This morning our text is from Exodus chapter 14. We'll read verses 10 through the end of the chapter, 10 through 31. This passage comes right at the, I think, one of the most climactic scenes in the entire Bible. So we're going to read it. without all of the context of Exodus that comes before it. We kind of just have to jump in. So it's a little bit like fast-forwarding through like a Western movie, going straight to the showdown at the end. And so it'll be good, but we need to just briefly get some context. So I'm gonna try to sum up 13 chapters here in about 90 seconds. So what you need to know about Exodus is that it's real history. It really happened. But God orchestrated this history in such a way that it parallels and gives insight into the Christian life. Every Christian, there's some parallels from Exodus to us. So for example, the Jews had been slaves in Egypt for 430 years at this point, which means that everyone in Exodus 14 had been born into slavery, just like all of us were born into slavery to sin. The Egyptians play the role of the supernatural force that can't be defeated by mortal efforts. And so God performs 10 miraculous plagues and that culminates in the death sweeping through Egypt. Kills all the firstborns in every house unless the house was marked by the blood of a perfect lamb. And that points us very clearly to Jesus. We're covered with the blood of Jesus, so we have hope. So one really important piece of this as we kind of go through Exodus 14 today and we look through, I look forward to the mission conference, is that Egypt and sin are kind of parallel to each other. Not modern-day Egypt, I'm sure it's lovely, but in Exodus 14, when we talk about Egypt, we're talking about sin and its dominion over us. So Exodus 14, it opens with the Jewish slaves caught between the Red Sea. It's impassable. So they have the Red Sea on one hand, or I guess it would be behind them, and in front of them is the greatest military power on earth at the time. So that's the context we're entering into in Exodus chapter 14 verse 10. It says, People of Israel cried out to the Lord. They said to Moses, Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us in bringing us out of Egypt? Is not this what we said to you in Egypt? Leave us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians. For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness. And Moses said to the people, fear not, stand firm and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today. For the Egyptians, whom you see today, you shall never see again. The Lord will fight for you and you only have to be silent. The Lord said to Moses, why do you cry to me? Tell these people of Israel to go forward, lift up your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it that the people of Israel may go through the sea on dry ground. And I will harden the hearts of the Egyptians so that they shall go in after them. And I will get glory over Pharaoh and all his host, his chariots and his horsemen. And the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord when I have gotten glory over Pharaoh, his chariots and his horsemen. Then the angel of God who was going before the host of Israel moved and went before them, and the pillar of the cloud moved from before them and stood behind them, coming between the host of Egypt and the host of Israel. And there was cloud and the darkness, and it lit up the night without one coming near and the other all night. Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. And the people of Israel went into the midst of the sea on dry ground, the waters being a wall to them on their right hand and on their left. The Egyptians pursued and went in after them into the middle of the sea, all Pharaoh's horses, his chariots, and his horsemen. And in the morning watched the Lord in a pillar of fire and of cloud looked down on the Egyptian forces and threw the Egyptian forces into a panic, clogging their chariot wheels so that they drove heavily. And the Egyptians said, let us flee from before Israel for the Lord fights for them against the Egyptians. Then the Lord said to Moses, stretch out your hand over the sea that the waters may come back upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots and upon their horsemen. So Moses stretched out his hand over the sea and the sea returned to its normal course when the morning appeared and the Egyptians fled into it. The Lord threw the Egyptians into the midst of the sea. The waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen and all the hosts of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea. Not one of them remained. But the people of Israel walked on dry ground through the sea, the waters being a wall to them on their right hand and on their left. Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore. Israel saw the great power that the Lord used against the Egyptians, so the people feared the Lord, and they believed in the Lord and in His servant Moses. Let's respond now. