Numbers 27:12-23 | Faithful Discipleship | Alex Culpepper

So we are in numbers, chapter 27. If you don't have a Bible with you, we just, we want you to be able to follow along with us. And so we've got some words up here on the screen. We always put the passage up on the screen for you to follow along. But numbers 27 is where we are this morning.

This week I had the privilege of experiencing kind of what was for me a profound sort of full circle moment in my life. Yesterday I was at a funeral and I got to share God's Word inside a church that was planted by the Calvary Chapel movement. So the Calvary Chapel movement, if you don't know what it was, it was started by a Bible teacher named Chuck Smith. He's a preacher, really, really powerful preacher of God's Word. And so Calvary Chapel is really founded on Bible teaching, but also really enhanced by this concept of revival.

If you're familiar with the JES movement, where a bunch of hippies like, you know, turn from drugs and partying and that kind of lifestyle to Jesus, right? That's what that movement was. And Calvary Chapel was at the center of that movement and really, really did some impactful, powerful things. So in the early 90s, the man who would eventually become my pastor, his name is John Morton, he came to the Lord through the ministry of a Calvary chapel. And then 10 years after he came to the Lord, he planted a church in my little tiny hometown of 1800 people in Warsaw, Illinois.

It was about two hours from every place that you've ever heard of in your life. And so God saw fit that that church would be there. I got connected to that church at 15 years old. And then over the course of the next seven years, this man made an investment in my life. He was, he was there.

And a key aspect of no less than three hinge point moments in my life where his voice spoke into my life at a very particular time that did determine the trajectory of my life. He's the man who spoke the right words at the right time to identify for me that hey, I like God has a calling on your life to full time ministry and to preaching into pastoring. And so he and his wife, they actually paid for my seminary training for me to be able to go to school. And I don't know if you know how much seminary costs. It costs a lot, like a lot, a lot.

And so they paid for that. And so I got to yesterday share God's Word in a Calvary Chapel. There aren't a ton of these churches throughout the Country. But I got to share God's word in a Calvary chapel. And it just made me extremely grateful that God had put John in my life to call me to essentially surrender my dreams to Jesus and see what he does with that.

And I was talking about John with my family yesterday with Andrea and the girls, and because of, like, work and family and logistical realities, he moved like down to Arizona, you know, a bit before I moved up to Chicago. And so, like, he hasn't even, like, really met Andrea yet. He hasn't met my kids. But as I was talking about him, I made sure that my kids knew that if it wasn't for that man, like, I never would have met my wife. I never would be.

We wouldn't be in the situation with our church. I would potentially wouldn't be pastoring, like, but. But because he was in our life, like, we, we have all of these things and, like, we get a front row seat to see Jesus do some pretty cool stuff, which I really love. So that's all context for today that we're continuing a series called Pursuing God's Call. And as believers in Jesus, you know, we're called to seek his kingdom, to seek his righteousness, to see his rule and reign extended through our lives and into our lives, but then through our lives and into the world that we would draw near to God as a father who loves us, to let his love transform us from the inside out.

And so we're looking essentially at the story of Israel and how they were given a call by God, right? They were given a task. They were given a pinpoint, a mission that they had to accomplish. And we're watching kind of the details form about how they, you know, after they had come through this season of wandering, they were essentially standing on the precipice of the land before they enter into the land. And there are several key stories that inform how they prepared themselves to get after the things that God was calling them for.

And I want to use some of these principles to form and shape us for how we can get after some of the things that God is calling us to. And today is all about the role that God intends personal discipleship to play in his kingdom, the role that God intends personal discipleship to play in his kingdom. And so numbers 27.

Oh, this is last week. Hey, Zeke, could you help Aileen load in pursuing God's call 2, which is in sermon content? I'll let you do that while I just read the passage for you. Numbers 27, 12, 13, it says, and I invite you to listen in here. The Lord said to Moses, go up into this mountain of Abarim and see the land that I have given to the people of Israel.

