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After the preaching of God's
Word, we sing Psalter 265. Beloved congregation of the Lord, what
do you think best describes who God is for his people in Exodus? The Redeemer, the Lawgiver, or
the Homemaker? And of course, a related question
is, which best describes God's role in your life? The Redeemer,
the lawgiver, or the homemaker? We tend to
see Exodus as about God's deliverance and about the giving of God's
law. God saves his people by blood and by power from slavery
in Egypt, from their own guilt, and tells them how to live at
Mount Sinai. And we see the Christian life
similarly. God saves His people through
the blood of Jesus Christ on the cross, and now He tells us,
now it's your turn. Do this and don't do that. This is a deep misunderstanding. not only of Mount Sinai and the
place of the law in the life of the people of God, and of
the Exodus, but also of your life and God's place in it. Because the missing part, the
part to which all these others aim, the redemption and the law-giving,
are all given so that God can dwell in harmony and safety among
His people. The climax of the book of Exodus
is not the ten plagues that destroyed a world superpower and made it
possible for enslaved Israelites to be God's freed people. The
climax is not the Red Sea where God drowns the obstinate Pharaoh
and his armies. The climax is not even the giving
of the Ten Commandments and the law on the top of Mount Sinai.
All of these things are means to an end. They're steps along
the way. The goal to which all of them
aim, the destination of Exodus and the destination of the Christian
life and the life of the church, is God the homemaker who lives
with and in His people. God whose presence is our light
and our life, our shade at our right hand, our guide, our keeper,
the author and finisher of our faith, who is leading us to the
promised land on the new earth. Compare it to a marriage. The
wedding's not the end goal. The big deal is not the signing
of the license and the vows you make and the banquet and then
the out-of-town guest, because all of that stuff's done in a
day. No, the big deal is that the wedding is the doorway to
life together, a life of love and intimacy and sharing of everything,
everything you have and are. And God has this goal too. That's
the purpose of His covenant. He establishes and advances His
covenant and works in His people with the goal of being the homemaker
in your entire life and everywhere you go and wherever you are in
the joyful seasons of life and in the difficult seasons of life.
Let's explore it with this theme, the Lord's presence dwelling
with his people. We see the glorious wonder of
his closer presence, the overwhelming majesty of his presence, and
the complete sufficiency of his presence. So the Lord's presence
dwelling among his people, first then the glorious wonder of his
closer presence. This whole text is about two
things. It's mentioned in every verse. the cloud of God's glorious
presence, filling the tabernacle and coming to dwell there. The cloud is mentioned five times
in each verse, and the dwelling is also mentioned four times,
but we don't notice it because we just read the word tabernacle
and we think that's the technical word for the tent. But in the
Hebrew, the word tabernacle means dwelling place, home, residence. It is the dwelling place of meeting,
that's what the Hebrews heard, where God meets with his people. The God of glory is accomplishing
what all his redemptive plans and acts aim for, to bring his
glory so close that that glory is at home among his people. Now that is a big deal for three
reasons. First of all, God in his glory
coming home to his people is important because that is salvation. Salvation is not just what you're
saved from, bondage, the guilt of sin. But far more importantly,
it's what you're saved to. Living with God, that is the
God of glory, making his home with you. What a beautiful picture
that is. Israel has come such a long way
geographically and spiritually. They came from bondage, they
came from oppression, they came from slavery, they came helpless. They came as sinners because
they deserve the 10 plagues every bit as much as the Egyptians.
And God made a difference after several plagues where there was
none by nature. They were sinners deserving God's
wrath on Passover night when the angel of destruction came,
but God supplied the body and blood of the Lamb to smear over
their doors and for them to eat and drink. And they were stuck when the
pursuing Pharaoh chased them, but God opened a way where no
one else could have right through the sea. They needed now also
the thunder and the majesty and the liberation of the law of
God, and so he reveals himself as lawgiver too. But none of
that is what God is ultimately after. The point of all of this,
the redemption to set them free, the law to teach them how to
live harmoniously, all of that is so that God's glory would
come and live among his people. What a moment this is in Exodus.
