you A good morning to you. I'd like to encourage you with a few thoughts from Exodus chapter 24 today, and I hope they'll be helpful for the journey ahead. We live in a culture, our American culture, that prizes efficiency and accomplishment, and loves to see the two things work together. They're interconnected. We want to accomplish things, and we want to accomplish them as efficiently as we possibly can, so there's no waste, and we get a lot of things done. and you come to the end of one year, and you look forward to another year, and a lot of times these time management expert gurus and so forth, they encourage you to sit down and do some evaluation over the last year. What did you accomplish? What could you have done to make that accomplishment more efficient, and get more done, and so on and so forth. Look forward to the next year, and what do you anticipate accomplishing in the year ahead, and how can you accomplish that thing efficiently, etc., etc. It's just so highly prized to accomplish a lot in as short amount of time as possible, as efficiently as possible. But the thing is, God doesn't always work that way, and it's very clear in Exodus 24, in verses 15 and following. Now notice, and get this, have you ever thought about this as you read this passage? It says, Moses went up into the mountain, and a cloud covered the mountain. This is where he's going to go up on the top of the mountain, and God's going to give him the law and all the instructions about building the tabernacle and so on and so forth. He goes up into the mountain, a cloud covers the mountain, and verse 16 says, Now the glory of the Lord rested on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. six days. On the seventh day, the Lord called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud. You get the significance of that? Moses goes up on the top of the mountain and What's he doing for six days? What's he doing? Just kind of hanging out, basking in the glory cloud? There's nothing going on. What about efficiency here? There's more. It says the sight of the glory of the Lord was like a consuming fire on the top of the mountain in the eyes of the children of Israel. So all the rest of the people of Israel are down at the bottom of the mountain, and they're looking up, and they see this fire of a cloud up on top of the mountain, and Moses is in that cloud. He's been there for six days, and now the Lord finally speaks. So verse 18 says, Moses went into the midst of the cloud, and he went up into the mountain, and Moses was on the mountaintop 40 days and 40 nights. Now, as you read the book of Exodus, and you read the next several chapters here in the book of Exodus, ask yourself the question, how long would it have taken for God to give this information to Moses? At best, supposing that Moses had to inscribe it all on rock or something, a few days? But 40 days and 40 nights, and six days before God even speaks to him? This isn't very efficient. Oh, but God is accomplishing his purposes in it. What's he doing all this time? Well, I don't have the answers to all of that, but one thing I do know is what's going to come down the road here very quickly. While Moses is up on the mountaintop, eventually the people are like, where is this Moses? We don't know where he is. Then they end up making the golden calf, and they renege on their promise to obey the Lord and to keep his commandments and all the rest of that. I'm wondering, is part of the purpose of the Lord in being so, quote, inefficient, a means of putting his people to a test? Will they be faithful without the constant pressure and push of Moses' leadership? Will they obey without Moses constantly harping on them to obey? What will they do? What's this all accomplishing in Moses' life, as he just waits on the Lord? I would suggest one of the things it's doing is building in him patience, trust, reliance upon the Lord that he's going to desperately need for the next 40 years, really. Yeah, the Lord's got his purposes in his timetable, and his timetable isn't always ours, and his way of doing things isn't always the American way of doing things, with high efficiency, quote-unquote, and an accomplishment of a great deal in a short period of time. but he does accomplish what he intends to accomplish in his time and in his way, and it's always good, and it is always truly efficient. Let's keep that in mind as we go through our day today. We may find ourselves in a standing in line waiting on something, or in some other way, seemingly wasting our time. What is the Lord wanting to accomplish in my life through this today? Well, our Father and our God, teach us, we pray. Give us patience, and help us to look at things, look at life, and look at the delays of life, the inefficiencies of life, from your perspective, we pray. We ask this in Jesus' name, amen. All right, listen, have a good rest of your day. May the Lord bless you.