Posts with the tag “exodus”

We have come to the end of our walk through Exodus. What a joy it has been to travel together. To see in this story of a nation, the bigger picture of God’s eternal plans to draw all people to himself. We have, as promised at the start, seen pattens of redemption throughout and have bumped into Jesus along the way. Israel’s story is our story and Israel’s God is our God.  Read More

As we continue to walk through the book of Exodus together, Moses has ascended Mount Sinai for forty days meeting with God. God reveals to him his plan for priests who were set apart to go in and out of the tabernacle representing a sinful people to a holy God, bringing the blood of sacrificed animals to cover the people’s sin, and bringing the presence of God to the people. We saw in the book of Hebrews in the New Testament that this was a copy of what was in heaven, a shadow of Jesus the high priest who did not need to sacrifice for his own sin but provided a once for all sacrifice for people who would come in to God’s holy presence through him.  Read More

In this week’s service we explore the significance of the Tabernacle. How it played an important symbolic and central role in the worship of God’s people while they journeyed through the desert. We also looked at how the Tabernacle points us towards Jesus, who is our true and better Tabernacle. It was on the cross that Jesus offered himself as the ultimate sacrifice. It was his death which tore the curtain of the Temple in two, from top to bottom. It is him we place at the centre of our worshipping church community. It is to him that we gather. He is worthy of our praise. He is our access into the very presence of God. Just like the Israelites, how we worship matters.  Read More

My sermon was very much focussed on the motivation for giving. When it comes to generosity, we start with the heart, exposing it to God’s grace, vision, and Spirit. However, Exodus 35-36 also helps us look at the mode of giving. It’s also deeply practical. Let me, therefore, outline four steps for reviewing your giving, particularly to your local church.  Read More

I love it when scripture surprises me. As you might imagine, having been a pastor for nearly 30 years I have read a lot of scripture and preached a lot of sermons. However, the Bible still surprises me. Verses that I am sure I have read before can leap out of the page, grab my attention, transform my thinking. This happened to me when preparing this week’s sermon. As I was looking at how the passage challenges our propensity to fall for the deception of idols, verse 17 snuck up on me: “When Joshua heard the noise of the people shouting, he said to Moses “there is the sound of war in the camp””.  Read More

In this week’s devotional we will be digging deeper into Exodus 33, and also Ephesians 2, to explore what the presence of God means for us and our life. You might want to use this guide in your personal time with God over the course of the week, or in your Life Group or household. In Exodus 33 we see how Moses pleads for God’s presence to be with him and the Israelites, telling God he won’t go on to the Promised Land without him. God grants Moses with his presence, and in Jesus, we too can know the wonderful presence of God in our lives.  Read More

We have been looking at the final 6 commandments in Exodus chapter 20 where God the Father declares his laws and seals his covenant with the Israelites. They were pauses on route to the promised land at Mount Sinai. There is a tendency when looking at the 10 commandments, to treat them as a list of rules to follow in order not to be on God’s bad side. The reality is that we get to see God’s heart for these people as he delivers on his promise to Abraham by making his descendants into a great nation. The 10 commandments are where this promise takes on a more civil and social focus. Thus far the Lord has brought his people out of Egypt and provided them with instructions on how to live as his people before they enter the promised land (Canaan). The theme for Exodus is that God fulfils his promises and we get to see that in how he’s taken these descendants of Abraham and turned them into a great nation. The plan was for Israel to live before God in the world, obeying the covenant instruction that he will reveal to them.  Read More

The fourth commandment is often treated as if it’s the least important. This is not surprising when you remember that other contenders cover murder and adultery! But on Sunday we considered how learning to build sabbath rhythms into our week actually gets to the very heart of what it means to live Christ centred lives. To approach things from a slightly different angle let’s look at Mary and Martha in Luke 10:38-42. I’ve often felt sorry for Martha who Jesus gently rebukes when she is simply working hard to provide for her guests. What is it that Jesus commends so warmly in her sister Mary? Simply that she knows when to STOP! There may be many things that still need doing, but she knows that in this moment she needs pause, to focus her full attention on Jesus in a way that both honours him and replenishes her.  Read More

God is the only true God, the one that is to have all our devotion, our first love, our whole heart. God is passionate for our love as he loves us passionately. As a loving Father, God knows that only by worshipping him will we experience the fullness of the life he has created us for, and that worshipping anything else, might that be our career, our self-image, a position of influence and power. Drugs, alcohol or any other addiction, money, religion or sex, technology, leisure time, video games, worshipping anything else than him will eventually lead to our destruction. Worship is an all or nothing thing – we worship God alone, or we don’t worship God. He will not share our worship with anyone or anything. So he tells us to worship him with all our heart.  Read More