For the first time since the Garden of Eden, when God walked
with Adam and Eve twice a day before the fall, God now dwells
in visible form among his people. His glory has come home. This is the most profound, intimate,
and wonderful moment in the entire book of Exodus. In Exodus 24,
some of Israel's elders could go partway up the mountain and
eat and drink with God, and they could just see the feet of someone
on the throne. But now God comes down from the
mountain to live with them. and joins them where they live
so that their whole life, their whole camp, their whole congregation
is organized around the presence and dwelling of the Lord. They
are the people of His choice. They are the people of His possession.
They are the people of His delight. God's glory, come home. This
is the advent of His glory among His people. This is Emmanuel,
God with us. Now they still have a lot to
learn to become the kingdom of priests that God wants them to
be. They still have a lot of growing to do in how they see
each other, but they can learn all these things because God's
glory lives among them in tangible, visible form. And this is why
Moses, in the oldest psalm of the Bible that we just sang,
Psalm 90, calls God this, God is our eternal home. Child of
God, you realize that this is how God sees you, as His home. In saving you from
your sins from death, God is doing more than saving you from.
He defeats your death and redeems you from your sins so that His
glory can come home to the place He created for it to live. Your
heart and your daily life and your congregation. The tabernacle
was the mobile temple, and even the temple itself was temporary.
1 Corinthians says this to the people of God, do you not know
that you are the temple of the living God? And that's spoken
not to individuals but to the congregation of the Lord. The
living God dwells. God's glory coming home to be
in you and with you. Before you think of anything
else, just stop for a moment and let that sink in. The God
of glory come home to you. You see that sometimes a couple
is just married and they're so happy together and he's not going
home for supper. He's going home to the woman
who is his home. And God sees His people like
that. His glory comes home. Jesus said it this way, if any
man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love
him, and we will make our home with him. That's why this is
a very big deal. But there's another reason it's
a big deal. You could say, in a sense, God's glory has come
back home. This is amazing grace. Because
right before this in the book of Exodus, Israel had promised
in chapter 24 to be obedient and to do all the things that
the Lord had said. And then in Exodus chapter 31 and 32, they
had committed spiritual adultery by making a golden calf, bowing
down to it and saying, this is the God who brought you out of
Egypt. And Aaron the high priest had led them in this insanity
and this blasphemy. And they committed liturgical
dance and idolatry, and if you read the passage, as I just rechecked
it, they were dancing naked, there was sexual sin, there was
all kinds of perversion happening because that's what pagan worship
did. All of that. Spiritual adultery on their honeymoon,
in the presence of their bridegroom, to his great indignation and
grief. You would say, humanly speaking,
a marriage like that is done. But that's not the end of the
story. God doesn't say, I don't need a congregation like that,
I am out of here, because he was actually testing Moses. Moses,
are you as committed to this congregation as I am? Moses,
let me destroy them and you and I will start over. And Moses
says, no, not me, these people. It took some doing, because Israel
wouldn't even be here unless God had supplied a mediator,
Moses, to intercede. It wasn't a quick, well, yeah,
forgive us our sins, amen. It was tense. Because God said
to Moses, I can't go with you. I can't live among people like
this. You can just go off to the promised
land. And Moses says, Lord, I'd rather live in the desert with
your presence than in the promised land without it. Without your
presence, there's no point to us being a congregation. Remember,
Lord, your great name. Without your presence, we have
nothing. And God, because that's why it
was set up that way, that the mediator and the role of the
mediator in the presence of God would become clear. Because God
had every intention of staying faithful to his people who had
just cheated on him. God hears that intercession and
forgives them and says, I will go with you. My presence shall
carry you from here and I will give you rest. Amazing grace. With New Testament eyes, it took
Christ dying on the cross to satisfy the righteous wrath of
God. It took Christ saying it is finished before God could
forgive sin without giving up on His holiness and live with
and in sinners. God who laid on Him the iniquity
of His wandering people who are so faithless they can't even
be faithful on their honeymoon to the only perfect bridegroom
God has ever sent into this world. Christ who prays, Father, forgive
them. Father, I will that they come
live with me to see my glory, the glory I had with you from
before the foundation of the world. That's what I want for
them. I want my glory to come home to them. And there was Israel having been
deeply humbled at Mount Sinai after all of this. This humbling
lesson, they needed it. Their eyes are opened for their
own sinfulness and the awful consequences of sin. They need
to face God's holiness now there in the camp, not just as a reality
in the heavens and not just as a reality on Mount Sinai, but
a force on earth right where they live. They need to realize
that their standing before the Lord as a congregation is a matter
of grace, and grace alone, and amazing grace. Have you ever realized what a
miracle it is to have a godly intercessor for you when you
are at your worst, your most foolish, and your most broken?
