Numbers 20:1-29 | Profaning Holy Things | Alex Culpepper

And then church, I'd invite you, if you have your Bibles with you, you can open them up to numbers chapter 20. That's where we're going to be. If you don't know me, my name is Alex Culpepper. I am the lead pastor here at Renovation Church. It is a joy for us to be able to walk through Scripture each morning.

And so if you did not bring a Bible with you, if you don't have one, we also have printed the passage that we're working with out in the bulletin so you can follow along with us and engage with us in that way. So numbers chapter 20 is where we are going to be. And I, to start us off, I just want to say, after you encounter God, meaning after you meet God for the first time, after God enters into your life as a follower of God, as one who is trusting him, as one who's learning who he is and how his power works in your life, your greatest challenge from that point forward is to be able to display him as holy. Your greatest challenge is to display him as holy. Now, the point of this, as you, like you say, hey, you need to now, or your calling, the calling that's on your life is to now display God as holy.

The point of that is to not say anything about you, right? It's the pride that leads a person to try to make themselves appear somehow better or like we've got our life together to other people. I just want to tell you, somehow appearing better or like you've got your life together, that's not holiness. That's just something that reinforces kind of your own sense of self worth. But when you say God has saved me, if those words are going to mean something to the people that you say them to, then they should see what God has done to you to make you different.

Because people really only see God as holy when you use God's gifts His way. Now, we're going to talk about that a lot this morning. What does it look like to use God's gifts his way? But people will only come to see God as holy, holy in your life when you use God's gifts His way. And this is incredibly challenging.

Why is it challenging? Because the place from where God has saved you, the life that he saved you out of, the place where you grew up, whatever it might be, the place that he has saved you out of, has a powerful effect on shaping the kind of person that you've become, right? Your thoughts and your assumptions and the way that you relate to the world around you. It all comes from the context that you came up in. And so I'll just share a couple of examples of this.

After I trusted Jesus, there were messages that shaped my behavior and action in significant ways. I'll give you one of those messages. One of those messages was, you know, everyone has to have a little fun sometimes. Everyone has to have a little fun sometimes. Right?

Now you might hear me say that. You might go, yeah, actually, I think that's true. And it is. I think it's a true statement on the surface. But you asked me, like, what did that statement lead to in my life, right?

And the implicit lie underneath that statement that kind of seems true on the surface is that, you know, following God with your whole heart is really about restricting fun in your life. And, oh, and by the way, we get to define what fun is, right? Like, we determine what is fun and what is not. And God is going to keep the things that are fun from you. I'll give you another example of this, A message that I believe that shaped kind of my approach to life.

The message is, nobody's perfect. Hey, nobody's perfect.

That's true. I just want you to let you know, on the surface, that is a true statement. But what did the reinforcement of that statement lead to in my life? It led to this implicit lie, which is, well, you know, because sin is so common, it's really not a big deal. You know, everybody does it, right?

Like, we all have this problem. Nobody's perfect, right? And so these are just a couple of examples of assumptions about the world around me and phrases and words that were said that carry under them implicit lies about the world. And they all shaped the way that I approached life. And in order to do what God would have us do, in order to display God as holy, we actually kind of have to move forward on his terms.

And this is a principle called renewing the mind, right? So all of a sudden, now this. This is not working. Can you advance to the next slide for me? There we go.

Romans 12:1 and 2 says, I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. This is. We're going to talk about renewing the mind in a second. But this is essentially saying, like, what does this look like? What does it mean to live as a.

A person who has been saved by God, a person who has experienced God's mercy? Well, the result of that is that we would reveal God as holy. And how do we do that? Well, in verse two it says, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. That by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

The idea is there are ways that you grew up, there are messages that you grew up with, there are assumptions you have about the world. And the only way that you're going to be able to reveal your God as holy to the world around you is if you let him renew your mind. So you might go, okay, well, how is a Muslim who comes to believe in Jesus then going to display the God that they believe in as holy? Well, they need to let God renew their mind. And how is maybe a person who practices Wicca, who then comes to believe in Jesus going to display their God as holy?