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for your word. We thank you for how you've orchestrated history for your glory. Lord, I pray that this wouldn't be a time for us to hear about people from a long time ago. not merely a history lesson, but Your Spirit would convict us and encourage us. We would see Your hand in our lives through this passage of Scripture. I pray that You'd be glorified now in everything we think and everything we say and everything we do. I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. So in preparation for the mission conference, how it works, is that all the pastors were asked to preach on a particular theme. So Pastor D has been thinking through this mission conference for several months, and he has themes that he thought would direct us in worship, point us, the congregation. So we were assigned a theme to preach on, and mine is this. God's love for us requires our entire life. God's love for us requires our entire life. So our three points, you'll see it in your bulletin, three points come from that. God's people can't stay in Egypt. That's the first one. The second point is that everything God's people have is for God's glory. And the third point is that God's people are walking a well-worn path. So you'll notice those first two points, God's people can't stay in Egypt and everything we have is for God's glory. That reminds us why it's so hard for us to give our entire life to Christ. We long for Egypt and we have to give it all to the Lord. And that last question is, well, if it's so hard, if it's so hard for us to give our entire life to Christ, how are we going to do it? How are we going to make that happen? That's kind of the breakdown for us this morning. Alright, so first point, why is it so hard for us to give our entire life to God's love? It's because we have to leave Egypt, even though sometimes we don't want to. We have to leave Egypt. So when we read this, we know this battle is coming. The Jewish slaves, the mighty Egyptians, there's about to be a showdown. And I think it rubs us the wrong way. In verse 11, when the Jews cry out and they say, is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you've taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done bringing us out of Egypt? Is not this what we said to you in Egypt, leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians. For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness. And when we hear that, I think we, get very Scottish, and we want to be like William Wallace in Braveheart. He says, they may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom. And we just say, come on, Jews, like, let's go, right? It's time to fight. And that gets to us. But I think it'd be more helpful for us to understand why the Jewish people thought that returning to slavery in Egypt would have been better than dying in the wilderness. And that'll help us understand our own trepidation to leave our sin behind us. So first and foremost, these people had been in Egypt for 430 years. Generations of Jews had grown up in Egypt. It was familiar. It was all they knew. They had become relatively comfortable there. And so in this jolt of panic, they reverted to what they had always known. They were seeking out their comfort blanket, as it were. And what does that have to do with us? We kind of already mentioned this. All of us were born in Egypt. All of us were born into sin. It's the natural state of our heart, and we'll continue to sin until an outside force, and we know that's the Holy Spirit, gives us a new heart, and that new heart hates sin and loves God. But sometimes we get that little jolt, that little bit of adversity that makes us revert to our natural response. and we're skittish. It doesn't take much for us to say, maybe it would be better for me to go back to Egypt. Just like the Jewish people had seen God work miracles, and then they forgot them when the army bared down on them. So I'll use myself as an example, because it's a negative example, and I'm very familiar with my sin. So I wasn't saved until my freshman year in college. So I played hockey in high school, which means that as an unsaved teenager, my speech was molded by a locker room full of young men with very little adult supervision. I'll just leave it like that. So when I was saved in college, one of the first fruits of my new heart was a change in my vocabulary, my everyday life. It was noticeable, right off the bat. But there was something about putting my skates on, going to play in the lowest level of rec league hockey, it didn't matter at all, that made my heart think, you know, maybe it would be good for me to go back and talk like I used to so I'm not left out. Or talk like I used to because obviously if somebody talks trash to me, I have to respond. The Lord gradually changed that in me, but there are still times when old Travis comes up, and I hear that little voice saying, wouldn't it be nice to go back to how it used to be instead of using all of that spiritual energy trying to control your tongue? Wouldn't it be nice to use those words again? And we're all like that. We all have this memory of Egypt, this memory of the fleeting pleasure of sin that gets stirred up in us from time to time. and we forget about the oppression and the slavery that came with it. So it might