Ralph Davis tells the story of when he was a young boy, someone
had been picking on him. And so being a pastor's son,
he says he knew a lot of theological vocabulary, he says, and he abused
it all to this boy. And this boy went home and told
his parents. When his parents came home, his dad administered
the justice on his behind. And his mother came in afterwards,
and she got on her knees at his bed and interceded at length
and with tears. My son wouldn't become another
pastor's son who wanders, but that God would have mercy on
my boy. And you could hear the emotion
in the voice of this man 50 years later when he remembered the
prayers of his mother. An intercessor. Amazing grace. And people of God, you know how
God lives among you. It's because of the cross and
the intercession of the one who ever lives to make intercession
for his people, who looks at his people in all their need
and even in their shame at the foot of Mount Sinai and says,
and yet they are mine. The Savior who always gets what
he asks for when he intercedes for someone. Amazing grace, child
of God. This is who's praying for you.
This is who's praying for our congregation, the one who always
gets what he asks. This is how a holy God can send
his glory to be at home with you and you not be consumed and
it be safe and hopeful for you to recognize this reality. Why
is God still with you after all your sins and unfaithfulness
to him? Why is God still gladly with you, knowing all your sins
that are still to come? Because he has made it in Christ
safe for him to live with you and for him to restore you. But third, God's glory coming
home to be among Israel is a big deal because it's deeply experiential.
That's the whole point of the tabernacle. And I don't have
time to work it out in detail, but the tabernacle is Mount Sinai
come down to them to travel with them. Because the same Hebrew
words are used of both. God's glory descended and dwelt
on Mount Sinai, it says in Exodus 19. And now that same glory descends
and dwells in the tabernacle, which is called the tabernacle
of the congregation, which means the gathering of God's people,
the tent of the meeting of the glory and presence of God. The tent of God's dwelling continues
the Mount Sinai experience for them throughout the wilderness.
Even the law given on Mount Sinai lives among them in the tabernacle,
in the Ark of the Covenant. They didn't just need the law
at Mount Sinai, they needed God's dwelling among them. Sinai is
not just remembered but relived and recreated and re-enacted
and re-experienced. The altar of the burnt offering
was lit by the fire of Sinai as well, a lasting testimony
to the forgiveness of sin found with the Lord for His people.
