your Old Testament was written in Hebrew, and we end up translating it into, you know, whatever language people need, in this case into English.

And in the Hebrew, sometimes it's really good to learn what some of the words, what the words were in Hebrew, and just kind of give a, like, a dictionary-type definition to give a broader understanding of it. We're talking about grace, and many times grace, the word that was in Hebrew that we translate for grace, was "ken," K-H-E-N, or "kan," and it was a word that kind of means that it's a gift given with delight or favor. A gift given with delight or favor. So when God says, "I'm going to give you grace," or that part of His nature is to have ken, to have grace, He's saying, "This is who I am," and it gives Him pleasure to offer Himself, His grace, to us. People throughout the Scriptures, begged God for His ken, for His grace.

People like Queen Esther, Jacob, Moses, they all asked for His grace, for His ken. The Psalms cry out for it continually, for the writers of the Psalms are always asking for another dose of God's ken. The prophets, later on when the people had been living in sin for so long and they'd been rebelling against God for so long, the prophets recall what God had done and the grace that He had given them, And they cry out for a resurrection of His grace in their midst, for His grace to return in strength and in power among them. Some of you need to cry out for the grace of God today because it's been absent in your life, not because God's not willing, but because you haven't been willing to walk that path, much like the Israelites years to come when the prophets would speak of this. In the New Testament, your Scriptures are written mostly in Greek.

A little bit of Aramaic mixed in there too. And in Greek, the word that we commonly see translated as grace is charis, or charis, C-H-A-R-I-S. And this is a word that can be defined as an unmerited— in other words, you didn't have merit that earned it— an unearned favor from someone, from God in this case. Unearned, unmerited favor from God. Now, I'll say any gift that you receive from God, you haven't earned. It's not a gift if you've earned it.

Like, if you have a job, you go to work, you punch the clock, or you're on salary, at the end of the week, you know, every 2 weeks, whatever it is, you get your paycheck. They owe that to you. You work for them. That's part of the contractual obligation. But if they're just like, "Hey, you know what?

Just because we want to, here's like an extra $1,000. What? What did I do to earn this? Well, nothing actually, you're pretty terrible, but you know, we just wanted to. You know, we just wanted to.

That's a very honest and generous employer, I guess, that would do that and say that.

So that's the difference between earned and a gift. And I guess if you're giving somebody $1,000, you can also insult them a little bit because you just gave them $1,000 and what are they going to do? Be like, "Hey, no, I don't want that." Like, they're going to take the $1,000. Like, people say, "What would you do if you won the lottery?" I don't know that I would do that, but I might try it once. Like, "Hey, can I insult you for $1,000?" You know?

Like, it might be fun to do. I don't know. I just thought of that. I'm going to stop now before I dig a hole. You can insult us all you want.

Some people will take it just for the attention, right, Troy? Okay. Over and over in the Old Testament of your Bible, there's another word though that's very important about the nature of God. It's this word that gets defined so many, you know, several different ways. Is loyal love, or steadfast love, or covenant faithfulness.

It's the word called, and it's got to have a little phlegm in it, which I think I've got today, hesed. No, I don't have it very good, but it's hesed, C-H-E-S-E-D, or sometimes without the C on the beginning. I don't know if that means a little less phlegm sound, I'm not sure. But anyway, it's this idea that God has set up a covenant with His people, In the Old Testament case, the people of Israel, He had a covenant with them. Their standing before God was based not on so much their actions, but on God's nature, on His character, on His covenant faithfulness, His loyal love, His covenant love.

See, He had set up a covenant with them and said, "I will be your God and you'll be My people." That means He is the greater party in the contract. He's the one that can continue to provide for them and give His love to them faithfully, whether they're faithful to Him or not. In fact, there's this part of it when He had set up a covenant before that with Abraham, kind of the forefather of the Israelite nation. He had set up this covenant with Abraham, and normally two people would pass through this little covenant-cutting process where they would sacrifice these animals and this blood would drain on this rock. And they would actually walk through— I know it sounds gross, but they would walk through barefooted in the blood of the covenant, sealing themselves into it and saying essentially, "If I transgress my side of this covenant, may it be done to me like what was done to these animals." In other words, my blood is shed if I break this covenant.

Now the interesting thing was God symbolically passed through. It's in Genesis. It talks about a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch, and they passed through. And that's symbolic of God passing through, but Abraham is not required to pass through. God takes the burden of breaking the covenant of both sides, of both parties, on Himself.

