And so Moses has been interceding on behalf of Israel, asking for the Lord to go with them. Um, because the Lord has threatened to not go with them any further than Sinai because of their idolatry with the golden calf. And so last week we looked at the final part of Chapter 33, where Moses is requesting the Lord to go, and the Lord says that he will. And we pick that up in Chapter 34. But let me go ahead and pray and ask the Lord to bless the reading and the study of his word this morning. Our Father, we humble ourselves before you and thank you that we can call you our Father in heaven. We hallow your name. We want to know your name. We ask you to reveal yourself to us and revealing yourself to us this morning that we would see ourselves, that we would see our sin, that we would confess our sins. and look upon Christ and how precious he is to us, that he would forgive and cleanse us from our sins. So, Father, would you reveal more of yourself this morning as we look at your word? We pray for the ministry of your spirit to bring illumination to minds that are so often darkened and hearts that are cold. Would you warm our hearts by your word? We pray in Christ's name, amen. Exodus 34, beginning in verse one, the Lord said to Moses, cut for yourself two tablets of stone like the first, and I'll write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets which you broke. Be ready by the morning and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai and present yourself there to me on the top of the mountain. No one shall come up with you and let no one be seen throughout all the mountain. Let no flocks or herds graze opposite the mountain. So Moses cut two tablets of stone like the first and he rose early in the morning and went up on Mount Sinai as the Lord had commanded him and took in his hands two tablets of stone. The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children to the third and the fourth generation. And Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped, and he said, if now I have found favor in your sight, O Lord, please let the Lord go in the midst of us, for it is a stiff-necked people, and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance. This is God's word. What is your view of yourself? How do you view yourself? Would you describe yourself as someone else would describe you? Your spouse or a friend? Your children? What's your view of yourself? I guess going along with that question is, are you a self-aware person? Do you have a good awareness of who you are? We all know those people that we say they have no self-awareness. They walk into a room and they might say something or act a certain way and we go, do they know how they're coming across? We must all ask ourselves, am I self-aware or am I self-deceived? I fear that we are probably more self-deceived than we realize. And many of us can look back on our lives and go, wow, I thought I knew how I was doing. And now looking back, I have a bird's eye view and I can see that I was a self-deceived person. I can see that in my own life and sometimes I wonder how self-deceived am I now? And the reason I say that is that the scriptures tell us this. In Jeremiah 17, nine, a verse that we know very well, we read, that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it? And the reason why the heart deceives us so easily is what we read about in Obadiah 1.3. There we read, the pride of your heart has deceived you. The reason our hearts deceive us is that there's pride in our hearts. And our pride, more than almost any other sin, pride blinds us. It makes us deceived, and we are self-deceived. And we must be careful of that as Christians, not to be self-deceived. But as I was thinking about how easily we have a wrong view of ourselves, I think about the Lord and his view of himself. Here is one Here is a being who has perfect awareness of himself. Nothing is hidden from him. God perfectly knows himself. And he can graciously reveal himself to whom he wills to reveal himself. And here what we have in Exodus 34 is God revealing himself to Moses. Letting Moses know who he is. Now, as I said, chapter 34 picks up with Moses still in a tent of meeting with God. He's still talking to God. You see this in verses 1, 2, and 3. This is the end of their conversation. And here, God gives Moses instructions. He says, okay, here's what I want you to do then. Since I said I'm gonna go with you, I'm gonna go with Israel, I want you to leave the Tent of Meeting and carve out two stones. And then tomorrow I want you to get up early, I want you to climb up Mount Sinai, and I will write my laws back upon those stones, the stones that you had broken when you came back down from the mountain when you saw Israel in sin, in the sin of idolatry. What God is saying with these instructions is that he is going to reestablish and renew the covenant. Because the covenant documents, which are those tablets, have been broken, along with the covenant had been broken. With God saying, I want you to carve out two more and I'm going to write on them, God is saying, I'm going to renew the covenant with you. Some of you maybe in your Bible have as