Well, they need to let God renew their mind. And how is maybe a politician who comes to believe in Jesus going to be able to display God as holy? They need to let God renew their mind. How are you going to be able to display your God as holy? You need to let God renew your mind.

And so today we're continuing a series called Wanderings and Warnings where we are kind of walking through the stories of the Book of Numbers, where we're looking at the way that God, people, Israel, had been led through a season of trial, a season of difficulty. They're going through the desert and we're learning what it means to explore how sin is displayed in this people. And yeah, these are stories that took place in history. But the telling of these stories also tells us something about the human condition, also tells us something about the reality of our own hearts. And so today we get to see the failure of Moses, who shows that after 80 plus years of walking with God, that he has a bit of a problem.

We say one quote that is often attributed to the people of Israel walking through the desert is, you know what, it's easier to get the people out of Egypt than it is to get Egypt out of the people. That's something that comes up when people talk about these stories of the wilderness. And what we learn about Moses today is that actually there's a bit of Egypt still in Moses as well. And so Numbers 20, verse 1 says this, the people of Israel, the whole congregation, came into the wilderness of Zin in the first month and the people stayed in Kadesh. And Miriam died there and was buried there.

So here's what the narrative has done. The last story that we talked about was just after the people were prevented from going into the land that God had promised them. And we've talked many weeks about that. But now what the narrative has done is it's fast forwarded us 38 years. So the people, the people of Israel for the last 38 years have been wandering through the wilderness.

And now we're near the end of their time in the wilderness. And you may go, well, what happened in this 38 years? And I'll just tell you, I don't know. They walked around the desert, maybe they stopped for a long time in some places in the desert. But that's essentially it.

The point being that God kept His word that he said would take place. And now it's towards the end of this time, and Moses has lost his sister Miriam. Now, this is telling us this, that this man who has been commissioned by God to lead is experiencing a pretty heavy grief, a pretty significant loss in his life. And this little detail sets the emotional context of the story. And so verse two goes on and says, there was no water for the congregation.

Gavin, could you just follow along with this with me? For some reason, the slide advancer is not working. So there was no water for the congregation. And they assembled themselves together against Moses and against Aaron. And the people quarreled with Moses and said, would that we had perished when our brothers perished before the Lord.

So now this is the pattern of these people. They experience lack, and then they come and blame Moses and Aaron. The Lord allows what they experience, the lack that they experience, to reveal their unbelief. And also their unwillingness to just humbly come to him and ask for his supply. They always take this posture of attack.

So remember this detail with me. These people easily forget that Yahweh, their God, the one who calls himself the I am. When you see the letters the Lord L O R D capitalized in the Old Testament, it's always, that's the name of God that's being presented there. Yahweh, the I am. And they don't see the Lord as actively involved with their every moment, right?

Who they see is Moses. And they believe that Moses is basically, I mean, for lack of a better term, they believe that Moses is a sorcerer, right? This is especially true when they face judgments for their rebellion. They don't see the Lord as the one bringing the judgments upon them. They look at Moses and they think that Moses is the one who has caused these judgments to take place in the people.

And the reason for this is like, we read the story and we read what God says, says to Moses and how God interacts, and we treat it like, oh, all of the people sees the story as we see the story, and that's not true. The Lord will speak to Moses, but the people do not hear the Lord's voice when he speaks to Moses. And their great struggle then, as they wander on this wilderness journey, is that they see the challenges and the discipline and the miracles of the wilderness. They see it as all coming from Moses hand, as this kind of sorcerer and magician. And they don't see.

See it as coming from Yahweh's hand, who is actually just trying to show them the great necessity of trusting and obeying him alone. And so now Moses, he is facing the grief of his sister and the accusation of the people. And so in verse six, it goes on to say this. Moses and Aaron went from the presence of the assembly to the entrance of the tent of meeting and fell on their faces. And the glory of the Lord appeared to them.