And so when the people broke the covenant repeatedly over and over, what did God do? In the fullness of time, He sent His Son, Jesus Christ. His own Son died on behalf of the people's sin and covenant unfaithfulness. That's how faithful God is in giving His steadfast love to His people that He's in covenant with. So in the New Testament, we're under the, the New Covenant that Jesus Christ made, the covenant in His blood, the covenant of His death and what it has done for us.

And God is still faithful, He's steadfast and loyal in His love to us. He continues to give us His grace each and every day.

So then I think our question is, how do we live in God's grace today? How do we receive that? Because like, I'm just talking about some stuff in Scripture that might seem a bit out there to some of you. You're like, "Okay, that's great." And maybe you're a Christian, you're like, "I've already received Christ, so I'm good on that part of it, but like, how do I in my daily life receive the grace of God? How do I receive these gifts?" And I want to give you a few scriptures first that kind of highlight this.

You might want to, like, write them down, look them up later. But Romans 5:8, first of all, says that while we were still living in our sins and transgressions, that Christ came and died for us. Meaning, before you ever knew that you had a need for God, He had already taken care of the solution for that need. Before you even knew how deeply depraved you were in your sinful nature, to that point, God had already provided salvation for you. That's great.

That's beautiful. Now, also, we've got a couple of scriptures. One is 2 Peter 3:9 that talks about God's patience in forgiving sins and iniquities and how He's very patient with His people. But I want to read to you from Psalm 103:1-5.

Would have been nice if I bookmarked it. I usually do. Okay. Praise the Lord, O my soul. Listen to what— this is King David that wrote this.

With all that is within me, praise His holy name. Praise the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all His kind deeds. He is the one who forgives all your sins, who heals all your diseases, who delivers your life from the pit, who crowns you with His loyal love and compassion, who satisfies your life with good things, so your youth is renewed like an eagle's. The whole Psalm is actually quite beautiful. I encourage you to read all of Psalm 103, and the way it talks about God's patience with us while we still persist and insist in living in sin, that He's patient with us, to bring us to the point of repentance so that He can offer us His forgiveness.

He offers that to us and invites us to repent of all of our sin and iniquity. By the way, sin is like when you do something bad. Iniquity is when you do something really bad. Like, that's the simple layman's terms for the theological things that we're looking at here. Iniquity is like some seriously bad stuff when your heart gets really bad.

There are times in the Bible where some people sinned. Then there are some times where they committed iniquity, like King David going and having an affair, killing the guy's— you know, the wife of the— sorry, the husband of the lady that he had the affair with, you know, and like not even caring about all that. That was iniquity. That's more than just like, "Oops, I sinned." That's some bad stuff. That's iniquity.

Like, you're not committing iniquity every day is what I'm getting at, you know? You might have here and there in your life, once or twice maybe, hopefully not any more than that. Hopefully didn't do what King David did. But anyway, most of the time we're not dealing with iniquity. However, it's still there.

Like, we do have a desire towards that sometimes. There are times where in our mind we're thinking about stuff, and it really, like, if we lived it out— Jesus talked about this. He said, you know, you've been told not to, you know, not to kill someone. That would be iniquity. He says, but you think it's okay to hate them in your heart?

That's just the seed of murder. You know, when you hate someone, it's the seeds that grow up into murder. You know, the sin of hating someone grows into the iniquity of murder. So don't even let it germinate. Don't let that seed get into the ground and germinate and sprout up and grow.

It'll get really bad really fast. So God, first we saw that while we were living in sin, He sent His Son to die for us. Now we see that He's very patient. Even though He has given us that opportunity for salvation, so many people are very reticent to take it. They don't want to do that.

And so He gives us— He's patient with us while we respond to His grace. And then we are given gifts each day, new mercies. Like our very life is a gift from God. I've been trying to wake up the last few days as I've been kind of studying through this and praying very specifically 2, and some of you guys, you're like, "This is going to be new for me." When you pray, a lot of times you just say, "Lord," or "God," or maybe even "Father God." Hopefully you don't say, "Daddy God." Those people really give me the weird vibes. You ever been around one of those when they say, "Daddy God"?

Please don't, you know.

He's your Father in heaven though, and it's good to address Him as such. But so often I think we just pray almost just kind of like blankly, like facelessly, like we just, we're throwing up our, you know, our prayers, our wants, our needs, our desires to the throne of God and just kind of, you know, just kind of hoping that somebody catches it, right? You get what I'm saying? I've been praying very specifically though to my Father in heaven because I understand that as my Heavenly Father, there's things as His son that He wants to do, but then I started recognizing it's like the Scriptures tell us that we have an advocate before the Father. It's His Son, Jesus Christ.