be looking at your finances, and now that you're saved, you look back and you think, man, I was a lot more comfortable when I didn't have to give sacrificially to the poor. Maybe it would be better if I just went back to that a little bit. Or maybe you remember how you could manipulate others to get what you want, and that's not been the case in your life for years. But today there's something you really want and you feel that urge, that pull to do whatever it takes to get it. Or maybe someone has searched you, they've hurt you, and you know something about them that would be the nuclear option, right? You could humiliate them and get them back, and that's a tug on your heart to go back to Egypt, to be a slave again, and to get them back. We all have these things that long for parts of our old self. And part of that is our own faulty expectations. So the Jews had just seen their God just completely dismantle the gods of Egypt. So if you go through the 10 plagues, it's really interesting. We don't have time to go through it, but they kind of match up with the God of the Egyptians. And so it's like the God of Israel is saying, You think this God is good. Well, let me show you what true power looks like. So he attacks it. So the God of Israel just dismantled the God of Egypt. And so the Jews were expecting to just stroll. Just stroll away. God's won. Everything's going to be easy. We'll just walk out of Egypt into a nice life. And so when the strongest military in the world begins to bear down on them, they begin to wonder, maybe we've bitten off more than we can chew here. And now I understand that we would all say, like, I know being a Christian doesn't make my life easy. We would all agree to that. We would all intellectually assent to that. But I think while we would say, Being a Christian doesn't make our life easy. There are times when we say, I thought being a Christian would make my life easier than it is right now. When our heart is changed and we begin to leave our sin behind and we see the ugliness and the destructiveness of our sin and begin to hate it and run from it, we think, there might be a few light showers on this sea as we sail away from our sin. And there might be some choppy waters, but it won't be that bad. It won't be as bad as what I've left behind. So when adversity hits, we're quick to think, you know, maybe slavery wasn't actually that bad. One of my old professors, this quote is in your bulletin. His name is John Currid. He said this. He said, isn't the reality that God does not promise his people calm seas, but only that they will reach port safely. He does not promise us a wealthy, prosperous, easy, comfortable pilgrimage. He only gives his word that we shall arrive safely. God's love requires our entire life. And that's hard because sometimes we miss Egypt. Our second point is that everything, everything that God's people have is for God's glory. Exodus 14, we read the Jews complaining. That's not the only time they complain in these couple verses in Exodus. And a few chapters later, they'll complain about how, you know, we don't have any food. We're gonna die in hunger. We should have stayed in Egypt. We don't have anything to drink. We should have stayed in Egypt. We're gonna die. So hunger and thirst drive them to say, it would be better for us to go back to Egypt. If we were to put this in a movie, I'm sure there's several movies you've been made, but what you would think about escaped slaves, right? They're running away. They just escaped slavery. It's awful. And they say, maybe we should go back because we're hungry. You're probably going to imagine like malnourished faces, them wandering aimlessly through the desert. It's completely barren, just windswept, nothing there. But if he were actually there, that wouldn't have been the case at all. So back in chapter 12, we read that the Egyptians, this was right after the spirit of death passed through Egypt. The Egyptians were so ready for the Jewish people to leave their land, they were just handing stuff out to them. They were saying, take my silver and my gold jewelry, my clothes, my livestock, just get out of here. And the text says that the people of God plundered the Egyptians. That's like war language. It's like the Jews had marched into Egypt and captured it and taken their spoils. So it wouldn't have been silent desolation and hunger out in the wilderness. You would hear cows mooing, jewelry jangling, and there's just massive people traveling across the wilderness. And yet still they complained. This plundering, this abundance that they had, shows us that every good thing that the Jews had, every good thing that we have, has been given to us so that we might glorify the Lord with it. Every good thing we have in our life is under control of the God that we serve. This rubs us the wrong way, I think, on a couple of levels. Primarily, we like to think that we've earned everything that we have. We don't like to think that it is only God's grace because it takes some of the credit from us. It also shows us our idols. So if we have something and we're not using it for God's glory, that's an idol. That's not good. But