Essentials | Week 1

And so we're gonna be talking about Jesus. We're gonna be talking about the Holy Spirit, about the scripture. But what we're gonna kick off today is talk about God. God, specifically God the Father but His nature and who He is because, there's this quote by a man named A. W. Tozer.

He's a theologian who wrote in the 1900s and what he said is, What comes into your mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you.

What comes into your mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you. I think if we all closed our eyes and we thought of who God is and what He's like and how He interacts with us and how He acts towards us and what what are His temperaments,

I bet you there's hundreds of different versions of what we would call God in our minds, yet there is only one true God. And so my hope is after today as we walk out of here, all of us walk out with a deeper, richer understanding of who are we talking about when we talk about God? What kind of being are we referring to?

So we're gonna be in Exodus chapter 34 verse four. So if you have your Bibles, I'd love it if you'd open up and join me in reading. Exodus chapter 34 verse four. As you're turning there in your bibles, I'm gonna pray for us and we'll jump in. Father God, thank you so much that we get to be here, we get to seek you,

we get to worship you, and you reveal yourself to us. God, I pray that, today would just be a special day where you show yourself in a new and a fresh way that we would be able to see you clearly. God, produce in us a hunger and a desire to draw near to you and to know you. Know you more. Speak powerfully today so that, God,

our lives would grow more and more into something that looks like you. In Jesus' name, everybody said, amen. So I grew up in what I would call like an interdenominational home. What that means is so my stepmom, she was Catholic,

and her step or her daughter, so my stepsister and my half brother, they were Catholics. So on Sundays, they'd always go to the Catholic church. And my dad and myself and my sister, we were like nondenominational

baptist, similar to a church like this at Rock Point. And so we would always go to like a nondenominational church, and then we'd all come back for lunch and eat and talk about church.

But every Easter, we'd always switch up. We always wanted to do Easter together, but we would switch up whose church we went to on Easter. And before

baskets, we'd have to get up in our Easter, you know, outfits and we'd all have to go to church. So we were deciding which church we were going to go to. That was like ten years old and we we decided we're gonna go to the Catholic church this year. And so we go there and I don't know if you've ever been to a Catholic church but man it is far more physical than our churches are.

It's like they got these little kneeling things and you kneel and then you sit and then you stand and then you kneel and stand and sit. By the time you hit communion, you've worked up a sweat. And so we're we're towards the end of the mass and

and and we're about to take what they call Eucharist and what we would call communion. And it's like I've done this plenty of times in my other church, know, but at my church, they've got like tables all around the church and and you go and you get the little chick lit cracker and the little shot glass of grape juice and you take it back to your seat and you pray and you think about what Jesus did for your life and

how he sacrificed and then you take it. And so we just get up in line and I'm ready to go take my communion. We're in like apparently, nobody told me this but apparently if you're not Catholic, it's basically illegal for you to take it. So

I'm in line, you're supposed to do this and you get a blessing but nobody told me that. I get up to the priest, they don't give me the grape juice because apparently it's the hard stuff.

And then they only give me the cracker so I take the cracker and I'm walking back to my seat to go. I'm thinking and I'm praying and I'm asking you know, God thank you for what you've done. And so I'm halfway

to the back of the room. It's a it's a I mean it's a huge like church. It's probably as big as this room. I'm halfway back and I feel a tap on my shoulder. And I look around and everyone in the whole church is looking at me, eyes wide open with their mouth open.

And the priest had followed me all the way back halfway across the church and he was angry and he tapped me on the shoulder and he said, The body of Christ. And I didn't know what that meant so I ate the cracker because it seemed like the right thing to do.

And he was mad and he stomped back to the front to give it you know the communion out and we get in my parents minivan and my stepmom is mortified. She is so mad. She's like, Hunter what are you thinking? Why would you do that? You're not even supposed to take it. That is literally God's body. You could have done something to it. My dad is like, how

was he supposed to know? It's just a symbol. It's a symbol of what Jesus did. And she said, it's not a symbol. It's his body. It's God's body. And my dad is like, it's just a symbol. He didn't know. And I'm thinking, I don't know if I'm gonna get my Easter basket this year.