But the Scriptures also tell us— here's where this is great— Jesus, through His death, not only did He provide forgiveness of sins, but He also provided for adoption as as sons. Sorry, ladies, you're sons of God now. It's actually, it's not a male/female thing, it's a status thing, it's a position thing. See, if you're a son of someone, if you're a son of a patriarch in the Old Testament, they do everything to watch out for you, to look after you, to take care of you. They'll go to the ends of the earth to redeem you from destruction and death and despair.

And that is how God has treated you, as sons. And so, Jesus Christ is your brother. Like, like, he's there before the Father. You can't be home in front of God right now, okay? You still live on this earth, but he has ascended to the right hand of the Father.

And so when you have a need or a concern, when you're, when you're broken down, when everything's going wrong, maybe when everything's going right and you just want to thank God for it, whatever it is, Jesus is right there on your behalf at the throne of God. Because Jesus said, I'm going I'm ascending now to My Father and yours. Folks, we don't talk about this enough. Our brother Christ, who is our Savior. I don't know any of you who have a brother or sister that would do the things for you that Jesus Christ has done and continues to do.

But He's standing before the Father. He's sitting at the right hand of the Father. He's in His presence. Advocating on our behalf. There are people who have read Scriptures and believe—I don't know how—but they believe that we need to talk to maybe Jesus' mother or some saints.

And I think I understand the idea that they're looking for an advocate, but they missed the point. They missed the Scripture somewhere. Somehow they missed it that says that Jesus Christ Himself is our Advocate with the Father. Folks, you don't have to to work around all this stuff. You don't have to take all these side journeys trying to hope that somehow God will hear you.

He has heard you. As you speak to your loving Heavenly Father, Jesus taught us, He said, you know, even bad fathers on earth, like if your son asks you for some bread, you're not going to give him a rock, or if he asks for an egg, you're not going to give him a scorpion. Like, you're not going to do that. Who would do that? Not even the most despicable, wicked fathers on this earth would do something that low down.

Maybe a couple would. There are some really nasty people out there, but you get the point. Jesus is like, "Even bad dads don't do that stuff." He says, "How much more so is your Heavenly Father looking after you?" And then He says, "The way that your Heavenly Father has been able to bless you in your daily life is by giving you His Holy Spirit." Some of you have not asked for the Holy Spirit in your life. Some of you have asked, didn't receive it right away in the fullness of the Spirit, and you decided, "Oh well, I guess it's not for me today." It's not what Jesus says. See, what Jesus said is he said, "Bad fathers on earth even give their sons bread when they're hungry.

Your heavenly Father is so much better than that." He says your heavenly Father, like, he worries about the sparrows, the birds that are worthless. Birds are worthless, okay? Like, he says that. He says they're worth a penny, you know? Like, there's nothing.

I've always said pennies are worthless. I tried to teach my daughter The penny, like, were quarters, nickels, dimes, worthless penny. I tried to teach her that that's the name of it from infancy on up. It's a worthless penny. And I think in the long run I win because they're not making any more pennies because they're actually worth less than it costs to make them.

Anyway, sparrows are worth a penny, he said. I think he said 2 of them for a penny if I remember. I don't know. Anyway, he says, your heavenly Father knows when one of them falls down dead. I had to repent of that one time.

I can't believe I'm going to tell you this. We would get bored at work sometime, and I think the statute of limitations is over. Anyway, we would go and like try to shoot at birds with a BB gun, and we weren't successful. It didn't really work. BB guns aren't accurate.

We were just bored. I read in the Bible where God says after the flood, He says, for the for the senseless killing or the unnecessarily shedding of any of the blood of any of His animals, He'll hold you for a reckoning. I'm like, "I'm sorry, Lord, that I was hunting Your birds. You know, I apologize for that, Lord. I'm convicted by Your Word and I'm sorry." And I haven't hunted His birds worthlessly ever again.

If you hunt it for food, that's a different thing. Like, there's nothing wrong with that. Anyway, Amy's like, "You shouldn't have said all that." Well, she really tried. She was out there waving her hands like, "Stop!" You know?