Verse 13 says, when you have seen it, you also shall be gathered to your people. So what God is telling Moses to do is that he's supposed to go up onto a mountain and look over the promised land to observe the promised land. But you remember that Moses was told that he would not be able to go into the promised land, right? And so essentially what God is saying is, you're going to go gaze at this land, but I have forbidden you from entering into the land. And we have it here.

There we go. Thank you. We have it here. And so God says, you're going to be gathered to your people. When God says you're going to be gathered to your people, what he's essentially telling Moses is, hey, you're going to die, right?

Like the time is going to come for you to go the way of your ancestors, right? And so it goes on in verse 16 and says, Let the Lord, the God of the spirits of all flesh, appoint a man over the congregation. This is now Moses talking back to God, right? God says, moses, go look at the land. Be reminded that you're not going to go in, but you're going to go look at that land and observe where your people are going to go.

And then Moses is talking to God about this whole situation, and he says, hey, Lord, verse 17. Who shall go out before them or in front of them and come in before them? Who shall lead them out and bring them in? That the congregation of the Lord may not be as a sheep that have no shepherd. The idea here is, Moses, God, if I die, there's not going to be a point person, right? There's not going to be any point leadership.

And these people need some point leadership, right? This would be a really valuable thing. So there are two things I want you to realize. Number one, Moses is not surprised by his death, by the news of his death. This is something that he's been preparing for, at least for several months, if not a couple of years.

And the second thing to check out here is that Moses is not coming into this conversation with the Lord unprepared. He has, in fact, been preparing for this reality for a very long time, for the reality that a day would come when he would no longer be able to lead God's people. See, in leadership circles, we ask this really weird question, which I don't know why this is the thing that we pick, but it is the thing that we say, if you were to get hit by a bus tomorrow, who would take your place, right? And so Moses is asking, has been asking himself the question, if I were to get hit by a bus tomorrow, who's going to take my place, right? Like, what's going to happen if I disappear?

And I say that he's not coming to this conversation unprepared because he has been thinking about this not just for the last few months, not just for the last few years, but since he has started leading the people of Israel, he's been thinking about this.

Verse 18. The Lord tells Moses what to do. So the Lord said to Moses, take Joshua, the son of nun. Now this, this moment was not accidental on Moses part. It was not unintentional on Moses part.

Moses didn't know that the Lord was going to pick Joshua, didn't insist that the Lord had to pick Joshua. But Moses had taken intentional steps over the course of many years to develop Joshua into exactly the kind of person that if the Lord were to appoint another leader, Joshua would have the kind of character that the Lord would be looking for to appoint that leader. And so if this moment was not accidental on Moses part, and if what we observe here is kind of a key lesson and how we get after the things that God would want, then I want to know what are the things that led Moses to this moment? Like, what are the things that brought us here so that the Lord was ready to say, hey, Moses, take Joshua the son of nun. And so as we look at this relationship, we're going to look at Moses and Joshua.

And in church world, we have a word for this relationship. The word is called discipleship. It's not just a word that's related to Jesus. That is a concept of how God intends principles in his kingdom to work. This is either a teacher student relationship or a rabbi disciple in the context of Jesus, a rabbi discipleship relationship, or a master apprentice relationship.

But let's get a definition for it here. Discipleship is the intentional training of another person how to walk with God. And that intentional part is really important. The point of that is to say that discipleship doesn't happen by accident, right? You have to decide that a person needs to be developed, and a person has to be seeking out that development from somebody else.

And you have to be open. And everybody has different aspects of their own soul and their own wiring that need to be tended to in unique ways. And so discipleship doesn't happen by accident. It is intentional. And for the sake of our conversation we're going to use this language of discipler and learner, discipler and learner.

It's the primary framework of how the Lord kind of hands ministry and kingdom purpose off from one generation of leaders to the next generation of leaders, from one generation of his people to the next generation of his people. So occasionally the Lord will intervene out of nowhere and pick a person out of the middle of a crowd and show up in that person's life and show them how to follow, right? The example of this would be like Abraham or Moses or there's a, There was a king in Judea, in Judah, named Josiah, right? Occasionally the Lord shows up in individuals lives and then out of nowhere they sort of already are given or have, because of what the Lord has done, have the necessary character qualities to do the things that God calls them for. But that's, that is not the norm of Scripture.