So this falling on their faces, this is the posture that God's leaders take, right? When. When people come again, when there's issues in the people or there are people coming against them. This is the pattern that Moses and Aaron take. They seek after God for his solution.

So verse seven, it goes on and says this. In verse seven, the Lord spoke to Moses saying, take the staff and assemble the congregation. You and Aaron, your brother, tell the rock before their eyes to yield its water, so you shall bring water out of the rock for them and give drink to the congregation and their cattle. So there's no water, right? That's a problem.

And so God has issued to his leaders, the leaders of his people, some commands that they are to follow. And the first command says, you are to take the staff, right? Now, the staff that they are to take is Aaron's staff. Now, Moses has his own staff. Aaron has his own staff.

We didn't look at this last week, but after. After God kind of affirmed Aaron's role as the high priest when his role was challenged by a group of rebels. What happened was that God had all of the leaders of the twelve tribes of Israel assemble their staffs. And their staffs are supposed to be. They represent their authority as leaders amongst the people of God.

And so God assembled all of those staffs in one place and essentially said, the staff that I pick is the staff that I've selected as holy. And so when Aaron's staff, it began miraculously budding this, like, plant this flower out of it that started producing almonds, right? And you're like, okay, well, what does all of that mean? What it means More significantly than anything else is that God was affirming with certainty Aaron's role as the high priest, that he has chosen the one who would administer and lead the people to come to God and find a way to commune with God. And so this is Aaron's staff that Moses has taken.

Thank you so much.

So that's the first command. Take the staff. The second command is you are to gather the congregation together. And the third command is you are to speak to the rock. So now, every time that God has performed a miracle for these people, he has given them a different set of commands.

And every time when we read the passage, the text will take painstaking effort to show us that Moses and Aaron did exactly the thing that God told them to do. Right? They did exactly what God did. So it will say, God commanded them to fill in the blank. And then it will say, and Moses and Aaron fill in the blank, right?

They did what God told them to do. And so here we have another miracle that's going to come forward. And the whole purpose of that is for us to see that it's God's word through which God's power works. And it's the obedience to God's word that brings about God's power. And so Moses and Aaron used God's gifts his way, and it brought about these kinds of miracles.

So verse 9 says this. If we could go back to verse 9. There we go. Verse 9. Moses took the staff from before the Lord as he commanded him.

So, first command, we got the box checked. He followed the first command, right? Moses holds in hand the miraculous staff of Aaron. When the people see this staff, they're going to be reminded of the fact that God has indeed chosen Aaron to be high priest. They're going to be reminded of the fact that it is God's power and God's word that leads this people.

So they took the staff. That's the first command. And they followed the first command. The second command, verse 10. Then Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock.

So this is check the box for the second command, right? We gathered the people together, just like God said. Now, I want you to notice two things with me. After we follow the second command, notice two things. Number one, there has been for the people a miracle like this that has taken place before.

Before they ever got to Mount Sinai, right after they came out of Egypt, they came to a rock. And at a different time, they were without water. And God commanded Moses to strike the rock with his staff. And by striking the rock, water started to flow out of it. So that's the first thing we need to have some context for in this situation.

The second thing I want you to note is that this is a rock formation in the middle of the desert. It's not like a rock that's sitting on the ground. It's a kind of rock formation in the middle of the desert. And typically, these kinds of rock formations are up here because they are connected to kind of like underground systems of water that are lying underneath the desert. And it's even quite possible that for the last 38 years, as they've been wandering around in the desert, they've come by this very place, and it has provided water for them in the past.

There's a good chance of that. But now they come to it, and it's dry and they don't have any water left. And so now there's this problem, and now we come to this rock, and this is where the whole story unravels. So you ever deal with a person who's caused you some degree of trouble, and you, like, want to give them a piece of your mind for the trouble that they've caused you? And so, like, you think about it, and you figure out, like, ways that you're going to restrain yourself when it comes time to have this conversation, because, you know, you kind of have to keep it together.