a heading, the covenant renewed. Well, that's what's going on here. God is saying, I am going to renew the covenant. I'm going to give you the stipulations of the covenant, the 10 commandments, and I'm going to be with you. Now, as Moses follows the instructions in verse four, he takes the stones, he climbs up the mountain, and he comes to meet with God. We see that the Lord is doing for Moses what Moses asked when he said, show me your glory. And God says, I will pass by you and show you my goodness. I'll proclaim my name to you. And that's what we have here. As Moses gets to the top of the mountain, God now reveals himself again in a greater fullness to Moses. He reveals himself as the covenant Lord, the master of the covenant. This morning, let's consider who this covenant Lord is. Who is he? He reveals himself in verses five through seven, and then we watch Moses' response to the covenant Lord revealing himself. And so let's look at it in two parts. First of all, the covenant Lord revealed, and then our response to the covenant Lord revealed. First of all, the covenant Lord revealed in verses 5 through 7. It says in verse 5, the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him and then proclaimed the name of the Lord. Now this name and God as he puts his hand upon Moses, and covers Moses, and puts him in the cleft of the rock, and passes by him, and then lifts his hands so that he can see his back, which is a way to describe God's goodness, his covenant relationship towards his people. He's revealing himself, this is revelation, God is revealing himself to Moses, and he reveals his name, the Lord. Now you see in your Bible, most likely, they're all caps. L-O-R-D. In Hebrew, we're not sure exactly how to pronounce this name, by the way, but most people pronounce it Yahweh. Now, this is the name given in the Mosaic Covenant. The name under the Abrahamic Covenant that was given was El Shaddai, God Almighty. But this is the name that is associated with the Mosaic Covenant, or what we call the Old Covenant, the name Yahweh, or as we have it here, the Lord. Now God has expressed himself in this name. In giving Israel his name, he is giving them his character, who he is towards them. Now we've seen that this is the name that God gave Moses on Mount Sinai at the burning bush. And we believe that it's probably based off of the phrase, I am who I am. Kind of a running together of all of those consonants into the name Yahweh, which refers to God being the self-existent one. He is independent. You see, there is God and there's everything else, right? There's the creator and then the creation. The creator is independent. He is self-sufficient. He is from himself. Everything else is from him, is from something else, from him ultimately. The name the Lord here reveals that he is self-existent, that he is independent. He is the God who fulfills his promises. So this name expresses who he is and what he does, particularly what he does for his covenant people. This is a covenant name. He is the Lord of the covenant. So who is the Lord of the covenant? Who is this covenant Lord? Who is he in his person? How does he act towards his covenant people? How does he act towards us? Well, now we have this in verses six and following. God declaring a number of his attributes to us, his characteristics, who he is towards his people. So let's walk through some of these or all of these together. The first grouping that God gives, he says, the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger. Let's look at those first three together. That God is merciful and gracious and slow to anger towards his people. The first term there, he is merciful. This means that he does not give us what we deserve. Israel should be thankful for this. Moses should be thankful for this. In fact, honestly, if God were to give me what I deserved, I wouldn't be here before you today. I would be dead and I would be in hell. It's just true. I know my own life well enough. for the first 45 years of my life to say, no, God has been merciful to me. I'm alive and I'm here and his presence is with us. He has been merciful. You may have a translation that says compassionate. It's the same idea. And I like that. I think the new American standard says compassionate, that he is a compassionate Lord. And when I think of The Lord's compassion, I think often of Psalm 103, verse 13, it says, as a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. What does it mean to have compassion for somebody? Well, it means to pity somebody. It's a word that has rich emotion behind it. The idea is to pity someone or something, to have sympathy, and to be drawn towards that one to meet the need. Now think about that for a moment, that that is how the covenant Lord is towards his covenant people, is that he looks upon us with pity, with sorrow in his heart in a sense, with compassion and sympathy. Now we can think of this particularly in our covenant Lord, the Lord Jesus. who can sympathize with our weaknesses. Do you recognize that? That your covenant Lord in heaven looks down upon you, Christian, and he pities you, he has sympathy towards you, he is compassionate