God now lives with His people and it can be experienced in
the tabernacle when they gather for worship. We often think of God as the
lawgiver in Mount Sinai or only as the lawgiver, and we missed
the point. The lawgiver and the presence and glory of the homemaker
are the same God. The tabernacle was every bit
as much a gift as the law, and they came together. We should
always think of them as inseparable. God's revelation and God's presence,
God's holiness and God saying, I've come to put my glory at
home among my people. That's what it's about. This
is what God delights to do. This is why the church of the
Lord exists in the world. This is reason to get up in the
morning, and this is a reason to serve the God of glory. Even when the church still has
to go through the wilderness before they cross the Jordan
into the promised land. And you should notice here an
almost urgent hastiness about the Lord coming home with His
glorious presence. Because verse 33 tells us, and
I read a bit of that, putting all the bits and pieces together
of the building, Verse 33, Moses finishes the work and immediately,
verse 34, the glory cloud comes rushing down from Mount Sinai
and it comes down into the dwelling place of meeting which was set
right in the middle of the camp and all the tribes were encamped
in a circle around it. Heaven came down and the glory of God
filled the camp. It's almost as if God just can't
wait to come closer and live with His people. That's why we
can sing things like this in the Psalms, still closer to thy
side I press for near thee all as well. But God also is the
one saying, I come down closer, still closer to you, for there
my glory has come home. A match made in heaven, but lived
on earth. When I married Lisette a few
weeks before the wedding, I created a North American email for her
because we were getting on the plane right after our honeymoon.
And I created an email with the last name Mordyke. And I sent
it to the family saying, this is the new email. And my mother-in-law
said to me, hold on, she's not a Mordechai yet. And she said,
you just can't wait to get married, can you? An impatient urgency. And this
is how the Lord on Mount Sinai comes to dwell among his people.
This is how he sees you, believer in Jesus, even when you're at
your worst. He is eager for you to experience
life with him and for you to know what it is to have him as
your God and for you to be one of his people. This is God's
desire. And God will not rest until He
does everything to pursue you and fulfill that desire. He's
not finished yet. He delights to make His glory
come to be at home with you and in you. Now that is glorious. But it's also awe-inspiring,
and it should be overwhelming in a good way. And to make sure
they see this, verse 35 tells us about the overwhelming majesty
of the Lord's presence. The cloud of God's glory covers
the dwelling place of meeting. Even Moses can't enter it when
the glory is lit up and blazing like that. Moses and all Israel
are in a healthy way overwhelmed with the majesty of God. Think
of it. Moses had seen more come closer
to the glory of God than any other man alive in the entire
Old Testament. He trembled at the burning bush.
He held the staff of God in his hand and announced each of the
ten plagues. He saw the glory of God in the Passover. He saw
the Red Sea part in front of him. He saw the glory of God
descend on Mount Sinai. In fact, Hebrews 12 tells us
Moses was terrified. Moses was shaking like a leaf.
And Moses got to go higher in Mount Sinai and closest to the
glory cloud of God's presence. And even this Moses can't endure
the majesty of the glory of God as it fills his dwelling place
among his people. And the cloud conceals as much
as it reveals. What's the point of all this?
I think Calvin says it best when he says, to fill their hearts
with awe. If even Moses can't enter the
tabernacle when the cloud fills it with glory, how great God
must be. Yes, God comes to make His home
among His people and to be the home of His people, but He remains
God. You don't just treat Him like
everybody else. You come closer to Him at His invitation and
according to His commands, you must come in worship. that is
awe at His glory and submission to His words. He is God. And where God's glory is your
focus, your home, and your delight, His holiness will be a disruptive,
disturbing, and transforming presence in you. Now, if you
don't want this, you don't know God as He is, and you don't know
your own place either. Learn then how the glory of God
is best received and most at home in your life when you are
awed by His incomparable glory and majesty and feel small in
His glorious presence, His one-of-a-kind holiness. This requires our awe. And when you're overwhelmed with
the awesomeness of God being God, that's when you're most
at home with Him. And when you're at home with
Him, you will worship Him the most reverently and yet fervently and joyfully
and hopefully, because if God is here, it's going to be all
right. And where God is central, life
must happen. It's crucial that we worship
God and think of God this way. Not too long ago, one of my children
came home and said, Someone played a worship song from Casting Crowns.
What do you think? So I said, well, show me the
lyrics. So we looked it up. Apparently this is a very popular
song. God is not even mentioned by name once. Every stanza is
all about the worshiper. You've been through so much,
and now you can decide to turn your life around, and you can
leave the shadows behind, and it's time for you to fix yourself.