What comes into our minds when we think about God is vitally vitally vitally important. Important. See, that was a small nuance on our understanding of God, of how he presents himself within communion. Yet it erupted into this huge issue of you don't take God's body

or it's a symbol. It's a You see, it is vitally important for us to understand who we're talking about when we're talking about God because even the slightest nuance, the slightest difference can cause big, big, big life issues And the way that we live our life,

what comes into our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us. And so today what we're going be looking at in the scriptures is then who is God? Who is he? How do I know I have the right view of God?

Because my big idea, the thing that I really want us to see in the text today is this, our lives are shaped by the God we believe in. Our lives are shaped by the God that we believe in. If we have a good and a right and a true view of God, our lives are gonna be lived out in a good and right and true way.

But if we have a distorted view of who God is, if we have a wrong view of God is, that is going to distort the life that we're gonna live out. So how do we know? How do we know that we have the right view of God? One of the most beautiful things of Christianity,

what we're gonna see in the scriptures today, is God doesn't leave us guessing. He reveals Himself to us. He shows himself to us. And this, what we're gonna read today is actually the old testament equivalent of John three sixteen.

It is the verse that everybody knew, that everybody quoted when you're talking about God. Oh, we all know this verse about God. And they would quote it over. Everybody knew this verse about it was the most quoted Old Testament verses that are quoted by the Old Testament.

And so it's vitally important to understanding who God is and what's beautiful about this is it's not someone guessing, not someone just noticing. It's God revealing himself and speaking, This is who I am.

And so here's what we're gonna see in Exodus chapter 34 verse four. It's a story about Moses and he sees God. But before we get there, the whole book of Exodus is this

journey about how God is setting His people free from slavery in Egypt. And so He sends Moses and He says, Let my people go. And Pharaoh's like, Nope. And so they send the 10 plagues and finally Pharaoh lets God's people go out of slavery. And so they go and they get up to the Red Sea and they realize pharaoh decides, I

want my slaves back. And so he sends his army after the Israelites. And Moses, he holds up a staff and God's power moves in and splits the Red Sea and all of Israel gets to walk through in the middle on dry ground.

And the, Pharaoh's armies they chase them through. The the Israelites get through the water and then the water collapses in on Pharaoh's armies and wipes them out. And they're celebrating like, God saved us. He rescued us. And so they go to Mount Sinai, this mountain where God has showed himself to Moses.

And so the presence, the manifest presence of God comes down in this cloud of fire and He speaks to the people of Israel and He tells the people. He begins creating the nation of Israel and He says, You shall have no other gods before me.

Don't make any images of me. Don't kill. Don't covet. Don't commit adultery. He gives them all of these commandments. And it says the voice of God thunders over the people. And Moses is like, Isn't that amazing? And they're like, We didn't love that. Because they're freaked out.

They've never encountered a god like this. They saw the gods in Egypt where they have the little statue of an animal and you pray to it and you worship it and hopefully it gives you something good. But we've never encountered a god like that that just speaks to us. So they say, Hey Moses, how about this? How about you go talk to God and whatever He tells you, you tell us and we'll do that.

Let's do that. And so the nation of Israel, they stay at the base of Mount Sinai and Moses goes up into the manifest presence of God and God is writing the 10 commandments on these stone tablets and Moses is up there and and he's up there for forty days and forty nights and the people of Israel are down there like,

he's been gone a while. I don't even know if that guy's alive anymore. Like, I don't And so what they decide to do is like, okay, we all agree that we're uncomfortable with this God.

He's just a lot. So everybody give me your earrings. And they they take all the golden earrings from all the people and they melt them down and they make this little tiny golden calf,

like the size of a stuffed animal. And Aaron, this guy Aaron, he's the the priest and he stands up in front of everyone and he says, Israel, this is the God that brought you through the sea. This is the God that saved you from Egypt. This is Yahweh. And they take this little golden calf

and they make him into a shape, they make him into a symbol that they feel comfortable with. So rather than listening to how God has shown himself and revealed himself, they decide to take this image of God and they distort it.