And you rehearse the conversation in your head over and over and over again. And so maybe wisdom even gets the better of you. And you're like, okay, I'm going to push away those thoughts. But when you see them face to face, man, something lights up in you, and you're like, okay, I cannot hold on to this. Like, something bubbles up in you and the restraints come come off.

And this is what happens to Moses when it comes time to obey the third command.

Then Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock. And he said to them, hear now, you rebels.

I mean, just listen to the tone. Like that is in his voice. He says, here, now, you rebel. Shall we bring water out of this rock for you? So it's just worth saying you should be careful.

Because while anger against rebellion might seem to be a holy thing, your anger against the rebellious might lead you to become a rebel as well.

So look at Moses tone. Like, he says, hear this, you rebels. Now, God didn't tell him to say that. God didn't give him that command. And then you look at how bold he is afterwards.

He says, shall we bring forth water from this rock? Now, who has performed all of the miracles that Israel has witnessed in their time in the wilderness. It certainly has not been Moses. Moses has been faithful to obey the things that the Lord has said. But Moses did not perform one miracle in the wilderness.

God empowered Moses to do the miracles. God performed the miracles. And God and Moses has been faithful to remind the people of the things that the Lord has done for them. But he gets in this place and his anger starts bubbling up. And so he places himself in the position of pride.

And he's like, should we be the ones to do this for you when you come and complain against us? So you remember, remember back last week, he said when the rebels came against him, the actual rebels, right? The people who were challenging his authority to lead. And God had given him that authority, right? They came to him and they thought he was a sorcerer.

And this is what Moses said. He said, hereby you shall know that it was the Lord who did these things and not me, right? And he has the whole time been constant in his goal to show them that it was not his own authority that leads these people, that it was always God's authority. He was always constant to not lift himself up above the people, but simply say, I'm obeying God. That's all I'm doing.

And this is what God has told me to do. And he goes to painstaking effort to do that. What happened to that attitude here? Because it's not sticking around. He's not making that effort anymore.

Something shifted in his approach, something in Moses pain and Moses anger and Moses vulnerability, right? He's struggling with the grief of the loss of his sister. He's now facing these people who are attacking him like they have sometime in this last 40 years. And so he has now something in his soul has snapped to the point that he was willing to attribute the miraculous power to himself and Aaron without drawing attention to God's role. And so this miracle for Moses has now become about Moses using God's power to prove something to the people about himself.

He's using God's tools and God's gifts as a way to lift himself up. And so in a moment, Moses shifted the focus from the glory of God to the validation of himself. And so he went from being obedient to being offended, from being prayerful to being prideful. All of this took place his heart. And so then verse 11, it goes on to say in verse 11, this is verse 12.

But verse 11 says, Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice. And water came out abundantly. And the congregation drank and their Livestock. So Moses lifted his hand and he struck the rock with his staff. Moses performed a miracle with the miraculous power that God had placed on him.

But he did so without following God's command, right? He messed up. He did this his own way. And for this failure, Moses and Aaron would be restricted from entering the promised land, right? There was a possibility that they could have gone in with the next generation when they took the land.

But now God is telling them, you're going to be restricted. You will not go into the land. You're going to have to die before I send this people into the promised land. Moses and Aaron for this. For this failure would need to die along with the unfaithful generation that didn't believe the Lord's word.

They would die looking into the land without ever knowing what it was like to live in the land. And when I initially read this story, I was a little bit like, whoa, that's kind of harsh, right? Like, why is God such a stickler? He seems like, a little like. Like, it feels like, why is that such a big deal?

Like, he struck the rock before with his staff. And, yeah, his anger got that, like, got the best of him in a mom. But is God really gonna, like, look at all of the circumstances, right? You can come up with all of these excuses, like, he's suffering under grief, and he's facing the pressure of leading the people. And couldn't we just have a little bit of understanding and a little bit of grace, God, for.