That's not the pattern, right? Samuel had an Eli, Nathan, the prophet, the prophet Nathan had a Samuel, Elisha, one of the greatest miracle working prophets of the Old Testament. In fact, perhaps even the greatest miracle working prophet of the Old Testament, Elisha had an Elijah. The twelve disciples, the apostles who established the church, who gave us the words of Jesus, they had Jesus himself, Timothy had Paul. And so when we look at Moses and Joshua, what we see is that Moses took kind of this incredibly intentional approach with Joshua.

And their relationship clearly displays three major discipleship lessons that we're going to grab this morning. The first comes to us from numbers, chapter 11. Numbers 11. So, so here's the context of numbers 11. Moses, he's.

He can't bear the load of leadership of Israel by himself. It just so happens that when God has a word to give, Moses is the only person who through whom God gives that word. Which complicates things when you have a lot of people who need to hear God's word. And so God tells Moses, hey, would you gather 70 elders from the people of Israel, bring them before my tent. And so they all gather together.

And what it says is that the Lord pours out his spirit on that group of 70 and they all start prophesying, right? Speaking the words of God to each other in the midst of that context. But there's a problem in that there are two guys who are not in that group of 70. They are one of the 70. But they kind of missed the call, said, hey, we're going to the tent of meeting and we're going to go meet with the Lord.

And so they're still hanging out in the camp but when the Lord pours out his spirit, he pours out his spirit on all 70 of them, including the two guys who are in the camp. So all of a sudden those guys are in the camp and they start also prophesying and speaking God's word. And it freaks the people out. They're very disturbed at the fact that, like, these guys are just like, talking like they have God's word, like, right on their lips because they did have God's word there. And so somebody comes and this is what happened.

A young man comes and runs to Moses and says to Moses, hey, these guys, Eldad and Medad. Here we go, Eldad and Medad. These are the two guys who are stuck in the camp. Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp. This is frightening.

We've got to do something about this. And Joshua, the son of nun, the assistant of Moses from his youth, said, my Lord, Moses, stop them. Now. Why do you think Joshua would say this? Why is this a problem in Joshua's mind?

Well, Joshua thinks he knows how authority works, right? If you think just like the way things are in this world, especially at that time, you got a person who's in charge, and that person gives all of the directives on exactly what needs to be done, right? That one person. And Joshua, he's worried. He's concerned that as those people start speaking God's word, that the people are going to be led and not follow Moses authority and not follow Moses instructions.

And he's saying, hey, these people can't see that these are actually the words of God. This is going to mess with the authority structure of the camp. Moses, this is a problem. Moses, my Lord, would you stop them? And Moses takes this unique opportunity to turn aside to Joshua and reframe the way that Joshua is thinking.

He changes the way that Joshua thinks. So in verse 29, Moses said to him, are you jealous for my sake? Don't worry about me. Like, we shouldn't be concerned about what people see me as or what role I play in their eyes. He says, would that all the Lord's people were prophets.

I wish that everybody would be speaking God's word, right? I don't want all this to rest on me. It would be great that the Lord would put his spirit on every single person. And we praise the Lord that today that is true, that he's given us his holy spirit. But Moses is saying, like, don't worry about me or my authority.

It would be better for God to speak his word through all of his people. And so the first principle that we have here for the or the first lesson of discipleship is that a faithful discipler reframes how their learners see the world, right? You te. You equip the people that you develop to see the world differently than they currently see it, right? Because we all come with context from where we are, right?

We all come with assumptions that are fundamentally shaped by a broken and fallen world. And so what we need is we need some understanding of what exactly is broken so that it can be reshaped by God's word. But usually we need somebody to come alongside us and help us in that process. And so that's the first lesson. The second lesson comes to us from numbers, chapter 13, numbers 13, all the way through one, through verse 16, kind of give us this description.