Breaking the second commandment that God's given them. God is upset. Moses comes down. He's so angry. He takes the stone tablets that God has written the 10 commandments on. He throws them and shatters them. He shaves down the little golden calf and makes everybody drink it, drink water with the golden flakes in it. And, he calls everybody to repentance. And so as we jump into the text Moses, he decides he's gonna go back up the mountain and beg God to forgive them. And that is when God,

seeing that they've distorted the image of him, decides he's gonna show and reveal exactly who He is. Exodus 34 verse four, So Moses chiseled out two tablets of stone like the first ones. Early in the morning he climbed Mount Sinai

as the Lord had commanded him and he carried the two stone tablets in his hands. Then the Lord came down in a cloud and stood there with him and he called out his own name, Yahweh. Now that's so important. God calls out his own name, Yahweh. In Exodus chapter three, we hear for the first time God giving his name.

Because Moses is like, All right God, you want me to go set your people free? When they're asking, they're gonna ask like what God is asking for his people. What should I tell them? And he says, Yahweh. Which literally translates to, I am that I am. So as Moses Sorry, as God is revealing

who he is to Moses, the first thing he says is, I am. We refer to God as the great I am. The first thing that I want us to point out that is so vitally important when we get an accurate picture of who God is, is the first thing is God is. He is. He is the great I am. He is the only thing that is self existent

in the universe. When we say he's the great I am, we're saying God is the eternal uncreated creator. There was never a point in history when God did not exist. There's nothing before God. There's nothing after. There will never be a point when He ceases to exist. He simply is.

Everything was created by God through the power of God and all things are held together by Him. He literally spoke the universe, spoke the world, spoke the cosmos into existence with the voice of His mouth. God is. He is the greatest being. He is so high above us. He is

so much greater than us that we can't even wrap our minds around him fully. The psalmist writes, Your ways are higher than my ways. Your thoughts are higher than my thoughts. What he's saying is, God is so much greater than I could ever, ever, ever be. He's a greater being than us. It's kind of like my dog. He knows

I love him. He knows that I'm gonna show up and I'm gonna feed him, but he has no understanding

about how I have to go to work every day to provide for a home and I have to I also am motivated to provide for my wife and my daughter and and how, you know, I go to work and I feel called by God to be a pastor and but sometimes I get into trouble and I know I say things I shouldn't because you know and

sometimes I interact and I have a big ego because you know like there are some times that I say wrong things and he doesn't understand like how my father wounds affect me and how that he doesn't understand any of that because

he he understands who I am, but he'll never wrap his mind around everything I am. Now multiply multiply that by infinity, and that's close to how we relate to God. We understand who he is, but we'll never be able to fully wrap our minds around him. Like one of the hardest things for us to understand about God

is he reveals himself in what we call the trinity. We know God is one. We know there is one God. Deuteronomy four:six says, Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God. The Lord is one. There is one God. Yet He presents Himself in three persons.

We see the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And the Father's not the Son and the Son's not the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit's not the Father. But the father's God, the son is God, and the spirit is God.

We see the trinity all appear at the baptism of Jesus where Jesus is baptized down into the water. Jesus the son, he comes out. God the father says, This is my son in whom I'm well pleased. And we see the Holy Spirit descending like a dove. They're all there. But he's a greater being than us. Somehow he's one God,

three persons. So don't think like one plus one plus one. Think one times one times one. He's one God, three persons. He infinitely greater than us. And I know like at this point we're thinking like, okay God is great. Why does it matter which God I choose?

Why does it matter which God I pick? Isn't there kind of like a piece of where, you know, what if they're all true? What if they're all the same? And the truth is, man, our lives are shaped by the God we believe in. We've been created in the image of God.

He's created you in His image. And if you want to know the life we're called to live, that's going to be determined by what we believe, who we believe God is. Because if we're going to reflect the very character and nature and life of God, then we have to have a correct understanding of who God is.

What does that mean for our life right now? So if I understand that God is the great I am, He's the one who holds all things together, He created everything, What does that mean for me? Well, I think the beautiful thing is if God is the I am, that makes me I am not. If God is the one who's holding everything together,

then praise God, that means I am not. If God's the one who is completely in control,

then that means I am not. If God's the one who says that I have inherent value because I've been I've been made in His image and He's the one who gives me value, praise God, that means I am not the one who gives myself value. I don't need to go out and try to prove that I'm worth being valued

because He's the one who gives it to me. If he's the great I am and he's the one who lavishes his love on us and and deems me worthy of love, praise God, that means I am not the person that needs to go out and earn being loved. If God is the I am, that praise God, that means I am not.