Jesus said that your Heavenly Father even knows the number of the hairs on your head. He says they don't fall out without Him knowing that. Now, I've been noticing, I've told you, we've got these cameras up here and I've been noticing like it's getting thinner and thinner on this head. And they must be falling out somewhere. And God knows that.

It doesn't say that He cares that I'm going bald slowly but surely. Like, I don't know if He's abandoned you, Troy, Tom, you know, I don't know. Like, I don't know what— Sunday.

But if your Heavenly Father knows those minute, those things that we see as the smallest of things, and cares, then how much more does He want to give you good things? And Jesus says the good thing is the Holy Spirit. Some of you have never even maybe thought or been told to seek the Holy Spirit in your life. You're living life on your power every day. Yes, you're saved by the grace of God, you claim that, you're like, "I'm good, I'm going to heaven, but every day now I'm just struggling through to make it." God has offered you His Holy Spirit.

He is saying, like, the presence of God with you every day. This isn't a haunting. This isn't like being somehow possessed in some way. No, no, this is the very presence of God with you, by your invitation, filling your life for goodness, for power, for sharing the love of God with others. I don't want to jump ahead, but, you know, like, we're gonna be looking at that in a couple weeks, but seriously, like, You need the Spirit of God in your life.

And some of you have looked at this and you said, "Okay, well, Lord, will you send me your Holy Spirit?" And then you didn't. Like, you didn't receive what you thought you were asking for, and so you stopped asking. You know, Jesus actually told a parable about a woman. A parable is a story with a point that you've got to think through to understand it. And Jesus tells this parable about this woman.

She has an adversary. She's a widow, so she doesn't have an advocate. But she has an adversary that's taking her to court, and so she goes to the ruler, to the king, and she's like, "I need justice against my adversary." This guy doesn't care about her. He's a selfish, selfish man. He admits that by his own.

He's at least better than our politicians today that won't admit how selfish they are and how much they're working for their own stuff. This guy actually says it. He's like, "Well, I know I don't care about God, and I'm a pretty selfish guy, but..." "this woman won't shut up. She keeps coming to me every single day pestering me, so I'm just going to give her justice in her case. I'm going to mark it in her favor just so that she'll leave me alone." Jesus was giving us a point about His Father saying essentially, like, if that's how these human guys work, like, how much more would your Heavenly Father be inclined to give you the good things that you need, the Holy Spirit especially, if you ask Him?

And the thing is, though, He says if you don't get it right now, you need to keep asking. Like, don't give up in asking. Don't give up in seeking the Holy Spirit, because if you do that, you're cutting yourself short from everything that God has wanted to give you. So how do we receive or walk in God's grace? I think a few things here.

Here's your, like, practical takeaway steps besides storming the throne of God and asking to receive the Holy Spirit. The first thing that you need to understand, that you need to look for, is to look for His grace. Like, see where it's already happening in your life. If you want to really receive the grace of God, look at where it's already been given to you. Remember, grace, as we were defining earlier, is a gift that is given with delight or favor.

When you receive good things from God— he checked me on this this morning— I made an English muffin and a fried egg for breakfast. That was my yummy breakfast, and I'm sitting there, I'm just gonna do like a quick little prayer, "Lord, thanks for this food, blah blah blah, let's go." And He's like, "That it? That's all you got? I'm providing for you. I'm giving it." Literally, like, I think these eggs are from Jen.

Sometimes Tom brings me eggs. I love you guys, thank you. Like, I love these farm-fresh eggs, you know, or side yard, backyard fresh eggs, or whatever it is. Like, you know, like, this is great, but God is the one providing. And so I had to pause and acknowledge that, and I'm like, "Lord, "Lord, this meal, this food that I'm eating is Your grace on a plate in front of me.

Thank You for Your grace in this provision. Thank You for Your grace in this. I was able to get out of bed on my own, to get myself dressed, to come here, to be with you all. Thank You, Lord, for that grace that is new this morning. Thank You, Lord." And so He's been teaching me, He's been showing me how much I overlook daily His grace.

So be aware, like be looking for it, meditate on it, say, "Lord, this is your gift, isn't it? This is your grace." Read the Psalms, read what these people, King David and others, the things that they wrote, that they were meditating on the grace of God, and they wrote about it. And so many times you look, you're like, "Oh my goodness, here he goes again, like get over it, dude." No, he couldn't get over it because he had spent time meditating and realizing that despite even the lowest times of his life, the grace of God was there. In such a strong way and he couldn't get around it. Start to read the Scriptures more looking for the places where grace is mentioned or favor is mentioned or loyal love, steadfast love, etc.