For what Moses has done? And what we need to be reminded of as we look at the story and try to evaluate it, is that God is not arbitrary. His application of discipline, right? There's something like. What we don't see and what we kind of need to wrap our minds around is that there is something much more wrong in what Moses did than simply he had a bad day and he made an oopsie and messed up one of God's instructions.

There's something much more wrong going on. So I want you to listen to verse 12 very carefully.

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, because you did not believe in me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore, you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them. So anytime that word believe is used in the Bible, you could always put in the word trust, like, substitute the word trust in its place, right? Do you trust in God here? God tells Moses, you did not trust in me. And this failure to trust, it led to something else.

It led to, like, because you didn't trust in me. You did not uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people. So there are two kind of categories we need to look at here. So he says holy. You did not uphold me as holy.

The word holy means something that is utterly different and set apart. It is something that is unlike anything else that you have ever experienced or encountered. It's something that's in its own category. That's what holy means. And the opposite of holy is profane.

So we might think. You might think that the opposite of holy is something like evil, right? Or something. Something like corrupt, right? And that's actually not the case.

The opposite of holy is common. Right? There are things that are different, and there are things that are common. The word that the Bible uses for common is. Is profane, right?

And so this category of profane is something that is common like any other thing. I want you to take that category of like any other thing, because God says. God is essentially telling, Moses, you profaned me in the eyes of the people. You made me common. So, so Moses, one action contained two sins in it.

The first sin, Moses, you trusted in something besides me. So we'll have to look at what it was that Moses trusted in in just a second. But the second sin is, Moses, the people saw you treat me like I was any other God. I was just some other God. That's what they saw.

That's what they witnessed. Literally, that's what it means when it says, you did not uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people. You took Aaron's holy staff that I made holy, and you took it out of my holy presence, and then you lifted it up in front of the people so that they could see you were holding the holy staff. And what did you do with that holy staff? You put on a show like I was any other God.

In other words, you did not use my gifts in my way. You did not use my gifts the way that I said they should be used. So what's going on here? So, just some context. I talked to you about the places where we grow up, shape and form the assumptions that we make about the world.

Moses grew up in Pharaoh's house in Egypt. And Moses undoubtedly had regular interaction with the Egyptian spiritual practices. And Egyptian spiritual practices were facilitated by Egyptian sorcerers and magicians, right, who made transactional exchanges with their gods for power. They would commit certain rituals or even make certain sacrifices. And the exchange was, you make to me.

The God says, you make to me a certain sacrifice, and I'll give you A certain kind of power. And then power is invested in those people. And they would use. The Egyptian sorcerers and magicians would use that power as a way to strike awe and fear into people and lift themselves up in the eyes of the people. And they would use that spiritual power to force their will onto the circumstances around them.

And this is what God calls spiritual sorcery. And he actually, in his law calls it a forbidden, idolatrous practice. Right? This is what people who worship idols do. And there is something about the stress and the grief and the loss of the last 38 years of wandering through the wilderness that.

That caused something to break in Moses. And Egypt rears its head in his actions.

Moses, when he strikes the rock, he's not simply following directions that he heard from God a long time ago. He's not simply making an upset. He is placing himself in the position of a sorcerer to use God's power on his own terms. And so when God says to Moses, the people watched you treat me like I was any other God. And he's telling Moses, you did the things that a sorcerer does, something in you reverted to trusting the things that you learned in Egypt, rather than trusting in my command.

And for all of Moses effort to prove to these people that he was not just some magician or not just some sorcerer, that it was the Lord who led them here. At the end, Moses loses his cool and used God's power and God's resources on his own terms. And so now God has to say to Moses, who has been faithful for so long, he has to say to Moses at this last part, I can't let you go into the land. And in fact, Moses reflects on this incident when he tells the story to the people in his final reflections in the book of Deuteronomy. He says.