And there's so much beauty in surrendering to the God who holds all things together. There's so much beauty in surrendering to the power of God. The understanding that I'm gonna let God be God and I'm not gonna take away from your job description, God. I'm just gonna let you be you and I'm gonna be surrendered to you.

I was getting my haircut the other day and I go to, you know, the place I normally get my haircut, the haircut place. And I went in and there was a bar my normal barber, he wasn't like wasn't he there. And so I I had this other guy and I was talking to him. I'll just call him Josh because I I didn't ask him. But so

I was talking to him and I, you know, I whenever I'm getting my haircut, I'm like trying to share Jesus because like you're trapped. You know? And so my strategy is I always share I always ask about what people do for work.

And then, like, you know, how'd you get into this? You like cutting hair? And then when it gets quiet and awkward and there's nothing else to ask inevitably, they ask, what do you do for work? Then I got them right where I want them, you know? It's like, Funny you should ask. I'm a pastor. And he said, Oh.

I said, Yep. I was like, All right, there's something there. There's something there. And so I said, Do you have any, like, religious experience or religious background? He's like, Yeah, my wife and I, our family, we're actually Muslim.

I was like, okay. Yeah. Like, tell me about that. And he goes on, and and what's so interesting is he's talking about how how there are so many misconceptions about him and the Muslim people, and and and people have, like, stereotypes

that that they place on him. And what was fascinating, he's starting to get agitated as he's telling me and I'm like, Please be careful with the scissors. But what he's telling me is like I had a Christian guy in my chair just the other day and he was saying like, Oh, guys worship Allah?

That's the God you worship? And he's like, Allah is just the Arabic word for God. It just means God. And what he said is, We're saying the same word. We're saying the same thing. We believe in God. And I was like, Isn't that interesting That we have the same word for this being

but we're talking about two completely different beings. Two completely different gods. We both are saying God but we mean completely different things. Because God, He's not only the uncreated Creator of all things who reveals Himself to us, but He has attributes. He has things about Himself that are true to His character.

And when we talk about attributes of God, we're not talking about like attributes like we talk about like a human. Like, you know, I'd say an attribute about myself is I am funny. It's like people in the three agreed, so

I'm funny. And what that means is, you know, in most circumstances and as long as nothing's wrong and then I tend to be funny. Woah, what was that? I tend to be funny. But what an attribute means when we're talking about God is that he is the definition of that thing. If God is good, he is the definition of goodness.

If God is is is is caring, he is the definition of care. When we talk about attributes of God, it is the definition of who He is completely. He's holistically these things. So let's see the attributes that God talks about Himself. In verse six it says, The Lord passed in front of Moses calling out Yahweh, name

not not in

to a thousand believer generations. I forgive iniquity, the rebellion, and sin. Man, when you ask God what Tell us about who you are and your attributes, the first thing he says is that He's loving. And what I want us to pull out of here is we serve a God when we talk about God, God is love.

It's not like when He, you know, if as long as He's in a good mood and He's not hangry and He's had a good day, then He's loving. He's unchanging. He's the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. God is the very definition of love. That's who he is. You see as we break down these words like it says, the God of compassion

and mercy. In the original language that word compassion literally is related to a mother's womb. God is saying, Man I care about people in a similar way that a mother cares for her newborn baby. Like just desperately in love. He is slow to anger. You realize we don't serve a gotcha God.

We don't serve a God who's just following you around looking over your shoulder and as soon as you mess up, He's gotcha. He's slow to anger. He's patient with us. This is interesting. It says, And filled with unfailing love and faithfulness. That's actually single word in the original language, Hebrew. It's this word, chesed.

Chesed. If you don't spit on someone when you say it, you're not doing it right. Chesed. And what's fascinating about this word is we have nothing like it in the English language. It's this term that has something to do with like a promise, covenant based, unbelievable loyalty, generous, overflowing, affectionate love.

That's what God says. He's like, this is who he is. He's a God, He's a Chesed love God. He's a It's promise based. It's not situation based. It's not based on how good we are. It's chesed love.