And the chorus kind of vaguely hints at God when it says something
like, love and mercy are waiting to embrace you. And the rest
is all about the worshiper, and God has been reduced to he who
must not be named. a sad commentary on the state
of modern Christianity in North America, when we create a new
genre and call it worship music, as if the church has never worshipped
before, and then consider songs like this worship, when God is
He who must not be named. So person-centered, not God-centered. And people sing it and it makes
them feel so good about themselves, and they completely miss the
point that it's Ichabod, the glory has departed. When it's
mostly about the worshipper, the God who is to be worshipped
gets forgotten. And you think you can tame God
and put him on your leash. God is God. And worship that recognizes God
as God requires being absorbed with His glory. Young people,
therefore, don't trade in the meat and potatoes of the Psalms
for the cotton candy of modernity that can give you a buzz but
cannot nourish and sustain you. You need songs like this, Psalm
98. He has brought salvation. He has made it known. And before
the nations is His justice shown. Tremble, O earth, at the presence
of the Lord. The God of glory thunders and
in his temple the only thing people cry out is glory, glory,
glory to God. Our worship must radiate the
majesty of God and react to the majesty of God. And our experience
and our life must adjust to it and become compatible with the
glory of God. And it's when you're most God-centered,
that you grow spiritually the most and that your obedience
flourishes. And that was also missing in this song, not a word
about sin, not a word about repentance, and not a word about obedience.
It's all about you. There's a second reason why God
makes his glory come near in an overwhelming, majestic way
in the tabernacle. A God this glorious among his
people has to restrain his glory. He has to accommodate his glory
to your weakness and creatureliness. Fathers, you know I'm sure that
one of the things that little boys need when it's bedtime is
to wrestle with dad. Now, when you wrestle with your
little boys, you hold back your strength. You don't want to hurt
them. You dial back your strength just
enough so that they can get the sense that they can compete with
you and be near you and enjoy This, God has to dial back his
glory so that the priest can enter the tabernacle, so that
Moses can enter, that the people can worship. God restrains the
fullness of his glory, at least in this tabernacle of dwelling.
But the time would come. when the greater than Moses would
be sent, who doesn't just stand close to the glory of God. He
is the glory of God, John 1, 14. The word became flesh and
tabernacled among us, and we beheld his glory. The glory is
of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. The angels already chanted it
at his birth. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace,
goodwill towards men. What a combination, but that's
what happens when God wants his glory to come at home among his
people. Glory to God in the highest and therefore on earth peace.
Goodwill toward men. Paul could cry to the Corinthians,
God has shined in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge
of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. No wonder his
disciples also fell at his feet in worship and awe. And yet how
much of the time on earth his glory was dialed back and dialed
down and veiled by his humanity, the lowly Jesus, the servant,
the suffering servant, there we see the glory of God. When
Jesus puts his hand on someone's shoulder or touches the carrying
pallet of a dead boy to give him back to his widowed mother,
when he raises the dead and makes the blind to see and finds Zacchaeus
in a sycamore tree and comes with his glory and grace to the
chief of sinners, That's the glory of God accommodated to
and dialed down to us beautifully. But God didn't just leave Jesus
lowly and clothed with our weakness. He raised Him from the dead and
seated Him in glory on the throne of God where the people of God
still fall on their faces before Him and sing of Him, unto Him
who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood. Be
glory forever. Now why does all this majesty
mediated through Jesus Christ become so important? Because
this does two things to you when you get it, when you experience
it. It makes you afraid to sin and
yet eager to draw near to God and to go to Him first as the
one who wants to help you with your sin. It makes you tremble
and run. Not away from God, but away from
sin and towards Him. This is the fear of the Lord
that is the beginning of wisdom and of godly choices in your
daily life and of harmony in your life. This is the presence
of God that is the secret of real spiritual growth. The glory of God when it is your
food and your drink and your delight that does something to
you. And yet sometimes in revival
times, God turns loose His glory more fully, and His people become
unusually filled with God. One pastor was heard to cry out
to God in prayer during revival times, Lord, restrain Your hand,
Your servant is only clay and cannot contain such glory. People
become unable to pray for hours and to stay up all night praising
God and hearing His Word and not needing sleep, and fellowshipping
and delighting in God. Let us pray then that God would
turn loose more of His glory here among us. It can be so. That is the cure to all that
can trouble. a heart and a church, that God
would turn loose His glory and that everything else would fit
into its proper place as a minuscule thing before the God of glory
and grace who dwells among His people. To know God more fully,
to draw near to Him more closely, to follow Him more, to be more
at home with the glory of God. Oh God, turn loose that glory
here. And it is as we are a people
who are filled with the glory of God that we live like His
people all the more. And with such a glorious God
living with His people, we see in our last point the complete
sufficiency of His presence. Israel's leaving Sinai. The mountain's
staying belied because the mountain isn't the promised land. And
the law's important, but it doesn't bring you to the promised land.