He says, I pleaded with the Lord at that time, saying, o Lord God, you have only begun to show your servant, your greatness and your mighty hand. For what God is there in heaven or on earth who can do such mighty acts as yours? Verse 25. Please let me go over and see the good land beyond the Jordan, that good hill country and Lebanon, the place. Let me go to the place that you've promised me, Lord, would you please let me.

Let me cross over. But the Lord was angry with me because of you and would not listen to me. And the Lord said to me, enough from you. Do not speak to me of this matter again. Why not?

I thought the Lord was gracious and compassionate and abounding in steadfast love. Why would God not let him in. And this is where we need to realize that this is not just about what happened between Moses and God. This is about what the people witnessed. If Moses got away with this action, then every future generation that reads these words in scripture would have looked on that situation and concluded, well, Moses was not a prophet.

He was a sorcerer. And Yahweh is just like any other God. He's one who makes transactions with powerful people who know how to say the right things and do the right things. And you know what? When those people do those things, they get the things that they want.

If Moses had not faced any punishment for that, they would have concluded that Yahweh is just like all the other gods.

And so our main point this morning is using God's gifts our way makes him appear ordinary. And he is anything but ordinary. Our God is great. He is the name that is lifted up above every name. But when we use his gifts our way, it makes him appear as ordinary.

And people will only see how holy he is, how different he is, how other he is when we use his gifts his way. So verse 13. These are the waters of Meribah, where the people of Israel quarreled with the Lord. And through them, he showed himself as holy. It doesn't immediately pop out to you, but these are some of the saddest words in the entire Book of Numbers.

Because what it is saying is that every single person in this desert that God loved and God called, there is not one human being alive who is able to show God as holy. So the Lord, through his discipline on Moses, had to show himself as holy so that through the ages, people would know he is not like any other God. So what?

His holiness gets put on display as our minds are renewed. So if you've been following Jesus for, let's just say, more than two years, right? There's this reality that you've been bought with a price, that you've been given the free gift of God's mercy. And we should be put in this posture of asking ourselves, if people could just, like, watch a week of our life, what would they learn about our God? What would they observe about God from just watching that week?

Now, here's the thing. You're undoubtedly, as you think about, okay, well, what was my last week? You're gonna find failures and your last week, but what will people learn? And so this is where it's crucial that we observe these principles. In Romans 12:1 and 2.

Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. There is a direct correlation between the renewal of our thinking and the holiness that is then observable in our lives. And if you want people to see how Jesus is different in your life, you have to use his gifts, his way, which means that you have to live in a persistent posture of need and of coming near to him and of giving him the space to change the way that you think and process the world. Because when you think God's thoughts after him, it transforms you from the inside out.

That's what this is saying. When you let God renew your mind and it transforms you, you then become the kind of person who is able to display him as holy to the world around you. And so, at the risk of sounding incredibly over simplistic, if you want to display God as holy, you need to read your Bible and you need to pray, and you need to prayerfully read your Bible every day like your life depends on it. If you want God to see, or other people to see that your God is different than any other God, you will not meet that end without him renewing the way that you think. Because it's through the renewing of your mind that you are then able to display him in a transformed way, that his name is above every name.

So that's the first thing I would say to you. The second thing I would say to you is about our church, how our church will display God as holy. Prayer is the first and greatest work. So I just want to throw out there. We have been experiencing a lot of things to celebrate as a church.

We've been experiencing a season of ministry, fruitfulness as a church. So our vision, if you're relatively new here, you're like, okay, what are we about? What are we trying to do? Our vision that we have stated at this church is that we will become a conversion community. Now, I've talked about this several times, but it's easy, easy to forget.

What is a conversion community? A conversion community is a place where 10% of the people in our church are either exploring the faith or are new to the faith within the last year. And a conversion community is one more thing more than that, because sometimes a community can become like a place where new people are coming to faith all the time through the ministry of one person. And so there's an additional qualifier to this conversion community thing in which we say it's not going to be on the back of one person that those people will come to faith, but it's something that we're all going to share. And so what it means for us to be a conversion community is not only that we would see 10% of people new to the faith, but that every person in the church leads at least one person to Christ every 10 years.