It's generous. It's an outpouring. It's not an emotion but it comes out emotional because it's just so intertwined with who you are. It's chesed love. I remember, man, when I had my daughter, that was the first picture.

I started to understand this chesed love for the first time. So my daughter, she she's 15 now. She was born 04/17/2005. Actually, have a pic 2025. Sorry. I have a picture of her. So that's her. I know. She's precious. She gets it from her dad. What can I say?

And so that's my daughter Jojo. And man, I remember the day she was born. My wife had a c section and I was in there with the scrubs and and and so excited and nervous and having no idea. And I was so ready to see my beautiful little daughter and they pull this fish looking thing out of my wife.

And I was like jump scare and my wife she is just out of it and she's like, How does she look?

And I asked God for forgiveness. I said, She's beautiful.

And oh my gosh, that little girl, she had my just heart around her little finger. And she's grown up and she's grown into this beautiful little monster, man. Like, she's

walking now and she's getting into everything and she's pulling everything out and somehow someone taught her the word no and I'm trying to figure out where she learned that word.

And oh my gosh, and I'm so proud of her. Like she's walking and she eats so well and she's growing and she's learning but then she's pulling people's hair. It's like this simultaneous moment of, I'm so frustrated with you and I'm so in love with you. Can I tell you my favorite part of being a dad? It's every

night, it doesn't happen every night, But, you know, after dinner, and we get her in the bath, and we give her a bottle, and we get her in her sleep sack, and we read her two books, and we turn off the lights. Sometimes

it doesn't happen. And she's squirming, and she's not interested, and she's pushing away. And I just put her in the crib. But every once in a while, my favorite moment of being a dad is she'll rest her little head into my chest, and she'll lay into me and allow her head to fall with my breath. Oh, it's the best.

I'd put up with a thousand days of tantrums and nose and all the just for that moment. Because it has nothing to do with what she's done. Man, I'm so proud when she does good things. Yeah, she she struggles, but more than all of that, I just desperately love her and there's nothing she could do to change that.

That's the father's chesed love. That is just a small picture of God's unbelievable, infinite, loyal, generous, overflowing, affectionate love for us. That's the kind of God we serve. That's the kind of God we're talking about when we say God. He is unbelievably in love with us.

Growing up, I didn't understand this picture of God. I believed in a God who was perpetually frustrated in my failure.

And I remember there was a time when I like from eighth grade to freshman year, literally every night before I went to bed, I'd be like, Alright God, thank you for my blessings and thank you for all this. Also, I would say the salvation prayer just to make sure. Like if I messed it up that day,

I just wanna cinch that back up. Because I had this idea of a God that didn't actually have this loyal, affectionate love for me, but it was a conditional kind of love God. But that's not the God we serve. So for some of us, you're in a similar place that I am or that I was.

That you believe God's love for you is conditional based on your actions rather than who he is, his unbelievable chesed love. And when you mess up and when you feel like God might be frustrated with you, you get distant from him rather than running to him. My encouragement

for you in your life, man, when you know you've screwed up, when you know you've messed up, when you know you feel distant from him rather than walking away, what if you just said, God, I trust in your Chesed love, and I just want to be close with you again.

I know that you are the definition of love. I know you're compassionate and merciful.

Would you help me feel that love?

But God doesn't stop there as He's describing Himself. He continues on and it's vitally important that we continue reading on.

The latter part of verse seven it says, But I do not excuse the guilty. I lay the sins of the parents upon their children and grandchildren. The entire family is affected. Even children in the third and fourth generations. First time I read that, I was like, God, I feel like you kind of ruined that.

You know, it started so good and you had all these good things that you're compassionate and merciful and just. I'm like, Yes. It's like, But I will not forget. I'm like, Woah, woah. But let me explain what he's saying because sometimes it can get a little lost in translation. When he's saying that I will

hold you know the third and fourth generations even the children of the third and fourth generations. What he's not saying is, Man, if my grandfather sinned, then I'm gonna be held accountable even though I didn't do anything wrong. That's not what he's saying. What he's saying is, As long as cycles of sin continue,

I am going to be just and I'm gonna hold people accountable for their sins. Because he understands and he knows that sin is cyclical. That for whatever reason parents, people who have parents who are alcoholics tend to have children who become alcoholics. People who grew up being hurt and abused tend to grow up being hurtful

and abusing. For whatever reason there is a cycle of sin and God is saying that I'm going to hold people accountable because what God is revealing, and this is so vitally important that we get this, is that God is just. He is just. He is the definition of justice. He is holistically and completely and always just.

