Names of God | Week 4 | Daniel Goulding | Full Service

I'm not much of a fighter, but I do have a one and o fighting career with one knockout. So don't try me, alright? The

reason that I start there is the nation of Israel we're gonna see in Exodus 17 gets into their first fight. And as soon as I read it this week, I was like, man, I've only ever had one fight in my whole life, and it was against one of my best friends since second grade.

And I don't know if you had friends like that, but I had friends that would go and schedule

fights after school, we're gonna meet at the park at four. And I'm like, why? Are you guys mad at each other? No, we just like to fight. And I'm like, you realize that somebody's gonna hit you, right? Like that hurts? Like that's It was like trying out for freshman football for me. I like went and tried out and then a dude tackled me and I was like, that hurts. I'm gonna stick to golf. I sit in a golf cart, halfway through a lady brings me refreshments and snacks,

like this is more my vibe, know. All that to say, I was not a fighter. When people tried to get all crazy, I would do this wild thing called walking away, you know.

But me and my friends would orchestrate these boxing matches. We'd throw on boxing gloves, but we're all like really good friends and mostly just messing around. But

every now and then, it would get a little bit squirrely and get out of hand. Know what I mean? Like where those of us who have kids, you've watched this with your kids. Like my kids will be in the living room and they're wrestling and playing and it's fun and everybody's laughing until one of them goes a little bit too far. Right? And then the other one, it's like it just becomes a full blown fight and then now you've gotta intervene.

And in these boxing matches, every now and then, it would get a little bit squirrely and we'd have to break people up and remember, hey, we're all friends here. This is supposed to be recreation. Nobody needs to die. And then we'd put new two people back into the ring and we'd go about boxing. Well, this one particular day, I ended up boxing my buddy named Brett. And again, Brett's been one of my best friends since second grade. We grew up on streets next to each other. We lived at each other's houses and to this day is still one of my really good friends.

But Brett was that guy in high school that nobody

liked. Not because he wasn't likable, but because he just had a six pack all the time. Like how are you buff all the time? You don't work out, you eat worse than all of us, but you just are ripped all the time. Right? He was the best athlete out of all of us. He was faster than us. He was better at every sport.

And the other part about Brett is he had the world's tallest pain tolerance. This guy just felt no pain. There was one point in our high school career, he broke his leg

and he walked on it for four days before he even went to the doctor to think, hey, something's wrong with this thing. It's like, dude, your leg was broken for four days. All that to say, when they were orchestrating who was gonna box who, I was not signing up to box Bret. Right? At this season in my life, I'm like six'two. I weigh one hundred pounds soaking wet. I've got braces. I look like Sid. Like I am not in a position where I need to be punched in the face. Okay?

Somehow in my parents' backyard, my buddies convinced me to fight Brett. And I am absolutely terrified. This is like the ultimate David and Goliath,

but I'm David in this scenario. Right? Like I don't want to fight this Goliath guy. But lo and behold, we start boxing and I remember he's my friend. You know, he's not gonna kill me and I really only have one goal in this boxing match and that's to not die. But what happens in boxing is once you get punched in the face,

everything kinda changes. And all of sudden you go, wait, you're not my friend. You're kinda my enemy. Right? And this happens with Brett and I. We start off, we're just having fun. And then both of us throw a couple punches, and all of a sudden this thing kind of turns into a bit of a fight. But I know in the back of my mind, I'm starting to panic. Like he's going to literally kill me. And I know that my friends are gonna come and break it up. Right? This is what happens. It gets a little bit out of hand, they'll come and stop it. So I'm waiting for my friends to intervene as Brett's getting all fired up and getting ready to murder me. But my friends don't come. And so I'm like, where are these guys? I have to maintain some dignity so I can't just like scream and run. Right? So I sit there inside, I'm kind of panicking. And I start to realize like nobody's gonna break this thing up. I've gotta figure out what to do. And I remember that I do have one advantage against Brett. I'm like twice as tall as him. Right? So as long as I stay away from him and I use my reach and my length, he can't get close enough to me. And all I've gotta do is hit him with one decent shot and hopefully I can end this thing. And so me and my buddy are fighting

and the perfect shot gets set up. He kinda comes in, he tries to swing and he misses. And I just, with everything I have, I hit him with all the force that I have. And it's not a ton, but it was a pretty decent punch. And as soon as I hit him with it, again, my fear was like, now I'm gonna activate the beast and he's gonna destroy me. Like, he just goes like this and he just stops.

I'm like, what's gonna happen next? And then all of sudden he just goes And the funniest part, I swear to you, if I could call him and put him on speakerphone right now and say, hey bro, what happened in my backyard when we boxed when we were in high school? He would say, oh, when I fainted and I fell down. Like,

to each their own, but I've never seen somebody get who fainted and fell down and didn't put their hands down. But regardless, I knocked him out. This dude falls in my parents' backyard in all the grass. His whole body lands in the grass except for his face.