largely, we agree with this. As long as we don't get too close to the prosperity gospel, it's easy for us to say, all these good things that I have, yeah, I'm gonna use them to glorify God. My new car, my good-paying job, my lovely spouse, my straight-A student, my new phone, my fancy shoes, whatever it is, all this good stuff that I have, it's sure to show how good God is. That's easy. What's harder, I think, It's that even our bad stuff, even our failures, even our shortcomings, those belong to God as well. So think about how differently the story would be for us if the Jewish people didn't have any flaws. If they were actually like lean, mean fighting machines that just decimated everyone they came across. People that were known for their skill in battle and their faithfulness and their honor off the battlefield. They all just look like superheroes. Just imagine that. And so they just got tired of being slaves one day and they said, we're stronger than you. So they just beat Egypt. That makes sense to us. Of course God would want to be on the side of these superheroes, but that's not how they're described at all. Throughout the Old Testament, The Jews aren't known for their courage or their skill in battle or their battle strategies. They're not really known for anything good. They're called stiff-necked and adulterous. That's how they're described the most. So stiff-necked means they're stubborn. So if you can imagine a cow plowing your field and they won't turn, like you need that to happen, right? Because your field's not just one straight line. That's what it means to be stiff-necked. and adulterous. We all know adultery is bad, even in the moral confusion of our present age. Adultery is not good and that's how the people of God are described. Adulterous and stiff-necked. But even those glaring weaknesses belong to God and they bring him glory. I think it's one of the hardest lessons for me to teach the youth because it's one of the hardest lessons for me to learn. Sometimes God is going to be glorified in your wins More often, God is going to be glorified in your losses, but all the time, God is going to be glorified. God's love requires your entire life because God's love covers your entire life. It's a lot like hand sanitizer. This is going to sound weird, but it works. So when we go grocery shopping every Monday afternoon, we go to Walmart, and it's just, I think it's kind of gross, right? So I push the cart, we get back in the car, the first thing I do is I put hand sanitizer on. It feels good. It's like I'm finally clean. Sometimes I have little cuts on my hands. That does not feel good. That stings, right? That stings. But it's for my good. So sometimes God's love to us, God's using our lives feels good, and sometimes God using our life really stings. Just like the jewelry and the clothes and animals displayed God's glory rather than the people's, our entire life is that way. And that's really hard. I tried to come up with a more eloquent way to say that, but God using our weakness for his glory is good, but sometimes it's really hard. It stinks sometimes. So growing up, no one ever thinks about hard things happening. We all just kind of assume I'll have this baseline where everything's normal, and I'll get some occasional really good stuff sprinkled on top. No one thinks that they'll get fired from a job until that actually happens. No little boy or little girl thinks, like, well, maybe I won't get married. Maybe I won't have kids. And then one day, it just doesn't happen. No one thinks that they'll lose their spouse or they'll watch their dad have a heart transplant until they wake up one day. And that's the reality. That's what's happened. And that's so hard, right? That's difficult. God using those things for his glory doesn't make those things any easier, but it makes them worth it. So our lives are not our own. Everything that God's people have is for his glory. So we've painted kind of a bleak picture to this point. Leaving behind our sin is hard. God using all the good stuff and all the bad stuff in our life is hard. So how do we do it? How can we possibly continue out of Egypt? How do we escape this gravitational pull of our sin and apply God's love to all the messy areas of our life? That's our third point. We're traveling a well-worn path. We're following in Jesus here. Throughout the text, if you go back and read it, you would see there's very clearly the Lord doing the work. It's the Lord that divides the sea. It's this divine pillar of fire and cloud that stops the Egyptians. The Jews could have stayed at the Red Sea from whatever day that was until today. They still wouldn't have been able to walk across the Red Sea without God. Even Moses on his own couldn't have done that. but the Lord fought for them, the Lord brought them through it." This very clearly points us to Jesus. Very clearly. So we read from the Shorter Catechism earlier that Christ became man and went through all the miseries of this life and he bore the guilt of our sins and he died. That's humiliation. He was brought low. He was exalted by rising on the third day and ascending into heaven. This wasn't a good