That he is not okay, he is not fine with people hurting each other and living in sin. He's not okay. He's completely righteous and he will make all things right. I remember growing up, so I have a brother. He is six and a half years younger than me and so I was quite a bit older than him.

When I was like in ninth grade and he was like in third grade,

every day after school we would always go jump on the trampoline. That was like our thing we did. So after school we're jumping and we'd always make up these stupid games like, alright, you gotta get the sock off of you and put it on your hand. And then we were playing a stupid game. And Ira was always winning because I was much bigger than him, and it was very fun for me.

And at one point, I don't know what happened, but he's like, something snapped. And he got so upset and I don't know if he saw this on some MMA TV show or John Cena or what, but he jumps up and roundhouse kicks me in the side of the face. And I fall on the trampoline and I'm simultaneously

thinking that hurts so bad and also he's gonna get in so much trouble and I'm so excited for it. And so I go inside and my parents are at the table and they're doing something and I was like holding my face and I'm like, alright everyone, listen up. Jack just roundhouse kicked me in the face.

Go ahead. Have your way with him. And my parents said, Well, I'm sure you probably deserved it for some reason, Hunter. Just

And I realized at that moment that I had the worst parents on planet earth. No. They were probably right to be fair but why I say that is all of us have this this intrinsic understanding that that if someone is to be good they have to be just. If my parents are good parents they have to deal with the wrongdoing.

If my parents are good parents they have to deal with the fact that my brother just hurt me. If you're good, you'll deal with it. And all of us have this intrinsic value because we've been made in the image of a God who is the definition of justice. All of us have a desire for justice.

Now all of us have done some things wrong and we don't like the fact that justice is going to be towards us. But let encourage you for a moment because some of us who don't understand the complete justice of God, you miss out on a beautiful attribute of what our God speaks to us. Some of us, we've grown up

believing that nobody is going to take care of us. We've grown up believing that the people who have hurt us and take advantage of us and slandered us and gossiped toward us and what tried to hurt us, that they got away with it.

And the truth of what we can take from what we know about God is that is never going to happen. Because God is a God who by His very nature will make all things right. He will make everything right. And a person who hurt you, a person who took advantage of you or tried to they won't get away with it.

You can trust in a God who's going to make all things right. Now when we see the love of God and the just and I don't want to get ahead to next week but it's just so good.

God has to punish the sin within each and every one of us but he's not content being separated from those who want to be with him. So that's why he sent Jesus. And he poured out his wrath on all of the sin on all of the world so that whoever believes in Jesus who was our atoning sacrifice

will be saved and set free from the wrath and punishment of their sin. And that's the beauty of the justice of God. He is good. Therefore, he is just.

We have to understand that God is holy and he is righteous and he is just because otherwise we can walk around assuming that God doesn't care about the way we live our lives. And that is simply not true. He is perfectly, completely just and when we understand that that's who God is, that he is holy,

that he doesn't just let people get away with it and he calls us into, he shapes our lives into holy lives because our lives are shaped by the God that we believe in.

So if that's where you've been at, if have forgotten or if you haven't set your eyes on the God who is just, our God who is completely just, and my encouragement to you in the next week is in those moments where you realize you feel the conviction of the Holy Spirit drawing you back to closeness with God,

And there's this beautiful thing God invites us into called repentance. And what repentance is is I'm gonna turn away from the sin that I was just participating in, and I'm gonna turn back to the father, and I'm gonna ask for forgiveness, and I will be forgiven.

But I'm gonna turn away because I know that God is just and he is not okay with me living in this sin. And for some of us we need to realize that man we've been forgiven by a just God. We're harboring and we're holding on to this need for justice by holding on to unforgiveness.

And part what Jesus calls us to is, Man, give up your right to have immediate justice because God is the ultimate judge and forgive that person and trust that God's gonna take care of it. Some of us, we need to engage in forgiveness.