Whatever it is, look for those places where that is mentioned. This isn't specifically a series on mercy either, but you've got to understand that mercy and grace is kind of like the chicken and the egg— which came first? Like, I'm not really sure. They both feed feed off of each other. God gives you mercy in your sin because it's in His graceful nature to do so.

He's able to give you grace because in mercy, even though you deserve death and hell, He has offered you gifts and grace. See, they're like intertwined, they work together, we can't have one without the other. And so, be thankful for the mercy of God in your life.

Begin praying according to the knowledge that you have. Begin in your prayers, like I said, I started addressing my Father in Heaven in a very fatherly way, as saying, "Okay, Lord, like, Father, what do You want me to learn today? Dad, what do You want to teach me today? My Father in Heaven, how should I be living today? Where do You want me to go?

What do You want me to do?" Then I'm saying, "Well, Holy Spirit, like, Like, lead me in this. You're the presence of God with me, so lead me in this. Show me the grace of God in my life. Show me what you're wanting me to do. Show me how to extend that grace to others.

Jesus, my Savior, my Brother, Lord Jesus Christ, thank you for your gift, for your death, for your resurrection, for your ascension to heaven, sitting at the right hand of the Father. Now, as you work to advocate on my behalf, Speak to the Father for me. Show Him how to lead me through His Holy Spirit. You begin your prayers speaking to the Three-in-One, the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, specific to who each one is and what they each do. I want to give you 3 verses, and I'm going to wrap this up with a quick story.

I know we're a little over time, but I'm up here and I get to do that. Colossians 4:6 says to keep your conversations full of grace. This graceful conversation is the salt that seasons what we talk about. Salt isn't— this is a mostly white room here, okay? You guys need to understand salt is not a seasoning, right?

I have somebody, like anybody? Okay, salt enhances the existing flavors. That are already in the food. All right? Like, that's not the only thing you use.

You put other seasonings on it. Your conversation needs to have flavor. It needs to have season. It needs to have good things in it. The grace that we use in our conversation pulls out those flavors.

It highlights them. So as you're displaying the grace of God in the way that you talk, Oh, God's convicting me on this right now as I say it. Maybe for things I've already said today, you know, but anyway, how many times has the things that I've said not brought out the good things of God, but rather highlighted the depravity of my sin? Our conversation should be the thing that is the salt that brings out the goodness, the good flavors of God. Romans 6:1, and really for most of the rest of that chapter, tells us not to walk in sin.

See, there's people that think that they can continue on the pathway of sin, walking in sin, and they can expect like an extra dose of grace. Oh, because when I sin, God gives me His grace, so the more I sin, the more grace that I have. He actually uses a phrase that's equivalent in strength to like, heck no! Well, probably stronger than that, but anyway, I've gotten in enough trouble probably already today, so I'm going to say it that way. He says something so forceful that it would kind of stop the readers in their tracks.

They're like, "Whoa, Paul's serious here." Like, don't sin more so that you can experience more grace. That's not how grace works. I mean, yes, God does give you more grace when you sin, but don't say, "Oh, I need more grace, so I'm going to sin more." He's like, "You're an idiot. Don't do that." Acts 7:51, this is one of those chapters that's so long, and this is a guy named Stephen. We talked about him a couple months ago.

He was the first Christian to be killed for his faith. We call that a martyr. He's the first martyr. And just before they killed him, the Jewish leaders stone him to death, they kill him. Just before that happens, he gives this long story that they all know.

It's like the history of their people. And they're like, "Yeah, we know this guy. Come on." This is our story too. And then he just, like, in the middle of it, just cuts it short and he's like, "And you guys killed all the prophets and you killed Jesus and you're hypocrites and you're evil and terrible," and all this stuff. And he says, "You've always shut down the work of the Holy Spirit.

Like, anything good that the Holy Spirit is trying to do, you're shutting down." That was his whole defense. And when they hear that, they're like, "Out! We got to get rid of him." And they take him out and they kill him. See, the real presence of God in the Holy Spirit is the thing that we need to be about, so don't resist the Holy Spirit. When I was saying that some of you maybe have asked for the Spirit and didn't receive it, maybe you quit asking, but maybe you got a taste of it and you realized that you actually didn't like where that might go.

You're like, "Am I gonna start speaking in tongues? Like, I don't know. I don't know if I'm okay with that. Am I gonna have to be called on to like, let's lay hands on somebody and pray that they would be healed? What if it doesn't happen?