toward you. Now the opposite of this would be judgment and vengeance, right? And what we have to realize is that God operates that way too. God does operate in judgment. He does operate in wrath. We know that he feels indignation every day, the psalmist says. And so God does operate with judgment. He does operate in wrath and vengeance. But towards his covenant people, he operates with compassion and pity. He pities us. And I wonder, what's the difference? What is the difference between God having compassion towards a sinner and him having vengeance towards a sinner. What's the difference here? And I thought about it in our own lives. When do you have pity on somebody and want to forgive the person? Maybe the person has really offended you and sinned against you. When are you more prone to say, I forgive you, I feel sorry for you, when they've done something grievous to you? And I thought of two things. I thought one is a relationship, your relationship to the person. If the person is close to you, then you're much more willing to forgive them, aren't you? And in one sense, we understand this. The Lord has compassion upon his children. We are related to him as a father to children. And so instead of vengeance and wrath that we deserve, he has compassion and pity for us. But I thought the second thing is this. It's the person's attitude so often, right? If the person is smug, if the person is proud, they've sinned against you and they seem not to care, they seem not to be broken about it, then you have a really hard time letting go of that, don't you? And having compassion or pity on somebody. But if they're broken, if they're broken before you, if they're humble before you, you have a much easier time forgiving them. Brothers and sisters, listen, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. God is drawn in to the humble person. But God goes the other way with the proud person. This morning, are you a proud person? Can you sit back and judge others and think about others? Do you yourself not show much pity and mercy towards others? Well, if the Lord has shown so much mercy and pity upon you, then we should be like our Father in heaven. It is really, truly humility. Of course, this is a grace of God humility. There's been three things that recently I've been praying for. I said, Lord, I need love, true love, Christ love, because we know that what goes for love is not love. But I need Christ's love. Second of all, I need humility. And third, I need wisdom, heavenly wisdom, not earthly wisdom. So these are three things. And we need humility. And humility draws God in towards us. And so God has compassion upon his people. He pities his people. He's drawn near to his people. But then the second term is not only is God merciful and compassionate, has pity for us, but he also is gracious towards us. Now, if mercy is saying, I will not give you what you deserve, which is punishment, grace is saying, I will give you what you don't deserve, which is good things. And so if compassion moves God towards us to meet our needs, then grace actually provides what we need. Say that again. If compassion moves God towards us, then grace then provides for our need. He is drawn near in his compassion, and then grace, he pours out upon us and says, you need this, and you need this, and you need this. Here they are for you. As I was thinking about this, and again, remember James 4, 6, God opposes the proud, but he gives what to the humble? He gives grace. Christian, don't you want grace from the Lord? Then seek humility. Seek it. Say, one thing, Lord, I ask for is humility, because I know that that's the one thing I don't naturally have. I have so much pride in my heart because I think of me all the time. You know, it's really hard to get away from us. We brush our teeth, we feed ourselves, we give ourselves sleep, we give ourselves, give, give, give. And only God can say, I'm going to take away so much self-centeredness and put me and others into your heart. This is God's grace. But when I thought about these two characteristics, attributes of God, his mercy and his grace, I thought of the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15. In Luke 15, you have Jesus' parable of the prodigal son where the younger son, He wants to leave his father. He wants to take his inheritance now. And so he does. And he goes and spends it. We know the parable. And he gets to the end of himself. He has nothing left. He's feeding pigs. He is filthy and dirty. And he's so hungry that he can look at the pig's food and think, I wish I could eat that. I'm so hungry. That's a low, low place to be. And he says to himself, I can go back to my father and maybe he'll just make me a servant. But we see that as he's coming back towards his father, we read in verse 20, and he arose and came to his father, but while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt what? Compassion. He felt compassion. He wasn't angry. He felt compassion. And ran and embraced him and kissed him. And then he poured out grace upon him. Yes, the hugging and the kissing is grace. But also, what does he do for him? He puts on a new coat. He puts on a