What happened was that the Lord spoke to Moses saying, hey, you're going to send men to spy out the land of Canaan. This is when the people committed the sin of unbelief, right? The spies went in and they said, oh no, we're all worried except for two of the spies, Joshua and Caleb said, no, the Lord can do it, right? The Lord's going to take care of us. But.

But the people still decided to stay back. Well, it goes through Ian, verses 1 through 16 names every single spy that was sent into the land. And what's really interesting here is in verse eight that we see, the one sent from the tribe of Ephrayim was Hoshea the son of Nun.

Like, I didn't realize any of this before. Like, before preparing for this message, Hoshea, the son of Nun. And then we find out in verse 16 that Moses called Hoshea the son of nun, Joshua, that actually he was not born as Joshua, that Moses gave him the name that he now has. See, what's interesting is that the text doesn't make a big deal about this, so that we. He may not even notice it.

But Joshua's name, it's actually like, if you were to say it in Hebrew, it's Yeshua. It's the same name as Jesus, who, if you were to say his name in Hebrew, would be Yeshua. See, Hoshea. The word Hoshea in Hebrew, it's just the word save. It means to save, right?

It's a verb. It's kind of this call out, this recognition, you know? And Hoshea, when he was born, was probably born to a family that was in Egypt, and that they were crying out to God to say, God deliver us, God save us. And so they Named him Hoshea, perhaps even as a representation of this reality. We don't know why they named him that, but that's perhaps a reality.

But Moses changes his name because what does Moses find out that the rest of the people don't find out? Moses knows the name of God. Moses is able to say to Joshua, joshua, you are not just some general God out there, like one of the Egyptian gods who. We're not just calling on some God to save. We are calling on the God to save.

And what is the name of the God above all gods? His name is Yahweh. And so instead of calling you Hoshea, I'm going to call you Yeshua, I'm going to call you Yahweh Saves. That's literally what Joshua's name is. Yahweh Saves.

So this is Joshua's identity. Moses says, joshua, you have a new identity. You have a new purpose. Your name is going to stand for what your purpose will be. You will show to all of these people that Yahweh is the one who saves.

And so the second major discipleship lesson, a faithful discipler calls out identity and purpose in learners. There are. There's a book called Hero Maker by a guy named Dave Ferguson. He's actually a pastor down in Naperville. And in that book he talks about four of the most powerful letters that a leader can ever give to the individuals that they lead.

The four most powerful letters are I see in you. I see in you, right? That when. When a leader looks at someone and says goodness, I. I see in you an encourager, right? Like God made you for the purpose of lifting his people up.

Or I see you, I see in you the gift. Like you are a prophet, right? You know how to speak God's word to specific situations at specific times. Or I see in you a humble servant who's willing to go wherever God would have them to just do the things that need to be taken care of, right? You don't need to be out in front.

You don't need to be seen. You're willing to do whatever is required to just help God's people, right? So I see in you a faithful discipler will call out identity and purpose in their learners. The third lesson comes from Exodus, chapter 24. This is one of the coolest passages in the whole Bible.

The whole Bible is great, guys, but I really love this passage. There are all so the same 70 elders before God poured out his spirit on them. God called Moses and these elders up to the mountain, the Mount Sinai See Moses, at this point in the story, Moses had been kind of up and down that mountain several times. He's gonna go talk to God, he's gonna come back to the people, go talk to God, come back to the people. And so right now he is, he's taken some of the elders up with him, right?

And Aaron, he takes Aaron and Aaron's sons and the 70 elders and they kind of go up, kind of halfway up the mountain sort of thing. And they're sitting there and they have just had this life changing experience where it says that they saw God, right? The 70 elders together had gone up and they had witnessed God. And what I imagine happened is that they, they actually like looked up above them and they saw the feet of God walking on what was like a floor of sapphire. That's what's described for us.

They have this remarkable picture vision of the God who created everything. And it says that they ate and drank together and sat and rested in God's presence there. But then something happens. God calls Moses from the place where the 70 elders are. About halfway up the mountain, God says to Moses, hey, you come up further with me.