What if I'm wrong? And you're worried about what goes wrong. Is God gonna give me, put me in these awkward conversations with a stranger where I've got to tell them about Jesus? I don't know if I want that Spirit-filled life. And you've kind of shut it off before.

What about the people I work with? They'll think that something weird is going on with me. Yeah, it is. It's not normal to the way most people live. It's the presence of the Like, your Heavenly Father that has created you, it's the presence of His Spirit in your life.

It's not normal to the things of this world, but it is the best way you could live on this earth. Amen? If you can't enjoy the presence of God in your life now, you're not going to enjoy eternity. Hang with me for a couple more minutes. I'm going to wrap this up.

I've got a personal story that I've got to share with you. I don't always do this. I rarely do this, but this one— It's like it's been waiting for this day, I guess. So a little bit about me. I grew up in Michigan.

I'm not going to tell you my whole story, don't worry. I grew up in Michigan. When I was about 20-something years old, young 20s, I don't even remember anymore, I moved to Tennessee. I was going to go to college there, and I did for a little while. They wanted money that I didn't have, so I stopped going to college.

Um, that's how that worked. Anyway, You guys didn't find it funny either. It was quite traumatic at the time.

So, but I also worked at that college. I was doing, I was one of their landscaper, groundskeeper guys, and right around the corner from the college was a little restaurant, little fast food place called Mrs. Winners. It was a southern kind of regional chain, and they were a chicken and biscuits kind of place, and it was good, and they made homemade biscuits, made good chicken. But I was always there at breakfast time on the kind of mid-morning break.

I would eat at home and then I would eat again at 9:30. Like, that's how much energy I was spending. It was great. You go to Mrs. Winter's, 2 for $3, get 2 sausage biscuits, and it was really good sausage. And so it's like, oh man, I'm going to Mrs. Winter's.

I'm going to get— I don't have much money. Payday's a few days away, but I still got a few bucks. I'm going to get a couple chicken biscuits or sausage biscuits at Mrs. Winter's. And I go there. The building's here.

I park in a space right next to it. And as I'm walking in, there's a guy hanging out by the door. He's like, "Hey man, you got a couple bucks?" I'm like, "No, I've only got my debit card, but I'll buy you something if you want. What do you want?" He's like, "Well man, they got like a 2-piece chicken dinner." I'm like, "Okay, sounds good." Well, I walk in, I order mine, I go to order his. They don't have any chicken yet.

It's too early, it's breakfast time. So I just got him same thing I got, a couple sausage biscuits. I take them out to him. He's standing there by the— he's like leaning on the wall, the outside of the building. He's like, "Hey man, they didn't have any chicken yet.

I got you a couple biscuits." He's like, "No meat?" I was like, "What? Man, no, there's sausage on them. Like, it's breakfast sandwiches." He's like, "Oh, okay." And so he's right there by the building. I walk over to my car. I get in the car and I back up and I look, and there he is leaning against the building again.

Like ready for the next person to walk up and ask them for the money. Oh, I was angry. I was so angry. First of all, I don't have that much money and I spent it on him. And not only was he just leaning there like, he didn't have a backpack, he didn't have anything, there was no trash can nearby.

He didn't have those biscuits. They were gone. They disappeared. I don't know what he did with them. I don't know if he like chucked them up on the roof to get rid of them because that would ruin the next, like if he wanted the next person to give him some money, they're not going to give him anything if he's got a sack of food.

If he says, "Hey, I'm hungry, I need food," that's going to be a lie. And I was so angry, and I'm driving around the building, "Grrr." I get around about to where the drive-through is on the other side, and God says, "But that's the way you treat my grace. See, I give you what you actually need, and then you just throw it away, and you say, 'Nah, I'm just going to keep wallowing in my mess and do what I want to do.'" I wasn't angry anymore at that guy. I couldn't afford to be. And I said, "Lord, thank you for that lesson.

It only cost me $3, and I could have lived my life this way for a lot longer ignoring that lesson that you just taught me this morning." Don't miss the next 2 weeks here. You need— and especially next week, I'm going to share something with you that that you're gonna need to be part of. Something that's coming up in October. I'm not gonna tell you any more about it right now. You just gotta come next week to find that out.

It's like a "to be continued" on TV. You used to hate those until like Netflix came out and was streaming and everything. Live in the grace that God has offered you. Don't throw it away. Don't trample it underfoot.