ring on his finger to say, you're back in to my family. And then he kills the fatted calf and says, eat for you're hungry. He meets all of his needs. You see, he's compassionate towards his son. And then grace lavished upon his son. That is what God has done for the Christian. He has saw, He's seen us, and He's seen us in our sin, that we are, we're bankrupt, we're poor in spirit, we have no goodness in us. We are nothing. We're just dust. And actually we're less than nothing because this dust is filled with sin. Having offended our Father, and he looks at us and has compassion in his heart well up so much that he runs out and he hugs us and says, I'm going to meet every one of your needs. You have a need for righteousness, I will clothe you in it. You have a need to be in my family, here's a ring. You have a need for food, here's Christ, feed upon him. I give you everything for your need. That's what Christ has done. That is what the Father has done for the believer. Now understand, the prodigal son did not come back with smugness. He did not come back with pride. He came back, it says, he recognized what he wanted to say to his father, which he couldn't even get out all the way, but his father knew his heart, was, I have sinned against you in heaven, and I am not worthy to be your son any longer. You see, we come to God saying, I'm an unworthy servant. And he says, you're my son. That's the compassion and graciousness of the God of the covenant, this covenant Lord. Instead of berating us in anger, you've lost everything, son. And understand this, we have. We have spoiled everything we've touched in a sense. We've marred it with sin. But instead of coming out, and this is where God is slow to anger, right? And that's what it says here. He's merciful and gracious, slow to anger. He doesn't burn with anger towards his son, all that his son has done against him to defame him, to dishonor him. But rather, he showers him with grace. And the two arms of grace that he wraps him up with is love and faithfulness. And that's our next two attributes. You say, what's God's grace like? I'll tell you what it's like. It is loving and it is faithful. What does he give you, Christian? He gives you his love and he gives you his faithfulness. Now these two terms, when the Lord says, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, abounding in them. Not just a little bit, but abounding in them. These two terms, love and faithfulness, summarize God's gracious activity towards his people. These two terms are the central covenant terms. You find them all throughout the Old Testament. Loving kindness and faithfulness, or truth. love and truth, love and faithfulness. This is how God acts towards his people. This is his grace towards his people. He gives us his love and he gives us his faithfulness. When God says in the covenant, I'll be your God, you say, well, what kind of God would that be? And he says, a God of love and of God of faithfulness. These are the two arms of God that embrace the son. Love and faithfulness. That first term, steadfast love, you've probably heard the Hebrew word hesed. God's hesed, this is his covenant love. This is a specific kind of love. This is not a general love. This is a particular love. This is not the love that God loves everyone with. This is rather the love that he loves his people with and says, I give you this particular love. And that means I'm in relationship to you and I'm going to do good to you and I'm going to be kind to you. And that's really the idea behind this term is God's goodness and his kindness towards us. And that's really what love is. doing what's best for another person, giving someone what is best for them, and God is committed to always doing what is best for us, and what is ultimately best for us is conformity to his image, to look more like him. And so God loves us this way, committed to us. We think of Romans 8, 28, all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. This is our God, our God with his people says, I am going to, every single thing that I bring into your life is going to be for your good. I'm committed to doing good towards you and producing Christ's likeness in you. I'm absolutely committed to this. Day in and day out in our lives, God is saying, I am working to love you and to bring everything about to produce ultimate good in you, which is, as Romans 8.29 says, conformity to Christ's image. God is committed to his covenant people, and that's the other word, faithfulness or true. He says, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. With faithfulness, God is saying, I am absolutely committed to this people to always follow through on my love for them, to follow through on every single promise that I've ever made. Now, listen to this, church. Every other person that you come into relationship with will fail you You cannot ultimately trust the love or faithfulness of anybody else but the Lord. Anybody else can break their love or break their faithfulness to you, but I'm telling you there is one Christian that will be absolutely faithful to you forever, and that's the Lord. Look to him. Don't put your hope in idols, they