The portable Sinai, the dwelling place of God will go with them.
Their whole pilgrimage, their whole camp life is built around
the presence of God. They still have to go through
the desert. They still have to learn to be holy just as God
is holy. They have to face enemies. They have to face disappointments.
They have to face temptations. And they will face many an uproar
and upheaval in the congregation of the Lord. They must learn
to represent God in a sea of paganism and idolatry and immorality. And sometimes they have to learn
it the hard way, the long way, and the wrong way, but they can
learn it because the God of glory dwells among his people and has
sent his glory home to be there. But what keeps them going in
their pilgrimage? Verses 36 to 38. Three things. First, God
guides them by his providence. Moses didn't send scouts to find
the best way to journey. They don't find a camping spot
and invite God. He finds it and stops there and
settles them. God is the sovereign one. He's
not at their beck and call, but they are at His beck and call.
They obey Him. They are His people, and He is
their God. They are His to command, and they look to Him for guidance.
They keep an eye on the cloud of God's glorious presence, and
He will bring them into their inheritance that way in His time
and way. He is the hope and the security
and the confidence of His people. What a relief that is. You don't
have to lay awake all night. You don't have to plan and agonize
and schedule your life or the well-being of your congregation
as if God is not there. We can plan, pray, purpose, dream,
hope, but God unfolds the seasons and troubles and sorrows and
joys of our lives according to his purposes. You are not in
charge of your life. All that has come upon you, and
that could come upon you, even when it comes in the midst of
sin and brokenness, is God teaching you something. Even when you
don't understand and it makes no sense to you, and you never
would have chosen it yourself, God is guiding your life. That's His right as God. And
His glorious presence makes His guiding hand a relief. And a
blessing that you don't have to walk in God's shoes, they're
way too big for you, but He's walking in them right next to
you. And second, this guidance is
expressed by God's law. It's no accident that seven times
leading up to our text, we read these words, as the Lord commanded,
all the Lord commanded. That's what Moses did. God put
His law at the center of life in the Ark of the Covenant called
the Ark of His Presence in other places. There are people marked
by obedience because the presence of the Lord should lead to obedience.
It's always the key to enjoying God's presence. It isn't about you, it's about
God. And this isn't legalism, this
is New Testament Christianity. Acts 5 verse 32 describes the
Holy Spirit like this, given to those who obey God. Jesus
said in John 14, if you love me, you will keep my commandments,
and in this way, you will remain in the enjoyment of my love,
and my Father and I will make our home with you. The fuller
your obedience, the fuller your enjoyment of God is God. Sometimes
as pastor, people come to you and they say, Pastor, I'm stuck.