That's our desire. We want to give you the tools to be the kind of person who knows how to influence your friends and neighbors and reveal God as holy to your friends and neighbors. So one person leads at least. Every person leads at least one person to Christ every 10 years. So why do I tell you all of that?

Because. So we average 75 people on Sunday mornings in our attendance. And this year, seven people in our church have led nine other people into trusting Christ to receive the gift of eternal life. So 7. I mean, that's very close to 10%, right?

10% of people here have led nine other people to trusting Christ and receiving the gift of eternal life, including. I just want, want you to look like somebody this week trusted Christ, somebody who calls this church home, believed in Jesus for the first time, and crossed the line of faith. In addition to that, God has brought many people to this church who may have spent years wandering from the Lord, but they've come back to seeking him with their whole heart. In the last year and a few weeks ago, we got to perform eight baptisms. We got to see several of you make a public proclamation of faith and following Jesus.

And so for the first time in my six years as a pastor in this church, we have put on display this year that reality of a conversion community. We have, you know, in a sense, at least for this year, become a conversion community, which is huge. We've met that vision. And so why do I say that? Why do I emphasize that?

Because in the church world, if you share the stories about what's happening, there's always these questions about, hey, you know, what system did you build to make that happen? Or what leadership strategy did you employ to make that happen? I would say, like strategies and systems and structures, all of those things have their place.

But oftentimes what can happen is that the name or the organization or the church or the system or the structure can be lifted as the thing which caused the other things to happen. Right? And so faith gets put then in the abilities of a certain leader or in the organizational structure of the church. And I just say, in the last year, the most significant change that we made as a church is to begin taking prayer more seriously. Right?

We emphasized prayer. We took prayer more seriously. So how do we do that? Well, last year, we did this thing last year, at the beginning, in October of last year, we did this thing called Prayers for the Harvest, right? Where we encourage everybody.

Can you find one person in your life who you want us to pray for for the next 30 days for the next month and pray for them to come to Jesus? So you commit to praying for that one person. But then every day here at the church, there's a person who is scheduled to come and pray for all of the names that we're praying for. So that was prayers for the harvest. So we did that.

And then I just want you to know, if you're here this morning and you are a part of Crossroads and you've ended up at our church or you have kids who are a part of Crossroads, there is a man in this church who took it upon himself to pray for your kids, but by name, every single day of the last school year. And not only that, but to pray for your family that God would intervene in the life of your family. And so I just want to encourage you towards that. There is prayer that's been taking place. And the third thing I would point to you is that there has been an increase in our church of personal prayer for the lost of individuals in our church, personal prayer for lost people and obedience to God here.

All of those things have been taking place. So I would tell you, yeah, we might imply certain strategies and we might send certain people with certain giftings to do certain things. But my heart for this place is that what is most said of us in any season where we're experiencing ministry fruit is simply that we prayed and we did what God said and God did the activity. We didn't rely on worldly tools or worldly systems. We trusted God to use his gifts his way.

So would you pray with me?

So, God, my desire then is that for those who are experiencing just this desire, that people would see more of the holiness of the Lord in their lives. Maybe friends and neighbors would be more impacted by being able to observe how our God is different from any other God. Lord, that you would lead them into establishing the rhythms or the patterns that they need to establish in order to see their minds renewed, in order to be transformed from the inside out. God, that you would lead all of us into a place where we become reliant on seeking you in prayer and seeking you through your word and receiving the gifts that you have and deploying those gifts on your terms and not on our own terms. So, God, we trust you for these things.

God, we also realize that in our desire to display you as holy. We often fall short. We recognize that Moses, as a leader who did so well for so long, but finally failed. He fell short.

And all of this draws our attention to. Yeah, indeed. Our own lack of perfection. Our own falling short in our need for one who did not fail. One who perfectly displayed you as holy.

And so may you meet us by your Holy Spirit in this time of communion, that you would lift and exalt the name of Jesus in our hearts. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.