Because this is where God intends to write his law on tablets of stone and then give it to Moses. And Moses brings somebody with him into God's presence, right? So it's like we see God, but then it's like we're going up to meet with God and that's what Moses is doing and he's going to take one other person with him. And I just think of this, like this reminds me of Jesus. If you read the Gospels, you will see times when it says that Jesus went away to a desolate place, or Jesus went away to a secret place, or Jesus got up early in the morning before the sun had risen so that he could go and spend time with his father.

And the disciples, you know, they watched Jesus do this very strange thing. And the reason it was strange to them is because in their minds, prayer is you read a psalm, right? You read a psalm, you pray the psalm, and that's how you relate to God. But goodness, for the amount of time that Jesus spent with his father, he could have read through the whole book of psalms, like, you know, three or four times in one sitting, right? Like he just, he spent a lot of time.

And so they're like, what is he doing in all of this time that he's just sitting there? What is going on? And then, and so they say, lord, teach us to pray. We want to figure out what is this that you're doing. And so they have this problem until, of course, after they've walked with Jesus for a while.

And Jesus said, hey, go to Jerusalem and wait. And then Jesus ascends into heaven. And he said, I'm going to pour out my spirit on you. And it says, for 10 days they were gathered together in one place, praying. By the time they had been done with Jesus, they figured out something about what it means to just sit and be in God's presence and seek him.

So Exodus, this is. So Joshua calls Moses up into God's presence with him, but then in a different place. Exodus 33:11.

It says this about Moses and how he related to the Lord. It says, thus, the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face as a man speaks to his friend. Goodness. Imagine the context that Joshua has for all of that. All of these people think that they have to, like, you know, we get on our knees and we bow down and we have to do things to make God hear us.

But when Joshua, he gets to go in. When Moses turned again to the camp, his assistant Joshua, the son of nun, a young man, would not depart from the tent. Meaning Moses is like, okay, I've got to go do the thing. And Joshua's like, I'm staying here, man. This is where I want to be.

Like, this is the presence of the living God. I get to watch you have this kind of relationship with him. I need to figure out what that is. I need to figure out what that looks like. I'm going to stay here.

Joshua would not depart from the tent. And so the third discipleship lesson is that a faithful discipler leads learners to dwell God's presence.

The best thing that John, my mentor, did for me is that he challenged me and held me accountable to come to prayer meetings when I was 17 or 18 years old, 16. 17, something like that. You know, I used to think that I had this pattern in my life where in the summer, I would go away to church camp, and then I would come back, and it was like church camp was the place that I could feel really close to God. And so it became like this mountaintop experience and then the valley of normal life and mountaintop experience, right? And that that was kind of the pattern of my life.

And I just thought that that was the way that it was always going to be, right? That. That the only way that I could get close to God was to get away from the normal flow of things and into this place. But I remember when he would hold me accountable to coming to these prayer meetings. There was one distinct moment when I was in a prayer meeting and I was just rocked by the presence of God.

I like felt him so near. And it was something that I had only experienced when I was away at those church camp places. And this is like God showed me, hey, it doesn't just have to be when you go away to those places. My presence is acceptable here and now. You can draw near here and now.

And so that place of intimacy and nearness to God is the place from which God accomplishes all of the purposes that he has to accomplish in our lives. And Moses actively displayed that to Joshua, like that's what he spent his time doing. And Joshua saw when God gets what he wants, it's because the leader is spending time with the Lord. If God's going to get what he wants with me, it's going to be because I'm spending time in God's presence. So Moses recognizes that he's kind of on the precipice of the land.

He's not going to be able to go into the land. And the people need a leader. And so what happens? Moses has taken these steps of preparation. So the Lord said to Moses, take Joshua, the son of none, a man in whom is the spirit.

Oh, gosh, that isn't said often about people. Sometimes the Lord, the Spirit comes upon people. Rarely do we read that the Spirit is actually in a person, but spirit is in Joshua in the Old Testament.

Make him stand before Eleazar, the priests and all the congregation, and you shall commission him their sight. What the Lord is giving him is instructions for how he will. Moses will install Joshua as the new leader of God's people. And so the Lord honors. What does the Lord do in this moment?