example for us because we can never die and rise again. We can't do that on our own. It's not something that we look at and we're like, that's a good reminder for me. I want to think about that more. It's something that we actively participate in. Our call to worship was from Romans 6. God's people have been united to Christ in his death. Our old self has been crucified so that we're no longer enslaved to sin. We're free. In Christ, we have actually and truly escaped from Egypt. And so the response to our being drawn back to our old sin or trying to keep the good things in our life from God and avoiding life's difficult circumstances at all costs, the response to that isn't to try harder, just like the Jews couldn't try harder to walk across the Red Sea. And it's not to belittle our sin or to have a, I mean, I'll defeat that sin whenever I get to it. Our response in the pain of sin and the old self calling us back is to look to our union with Christ who has defeated sin. is to look at Christ in faith and repentance and be united to Him in His death, and so we'll be united to Him in His resurrection. That's the gospel. The gospel isn't some motivational tool that inspires you to work harder or some self-help tutorial. It's about dying with Christ and rising with Christ. So here's how I see this in youth ministry, and then we'll apply it to everybody. So sorry for the youth that are in here. All right, so here's how I see it. I've been here eight years. I get hundreds of prayer requests for students, hundreds of conversations at Chick-fil-A that end with, how can I be praying for you? And almost every single time I ask a student how I can pray for them, they say, diligence with school. That happens in sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade, 10th, the entire time they're in youth, each year, diligence in school. And it rarely changes. Here's why. They don't see this laziness as sin. They just want self-help because they want their parents and their teachers to get off their back. That's how it is, right? And for a long time, I would pray for them to be diligent in school, but I've stopped. So, spoiler, I'm looking for the youth in here. I don't just pray that you won't be lazy anymore. What I pray now is that you would hate your sin. You would hate that laziness. It's not the most sinful thing they're doing, but it's sin. I pray that they would hate it. They would look to Christ's death for the forgiveness of that sin. And then through that faith, they would repent and walk in a newness of life, fighting that hard battle with renewed spiritual energy of Christ. Not that they would simply try to get their parents off their back. So what about the rest of us who are done with school? How often do we just have a nonchalant attitude toward our sin? It's like when you go to the doctor and they tell you, you really ought to start taking care of yourself. You're like, yeah, you know, I know. But you fasted all day before the doctor's appointment and drive by like Bullseye or McDonald's. I'll start taking care of myself tomorrow, right? That motivation you had just dries up at the first temptation. That's how we see our sin a lot of times. My wife would probably stop complaining if I just stopped this tiny sin, so I should probably get on to that. Or maybe my conversations with the pastor would be a lot less awkward if I just read my Bible a little bit more. Or maybe home would be a little bit more peaceful if I didn't complain so much, but that's just kind of who I am, so we'll see what happens. By our own strength, we'll stay in our sin. We'll never make it out. And we share that in common with literally every single person that's ever lived on earth, except for Jesus. So this week, when the missionaries come, we're gonna hear a lot about what God is doing. It's gonna sound crazy, right? We're gonna be like, wow, these missionaries really have it going. But the missionaries are doing the same thing that we ought to be doing. They're inviting people out of Egypt. They're inviting people out of slavery. They're telling the people of Freiburg, people of Prague, Honduras, Bulgaria, Moose Factory, they're telling them the same thing that we should be telling the people of Reunion, and Sterling, Chateau Alon, Summer Creek Drive, that's where I live. Telling them there's a way out of slavery, But that's going to require your entire life, because the only way out of slavery is in Christ. Amen. Let's pray now, and then we'll prepare us for the Lord's Supper. Father, we thank you that you have not left us to defeat sin in our own power. We know that that pull of our old self is too great for us to bear on our own. Like the Jewish people in Exodus 14, we are powerless to defeat a much greater enemy, a much more powerful enemy, which is sin. So Lord, I pray that we would not simply try harder to defeat our sin. We would be renewed by the Holy Spirit. Yeah, and we would toil and strive, definitely. but not on our own efforts, but as we look to Christ, as we die with Christ, as we're raised with Christ continually, or that we would truly die to our sin and live unto you. We pray this all in Jesus' name, amen.