We have reached the halfway point in our walk through the book of Exodus. We have reached the point that the Hollywood films usually finish with – in fact, they often finish just the other side of the Red Sea. In our sermon this week we have reminded ourselves that God draws the people out of Egypt to draw them into relationship. God rescues families to form them into a people, a nation, a kingdom of priests.   Read More

Welcome to this week’s Devotion. In our walk through Exodus, we arrived at Exodus 16-17. In our sermon this week, Cameron helpfully unpacked these two chapters that speak of God’s wonderful commitment to provide for his people as they walked out of Egypt and through the wilderness; manna, quail, water, clothes and shoes that didn’t wear out. Time after time God graciously provides. Time after time God’s people grumble and complain. This week I want to lead us in a song of worship. It’s a song called “Provider” and it was written in response to God’s miraculous provision in a time of personal need for me – Listen to “Provider” here.  Read More

I sometimes wonder whether we have lost the art of spontaneous worship. I love the songs we sing at Everyday Church, but I also know in my life, I have seen God move in spectacular ways, but I often forget to play that back to Him in worship. I have more than enough material to write songs of my own! Don’t mishear me, I am very grateful for the gifted worship leaders that we have in and out of our church, and you’ll never hear one of my tunes on Spotify anytime soon! I wonder though, if one of the ways we can and should respond to Him, is by writing some redemption songs of our own.  Read More

As those of you who know me know, I love Christmas. I love celebrating the birth of Jesus. I love all the biblical truth that we read and sing in that season. I love our family and church traditions that have built up over the years. But – Christmas would be irrelevant if it wasn’t for this week – if it wasn’t for the cross and the death of Jesus. We celebrate birthdays, we generally do not establish festivals around deaths. But we do with Jesus.  Read More

We’re now on week 5 of our walk through the book of Exodus, the 2nd book in the Bible. And I want to share some thoughts to help you to pick up a specific theme that reoccurs throughout chapters 5-11 in particular. We’re considering this week the concept that someone can have a hardened heart towards God; as demonstrated over and over again by Pharaoh (King of Egypt). Other parts of the Bible refer to people also having a calloused heart or a darkened heart. (Matthew 13:15; Psalm 17:10; Ephesians 4:18; Romans 2: 5)  Read More

Exodus chapters 7 to 10 lead us through Moses’ confrontations with Pharaoh, with, as David Pawson says, words followed by works, discourse followed by destruction. The plagues reveal both God’s justice and mercy - his grace in giving warning before final judgement and his power and sovereignty over the Egyptian gods and Pharaoh. But most of all a demonstration to both the Israelites, Egyptians and us, that God is God alone. In our response to this God entreats us not to harden our hearts, for now is the time of salvation. Moses brought word from God to Pharaoh ‘Let my people go that they may worship me’ (Exodus 7:16, NIV). We are set free to follow, to serve, to worship. God calls us to worship with everything we are and everything we have.  Read More

Moses is without doubt one of the heroes of scripture. A leader who managed to lead 2 million people right to the edge of the Promised Land. A leader who took up leadership at 80 years of age and led for 40 years. A man who suffered abuse, grumbling, open revolt, great victories and tragic disappointments. It would be easy to view him as a superhuman. A man totally different to you and me. However, as we read through Exodus we discover that in many ways he was just like us. This is never more apparent than in his interaction with God when he is being called to leadership. Moses is presented with an incredible call and commission – lead the people of God out of captivity to the superpower of his day. His response – send someone else.  Read More

God says, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” As well as saying this to simply differentiate himself from the many other gods worshipped at the time, I also find this name deeply reassuring. It starts, “I am the God of your father…” Moses probably didn’t know his biological parents, Amran and Jochebed, very well, if at all, as he grew up in the palace. They had been given some precious time with Moses as a baby, at least until he was weaned, but may not have seen much of him since.  Read More

Welcome to our first devotion in our new series on Exodus. If you have already watched or heard the first sermon in this series (and If not check it out on the Everyday App or on our Youtube Channel), you will know that these devotions are a key part of our journey through this amazing book. In these devotions we will have a chance to reflect on what has been preached, but also to draw out something that there wasn’t time to get to in 30 minutes on a Sunday or as part of our Online Church Service. In our sermon we looked at the big themes of the book, the highs and lows, the patterns of redemption that point to God’s big salvation narrative, and finally at the fact that in walking through Exodus we will constantly be bumping into Jesus. In this devotion I want to draw out 4 specific themes for us to think about this week.  Read More