He honors Moses steps of faithful discipleship that he has taken over the years. And so this is going to happen. Joshua is going to be installed. So what. What did Joshua have?

Like, what was in Joshua that could bring him to this place? Or I would even ask, like, what did Moses reinforce in Joshua that would bring him to this place? I would say that the reason Joshua stands out is because Joshua had a humility in him that would lead him to trust God's word over his own impulses and would lead him to look to God's instruction over anything else. And why would he learn that? Because it was the thing that Moses trained in him.

It was the thing that you could see observable about Moses that was true of him in a way that was not true of anybody else. Because you remember who was Moses in Numbers 12:3. Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all the people who were on the face of the earth. If Moses has something to instill in Joshua, it is this principle. You don't need to prove yourself before the people.

You don't need to vindicate or validate yourself by your role or your position. And Moses didn't like, he didn't challenge the Lord like Moses pattern was, I'm just going to lean on the Lord and do whatever he says and trust that the outcome is his. And so it was Moses humility ultimately that made him a good discipler. Because the very interesting thing is that Moses was preparing Joshua for a role that Moses wanted. Moses wanted to go into the land.

Don't think for a second that he didn't. He wanted to lead the people, to conquer the people of that land, to make that land belong to God's people. Moses wanted that. But what he did instead was he spent time developing Joshua for the role that he wanted. So he commissions Joshua to go into the land that he had been forbidden to enter, that Joshua would fight battles that Moses wanted to fight, that Joshua would lead Israel into the glory, that Moses wanted to lead Israel into where they would have victory over their enemies by God's power.

And so the main point this morning that should kind of over layer over everything we've talked about in terms of discipleship is that faithful disciplers develop learners to exceed them. Right? Humility is an absolute necessity in the process of discipleship, both on behalf of the person who is learning and on behalf of the person who is doing the teaching. The person who is doing the teaching should have the hope that they would develop something in that person that they could exceed them. But the person who's being developed goodness.

You cannot be developed by somebody without being humble. You need to be willing to let somebody else call out your flaws and call out what's not going right and reframe the way that you're thinking, right? And all of this requires humility. So what? Every Jesus follower should have a discipler.

So if you haven't walked with the Lord long, then you should find a mature brother or sister whom you respect, that you want your life to emulate this person because you see how they follow Jesus and you want to follow Jesus like they follow Jesus. So that's. If you haven't walked with the Lord for a long time, or if you're kind of fresh in your walk with the Lord, if you have walked with the Lord for some time, then the relationship can, can sometimes take on More of like a co discipleship in which I trust this person to speak into my life, they trust me to speak into their lives. But even then, I would say it's still really valuable for you to have a person speaking into your life who has gone through the things that you haven't gone through yet, who has gone through it with the Lord and come out the other side of it. And so at every point in my life, I wanna have at least one kind of CO discipleship voice in my life that we're kind of walking the journey together and shaping each other.

But I also wanna have the voice of one in my life who has gone through the things that I haven't gone through yet. Right? So every, every Jesus follower should have a discipler. But number two, every Jesus follower should aim to become a discipler of others. Notice I'm not saying that every Jesus follower is right now ready to be a discipler of others, because we all have things that need to be developed in us.

But I do want to tell you that God intends for what he is doing in you to not finish with you. He wants to do something through you and not just in you. And I wager a lot of you probably think like, well, I don't know if I really have anything to give someone else. Well, has God done something in you?

Has He? If he has, then surely you don't think so little of that thing that he's done that you would just keep it to yourself, right? So I'd invite you to consider whether or not that is like the most God honoring perspective. Because if God has given you something and is doing something in you, then you have something to give to others. So would you honor what God is doing in and through you by doing whatever it is takes to put yourself in the position where you're ready to hand off the things that God has handed you.

And if you're not ready, you should be asking yourself the question, well, what would it take to get ready? And maybe you would ask that of a person who's discipling you, right? What would it take for me to get ready to be in this position where I could hand off something to somebody else?