will let you down. Idols will not be faithful. Idols will not love you, but your Father in heaven will. He will perfectly love you. He'll be perfectly faithful. And how long will they do this? Verse 7 says, keeping this love for thousands or to the thousandth generation. The idea here is that the love of God spreads far and wide from generation to generation. It keeps going, it keeps going, it keeps going, it doesn't end. So thank him for his loving kindness, his faithfulness to you. But then finally, we also have a couple more characteristics here. He says, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty. So you also have God's forgiveness and his punishment. So God is forgiving, but he is also punishing. First of all, he is forgiving. And we know that he is forgiving towards his people. Now notice when it says here, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and sin. These are three categories of unrighteousness, and they're probably a little nuanced, each different term. As I was reading that, I thought, interesting that the Lord here says that he forgives three things. God is willing to forgive three things. You've got iniquity, transgression, and sin. Now, sin is the most general of the terms given for any kind of moral failure. We understand that. We say sin. We're talking about any kind of moral failure whatsoever. And so that's the most general term for unrighteousness. The first word that he uses is iniquity. And this word, and by the way, when it says forgiving, iniquity, forgiving, The term literally means to lift or to carry. It's a wonderful picture. That God lifts up our iniquity and carries it away, which again reminds me of Psalm 103, right? As far as the east is from the west, so far does he carry our sins away from us. And that's the idea here, is that God in his relationship to his covenant people, he picks up our iniquity, our transgression, our sin, and he lifts it off of us and carries it away so he doesn't hold us guilty of it any longer. Carries it away. But what does he carry away? Iniquity. Now, this literally means kind of a wickedness, but it's a crookedness or a wrong way. The term literally means to be crooked or to go wrong, a wrong way. And this is not as defiant of a wickedness as the next term, as we'll see in a minute, transgression. Iniquity seems to carry the idea of just stepping off the wrong path. It's still sin. God will judge it, as we see in the next verse. He'll judge iniquity, but it's the idea of sin that we may not even be aware of. You know, sometimes you know you sin, right? Okay, when, you know, if you I mean, if you murder somebody, you know you did that, right? But sometimes we're not aware that we're even sinning, but we're sinning. That can often be just sometimes in a complaining spirit, or we're grumbling in our heart about something and we don't even recognize it, but we've taken a crooked path and we're off the path there. Or just think about going through your day and ignoring God. Not once today have I thanked God for how good He's been to me. That's iniquity. That's walking in a path off from God. I mean, do you see how often we sin? How often we do wrong? When we recognize that iniquity is just getting off the beaten path. In a sense, I could say it is what Israel was doing in the wilderness as they kept complaining against God. There wasn't like a clear breaking of one of the Ten Commandments there, but they were sinning against God by their complaining spirit, their grumbling. And God wasn't ready to put them to death right there, like he was with the golden calf. But God forgives iniquity, but he also forgives transgression. Transgression, though, is a more defiant spirit here. The word here is a more defiant or a willful violation of God's covenant law. It is saying, we're going to build a golden calf. I mean, that's a clear breaking of the second commandment. This is someone saying, I'm going to commit adultery. I am going to steal this. This is a rebellion against God. This is a saying, I know God's law, but I'm going to break it. Okay? God even forgives that church. Have you ever had a high handed sin against God where you said, I know this is wrong, but I'm going to do it. I know that this is clearly against the commandment of God, but I'm going to do it. God, the Holy God forgives even that of his covenant people. That's amazing. Again, this term carries the idea of rebellion, revolt, contesting ownership. I thought that was interesting, contesting ownership. Because we were saying, God, I know you say this because you own me, but you don't own me and I'm gonna do it. It's defiant. It's high-handed betrayal of the king, the covenant Lord. And God says, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin but Who by no means clear the guilty What? Well, that's the other side of God's nature. Yes. God is a forgiving God, but he's also a righteous judge Who judges and punishes sin and guilt and you can look at this and go how do these come together? How does God clear the guilty? And yet, not clear the guilty, how does he do that? And in a word, it's repentance. God brings us to repentance. He atones, of course, he