I'm stuck in my Christian life. The hope and the joy and the
pleasure have been sucked right out of it. I'm not growing. I know the Lord
is there, but we are not as close as we once were and as we could
be. What is wrong? Well, I ask you, are you obeying
God? Or are you sloppy and careless
about obedience and you think as long as I say, forgive me
my sins now and then, no real effort need be put forward into
obeying God and growing in obedience? Do you really repent of disobedience? Or do you just wave it away and
say, well, nobody's perfect and everybody's doing it? No, to
sin is to fall short of the glory of God. When you care about the
glory of God, that is always great loss, and the glory can
only return in full force and full enjoyment when you recognize
God's right to be God and show it by obeying Him. His presence means you can run
to Him in repentance, confessing your sin, and the altar that
stands at the front of the dwelling place of God shows His atonement
has been made and can be applied to you. You want to grow. Work on your obedience in the
presence of the Lord. Now, that might not sound as
exciting as being pumped up and wound up by something or someone
else, but it is actually exciting. Because the glory of God is revealed
in your daily life when you obey Him and are thankful, and that
makes the glory of God a pleasure to be around, rather than a disturber
of your peace. But thank God for the disturbance
of your peace, because that's proof not that God has left you,
but that God is with you. Because when you're upset with
someone and you're living under the same roof, it's hard to live
under the same roof, and that's proof that you're both there. The disturbance of your peace
that comes at your sin and disobedience is there as proof that God is
there, not that He's absent, and that He desires your restoration
when you would recognize and honor the glory of His redemption
and of His holiness and run back to God in repentance and in diligence
and in love. Because law really is just God
telling you practically what love looks like. And third, God will be their
provider. His glory cloud, His dwelling place will be with them
as He provides for them. They'll have ups and downs, they'll
have days and nights, and God's glory will be uniquely reflected
in both. During the day it shades them
from the scorching heat of what Moses called that great and terrible
wilderness, and during the night it lights up the darkness when
all other lights go out. God's glory is their nightlight
that shines and that reminds them in the darkness, God is
still with me and he gives me his presence as his light. Now, what a blessing to have
such a God as the homemaker in your life. Where God's people
go, there you find God going. His redemptive presence, His
glory come home in the cloud is mobile. It goes where you
go, child of God. No distance is too far, no darkness
is too intense, no heat of trial too overwhelming for God. It
accompanies you in the classroom. It goes before you on the job
site and in the office. It sits at your kitchen table.
It's with you in the operating room in the hospital. It's with
you at the funeral home and at the graveside. It's at the empty
kitchen table. It is there amid all the troubles
and turmoils. All that can happen in the wilderness
is the congregation of the Lord travels towards the promised
land. It is right there. What a cloud to live your life
under. You could say Exodus opened with
a different cloud. They were living in darkness
and in the shadows of enslavement, of grief, as their babies were
taken in genocide, of the whips of the taskmasters and of a hopeless
future. They were under a cloud, even
if the word wasn't used there, but now they're under a different
cloud. This time, the cloud of God's
glory, the signal of His presence, His redemption, His holiness,
and His grace. He has destroyed their enemies.
He has delivered His people by the blood of the Lamb and by
His power. He's given them His law, and He's come in the fullness
of His glory to make His home among them as the indwelling
God. And he still does these things
in the congregation of the Lord and in the hearts and homes and
lives of his people. Do you see what you're missing?
If you don't seek or enjoy God like this, if you've never learned
to see God as your home, do you see you're missing everything? fall on your knees and cry out,
oh God invade my life with this glory to send that glory to be
at home in me through the grace of Jesus Christ to disturb and
evict all the sins that don't belong there and to produce in
me the holiness that the presence of the Lord both requires and
provides. But for all his believing people,
God says, my glory is with you to stay. It's come to make its
home with you in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Why? Then, let every day be cloudy
like this. Amen.
The Lord's Presence Dwelling With His People
1, The Glorious Wonder Of His Closer Presence
2, The Overwhelming Majesty Of His Presence ( As Creature, As OT Mediator, Enables Worship And Submission)
3, The Complete Sufficiency Of His Presence
| Sermon ID | 1117242322257125 |
| Duration | 42:38 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday - PM |
| Bible Text | Exodus 40:17-38; Revelation 21:1-8 |
| Language | English |
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