So what's how do we know we have the right view of God? How do we know that we haven't just made this golden calf of a God that we're comfortable with?

I think the answer is actually right here in the text. Moses is the perfect example when he sees God reveal himself that he sees that he's talking to the great I am. That he's he's talking to the God who is love. The God who is the definition of justice. Look at his reaction. Verse eight, it says, Moses immediately

threw himself to the ground and worshipped. At this point in his life, Moses is probably around 80 years old. And it says, man, his head hit the dirt. When he saw how big, how great, how amazing God is, he couldn't help but get low and worship, to humble himself and worship the God that he saw rightly.

See, when we see God right and real for the first time, there's this weird thing that happens that simultaneously I see how dirty and sinful and broken that I am. That I am not worthy to be to draw close to a holy and perfect and amazing God. Simultaneously, we are overwhelmed with the unbelievable, unmistakable, chesed

love of God. See Moses, he's simultaneously dealing with this, I'm so not worthy yet you count me worthy. You see this picture of God is so much greater than this little comfortable God that all of us create in our own minds. But the only right reaction when we see God for who he really is is to worship.

Is to worship with our lives. So I'll finish with this. There's a man named Edgar Mitchell. He was on the Apollo fourteen mission. He was the sixth man on the moon. After Neil Armstrong, they people really don't care, but he was the sixth. So what happened in his life was fascinating

because he had lived his life. He was a aeronautical engineer. He's brilliant. He studied obviously space and the stars and he had a really good understanding. He was a pilot and he got to go to the moon and something happened on his descent back to earth.

He was looking out the little window of the spacecraft and as it rotated around, he had learned all about the stars. He had learned all about the planet. He learned all about the sun. He could wrap his He understood it. But something clicked when he saw the stars

and the earth and the moon and the sun in all of its glory. He explains to a reporter that, man, it was more than just knowing about it. It was encountering it. I realized in a moment that that somehow

whatever created this universe, what whatever created all the the millions of stars also created me and I'm connected in some crazy way to this entire universe. And he said that moment in that space station, that understanding, that seeing the universe, the glory of God for the

first time in a real way changed his life forever. He went back and he he started an entire institute of trying to understand the nature of the universe and man our science can't even wrap our minds around the truth of the there's got to be more to the truth of the universe than what science can can explain.

Because he had an encounter where he saw for the first time and encountered the truth. And he he was never the same after that. I think for us, we can come to church and we can make these comfortable pictures, these comfortable sculptures of God that that we're good with.

And we know things about God. We know he's good. We know he loves us. We know he's not a fan of our sin. We know that conceptually.

But what if we allowed God to reveal all of himself? If we took these little dumb idols and we threw them away and we said, God, we want to see you clearly. We want all of you. We want our lives to never be the same. We wanna we

wanna see the God that is completely holy and just. We wanna see the God that is that is the definition of love. God, I believe you spoke the cosmos into existence with the word of your mouth and you also somehow, someway wanna speak to me in the same voice.

Man, when we encounter God like that, more than just cerebrally knowing but encountering, our lives will never be the same because our lives are shaped by the God we believe in.

So we're gonna do what Moses did. We're gonna worship this God. So I'm gonna ask you to stand to your feet and we're gonna have a time of worship. Some of we're gonna sing these true words about who God is and for some of us, man, I just invite you to praise God with everything

inside of you. Some of us though, I think we need to just stay silent. I think we need to hear the words that that are being sung. We need to meditate and we need to ask God, Father God, would you show me who you are for the first time? And I'm sorry that I've I've I've made this

this little false image of you. Would you show me yourself? Because God, we want we want to be encountered. We want to never be the same. And that happens when we see God clearly. Father God, we know you are good.

We know you are loving. We know you are you're not just loving and just you are love. You are justice. And God, you are the great I am. And you want to show yourself. You want to reveal yourself. So God, I'm just asking in faith, God, would you show us who you are in a real way?

Would your Holy Spirit open our eyes to see you

We're in in midst

gonna gonna worship you because you are the God who deserves it. We're

from heaven above with wings. Don't power in love. Our God is an awesome God. And praise our God here in this place tonight, church. Amen. Thanks for joining us online today. Be sure to follow us on social media to stay up to date with everything happening here at Rock Point.