atones for sin, but he brings us to repentance. In Psalm 7, I read just recently, Psalm 7 verse 11. I mentioned this verse just earlier. We read, God is a righteous judge, a God who feels indignation every day. Now verse 12, if a man does not repent, God will wet his sword. What does it mean? He will sharpen his sword. If a man does not repent, God will start sharpening his sword to use it. So the need for repentance, to turn away from our sins. And when we do, when we come to God and say, God have mercy upon me, I know that I have done all of these things against you. I know I deserve your sword. Forgive, have mercy. He does. And it is a grace of God that he gives you, Christian, that you actually do repent. Look at the mercy of our Lord, that he would give us repentance to turn away from our sins. Even Israel, he is going to forgive them for their sin of the golden calf. He says, visiting the iniquity of the children and their children to the third and the fourth generation, the idea here is that Our sins typically are passed down. The sins of leaders, the sins of parents tend to be the sins of children and followers and nations. We follow our leaders. Unrepentant parents, unrepentant leaders typically influence children and their followers. And that makes us wonder, do we leave a crooked path for those who follow after us? Or do we follow crooked ways? Because he says here, visiting the iniquity, which I said was a crooked path. Well, what path are we leaving for others? Now this, God has just declared who he is to Moses. What's Moses' response to the Lord in the last part, verses eight and nine? And what's our proper response? When God comes and reveals himself to us, I'm not just talking about head knowledge here, I'm talking about when God actually reveals himself to your heart, to your soul. When you really have an encounter with God, what is the response? Because it's never just a get up and yawn. His revelation of himself requires a response. In fact, any real encounter with the word of God requires us to be changed. James, in James chapter one, verse 22, says, but be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. Do you remember at the beginning I said we deceive ourselves? Do you know how you deceive yourself, Christian? by hearing the word, but not doing it. If you get a lot of the word of God read in your mind, and yet you are not living it out and growing in obedience, then you are growing more and more deceived, even as you're spending time hearing God's word and studying God's word, if you're not doing it. But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. Christian, don't deceive yourself into thinking, I'm hearing a lot of the word of God. If your life is not being conformed to the image of Christ, then fear. Say, God, have mercy on me. I need to be a doer of your word. And I need to stop saying, well, I ought to do this. I ought to do this. Do it. Obey God's word. Say, God, give me grace to hear everything you say to me and to make me live it out. To do it. Because God's word should change us. Well, how does it change Moses? What does it do for Moses? In verse 8, we see, first of all, he quickly bows his head to the dirt and he worships God. And brothers and sisters, that is the right response to God's presence. Face in the dirt. Humble ourselves before the Lord. Humble ourselves. For Moses to hear this, he must have said, I am unworthy of all of this grace and this mercy. I am unworthy, Lord. I can't believe you would do this for me. Praise your name. And I love the posture. And the Lord's, at least I've been struck lately, whether the Lord's been striking me of this or not, but I've been thinking a lot about our posture before the Lord, whether it be reading his word or in prayer. I think our posture means more than we think it means. An appropriate posture, I'll tell you, when I'm sitting at my desk and I'm casually praying with my feet propped up on my desk with a cup of coffee, there's not much earnest prayer going on. And sometimes it requires me to get off my chair and onto my knees and to say, God, if you don't do something, nothing's gonna happen of good. And if you don't change this man, this man's not gonna be changed. And this man's not going to have any effect on anybody else for change, Lord. You've got to do something. I'm desperate, Lord. How did people come to Jesus when they had a desperate situation? It wasn't some casual approach. It was desperation. It was submission. I'm at your feet, Lord. I'm yours. You know, I think about an obedient dog that sits at his master's feet and says, this is my master. I love him. I adore him. I think the world of him. That's how we ought to be. submissive at our master's feet, saying, instruct me, change me. And so he bows in worship and prays to God. And then in verse nine, he begins to bring requests to God. And he says, if I've found favor in your eyes, this is what I've wanted. I've wanted your presence. I've wanted your favor. He says, if this is the case, then please, I beg you, Lord, And he asks him for three things here. He says, go in the midst of us. So he's saying, set up tabernacle with us, Lord. We