29th May 2024

29th May 2024


Pray (ACts)


Read (Exodus 13:17-14:14 focus 13:17-19)


Message (Alan Burke)


The Lord is with you right now, do you believe it? If you have trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ then the Lord is with you right now for he has given you his Spirit and the Spirit dwells within his people through faith. You don’t need some kind of special baptism by the Holy Spirit, no for when you come to faith in Jesus Christ the Spirit dwells within you, it is the Spirit that brings you from life to death enabling you to be born again. But why do I start with this? Well I read todays text and you know what some people think that it would be really handy to have the Lord maybe not leading us by a pillar of cloud and fire but in some way directing our path, showing that he was there with us right where we were all the time. Now I understand the sentiment but the Lord already is with us and he has given us everything we need but I’ll come back to that in a moment. 


Here this pillar of cloud and fire is what is known as a ‘theophany’. What is a theophany you might ask, well it is the visible presence of the Lord God to his people and here it was in a pillar of cloud of fire. Now this wasn’t just 6ft tall for there were two maybe as many as three million people along with their livestock and possessions leaving Egypt and this pillar would have had to give them all enough light. In fact this would have been a spectacular sight in the midst of all of what they faced confirming to them that the Lord was with them. That he who had brought the plagues on Egypt was there with his people no matter what they would now face. The problem was that for his people even though he was with them the first we bump in the road and they forget that he is there and start gurning and say to Moses “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? 12 Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!”(14:11-12).


Later in the book of Deuteronomy, the Lord told his people; “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.” (31:6). For those of us who are his children through Christ the Lord will never leave us or forsake us. He has given us his Spirit, the Spirit that dwells within us through faith (Rom 8:9). If you have trusted in Christ alone for salvation, then the Holy Spirit dwells within you, and He is at work in your life. The Lord is with you always, ever present, we can have confidence for he will never leave us or forsake us even when that might be hard for us to see he is at work, his ways are the best. 


We might well want a pillar of cloud or fire to lead us, the Lord there being right before us day and night and all that we have to do is follow without thinking. But the Lord has given us everything we need, the indwelling Spirit though faith and he has given us his revealed word. In the revealed word, the scriptures God has given us everything we need. We don’t need a pillar of cloud in the sky or a pillar of fire to light our way, a neon sign. We have the indwelling Spirit and the word of God. What we need to do is trust in God, live for him, obey the scriptures his revealed will, think of others before yourself, be holy, love Jesus, and as you do these thing, do whatever else you with, with whomever you like, whenever you like, and you’ll be walking in the will of God and his ways are best. And if you want to think more about this Kevin De Young has a great we book called ‘Just do something’ that is worth a read.


Pray (acTS)


Sing


WSC
Q51 What is forbidden in the second commandment?
The second commandment forbiddeth the worshipping of God by images, (Deut. 4:15–19, Exod. 32:5,8) or any other way not appointed in his Word. (Deut. 12:31–32)
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