want you in our midst. Pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance. What wonderful prayers that is. He prays, God, give us your presence. Give us your presence. And I'll tell you, church, when we get God's presence, we will be confronted with our sin. And that's why I said, because I know if you come among us, we're stiff-necked people. The closer we draw to the Lord, the more humble we ought to become, the more recognizing our sin. And thus, remember what I said at the beginning, are you self-deceived or self-aware? It's interesting that when we really begin to know the Lord, as the Lord begins to press himself in upon us and reveal himself to us, we begin to also know who we are. And it humbles us. We're confronted with our sins. We recognize we have sin. We have more sin than we recognize we had. And thus, like in 1 John 1, verses 8 through 10, we confess our sins. We don't have pride and deceive ourselves and say, I have no sin. We say, I've got sin. And here it is, Lord. I'm bringing it to you. Forgive me. Cleanse me. But not only does his presence confront us in our sins, but it also conforms us to his likeness. If God will give you his presence, and that is close communion, abiding in Christ, you will be confronted with your sin and your lowliness, that you are nothing, that you are less than nothing. You'll be confronted with that, but you will also begin to be conformed more and more to the image of Jesus Christ. Why I say that is he says, take us for your inheritance. To be God's inheritance, we must begin to be like Him. We are His possession. And His goal is our holiness, for us to be holy as He is holy. I think of again what 1 John says in chapter 2 when it says, the one who abides in Christ will walk as He walked. We begin to be conformed, we begin to be His possession, His inheritance. It's interesting, he gives you, Christian, his Holy Spirit, and that's a down payment of your inheritance, and your inheritance is God. It's a down payment. But he says, you're my inheritance, you belong to me, not to yourself anymore. And that love begins to conform us and transform us, as Paul says to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians chapter five, He says in verse 14, for the love of Christ controls us because we've concluded this, that one has died for all, therefore all have died. And he died for all that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised. Christ's love, the steadfast love of the Lord controls us, begins to control us and say, I am not my own, I belong to God. I am His possession, His inheritance, and my life is now to be conformed to His likeness, which is displayed in the Ten Commandments, which is displayed in this grace and this love and this faithfulness. Let these things be true in me, Lord. You see, when God passes by a person, That person gets a lot more than they bargained for. They not only get God, but they also get a real view of themselves. And God perfectly reveals himself in his son. We think of Matthew 1, verse 27. Jesus said, no one knows the Father except the Son, and to whomever the Son reveals him. You will only know the Father through the Son. because the son has perfectly revealed the father to us because he was the sole mediator. You know, Moses was told to go up on the mountain alone. Jesus went up on the mountain alone. And he didn't go up with tablets in his hands, he went up with a cross on his shoulders. And when he went up there to meet with God, he didn't get God's favor, he got his wrath. He didn't get his presence, a covenant presence of goodness and mercy and love, but rather he was rejected. The father poured out his wrath upon him. This is our mediator. This is the love of God that Jesus would do this. And dying in our place, He came off the cross, went into the tomb, but then came out of the tomb three days later, and what has he done? He has sent the Spirit into our hearts to inscribe laws on our hearts. He didn't come down the mountain with stone tablets, but he brought the Spirit to reside in your heart and to write his law there. This is the precious new covenant that we have. Our mediator has done this for us. Let us love him in return, that he would pour out his life so that we could be brought into the Father, be brought into this perfect communion. Let's thank him for this, let's pray. Our Father, we thank you for your truth, And we thank you so much, Father, that you have revealed yourself in Christ to us, and that, Lord, you do not treat us as our sins deserve when we are in Christ. But Lord, grant us repentance, grant us to turn away from all that is vile and wicked. Show us our hearts, Lord, let us not be deceived. Help us to know your word and to walk in it. recognizing that it is Christ's love for us that controls us now. It is the spirit who lives within us that controls us and causes us to walk in your commandments. Lord, we thank you for this. We thank you for your love that we cannot get to the bottom of. It is too big, too deep, too wide, too great. But Lord, help us to search out these things. and to know this love that surpasses knowledge. We pray this in Christ's name, amen.