His face lands on the sidewalk that is right next to my parents' backyard. Yeah, it was not awesome. Basically from a free stand, takes a nose dive teeth first into the concrete. Yeah, that was my reaction too.

He just lays there, doesn't move. And I was like, this whole time I was worried about dying and I'm pretty sure I just killed him, right?

And we turn him over and this dude is like spitting up blood and spitting out teeth and doesn't know what month it is. He's literally crying like, what happened? Why am I here? And I'm like, dude, you were in the backyard and you were walking down the steps and you tripped and fell and I don't know, was crazy.

Know, like the whole time I'm still convinced he's gonna come alive and just absolutely murder me. And we end up having to take him home. We try to sell the whole story of him tripping down the stairs to his parents, and his dad's like, come on, just tell me. Somebody kicked his butt. Like, just tell me what happened. So we tell him, were boxing. And side point, the really cool part of the story is that Brett, for his senior year present from my parents' homeowners insurance, he got a whole new set of teeth. So that was kind of exciting.

Apparently, insurance covers recreational boxing just like they do baseball in the backyard. Who knew, right? And you're sitting here like, wait, are we still in church? Like what happened here? Why are we talking about fighting? The reason that I start there is because I think it illustrates perfectly

what we're about to see the nation of Israel, God's people in the Old Testament, have to learn about what it means to engage in battle. Because in Exodus 17, we're gonna see the nation of Israel getting their very first fight. And just like me,

they had become used to, if it gets too scary, if it gets to a point where I don't know what to do, somebody else will intervene. Somebody else will step in and stop this. For the nation of Israel, it was always God. God would come in and do the fighting for them. Up until this point in their existence,

they just knew that God would come in and stop life when it got scary. But in Exodus 17, he doesn't do that. And in their very first real fight with a real army that is way stronger than them, way bigger than them, they are going to have to learn a really vital lesson. That yes, sometimes God will fight for us,

but oftentimes the way that you and I are called to engage in battle when it comes to the spiritual realms is God actually wants to empower you and God will actually fight through you. You have advantages. You are not the underdog like you think you are all the time. Just like myself,

I had reached. There was things that I could use to become the one that had the advantage. What we're going to look at today, if you're taking notes, here's the big idea that I want us to spend a few moments looking at. That God fights for us, yes and amen, but he also wants to fight through us. You and I are in a battle.

You and I are in a war. Question is, how do we fight? Who are we fighting? How do we engage in this battle? Exodus chapter 17. Are we there? Yes. Alright. We got two of you. The rest of you will have to catch up.

Exodus 17, we start reading in verse eight. Here's how the story happens. The very first battle of the nation of Israel. It says that while the people of Israel were still at Rephidim, the warriors of Amalek attacked them. Moses commanded Joshua, choose some men to go out and fight the army of Amalek for us. Tomorrow,

I will stand at the top of the hill holding the staff of God in my hand. Let me kinda catch us up and give us a little bit of context for Exodus 17 to make sense. If you're new to church, in the Old Testament, we see this group of people called the Israelites. They were a nobody nation. They had no prosperity. They didn't have wealth. They weren't people that if you were looking at a bunch of people to choose, that you would obviously choose them for some reason. But God chose the nation of Israel to show the world who he was, and he chose them in spite of them. Then he began to do a mighty thing through them. But the nation of Israel was learning what it meant to trust and follow God. They made some major mistakes along the way. One of those mistakes led them into captivity in Egypt. And for over four hundred years, the nation of Israel was enslaved

in Egypt. And so this is a group of people that for generation upon generation have known nothing but captivity. But this Bible tells us famously that there's this guy named Moses who's a shepherd. There's a burning bush moment. God tells Moses enough is enough. It's time to go get my people out of captivity and show them what it means to be free. And Moses goes to Pharaoh and says, hey, you gotta let my people go. And Pharaoh says, I'm not gonna do it. There's 10 plagues that hit and eventually Pharaoh says, okay, let them go. Well, leave. Pharaoh famously changes his mind and he tries to chase them down. There's that whole Red Sea moment where the sea parts, the nation of Israel walks through,

the Egyptian army goes through, and they're all washed away. All of that has already taken place. The nation of Israel is now on the other side of the Red Sea. They are a free people. But you have to see the picture. We have a group of 3,000,000 ex slaves who've known nothing but captivity.

They've known nothing but having somebody else tell them when to eat, what to eat, where to go to work, what to drink, how to live, what to do. And now they find themselves wandering in the desert with zero structure, but in this guy named Moses, they have a half of a leader.

What we have is a band of misfits in the middle of nowhere trying to figure out what it means to walk in this new life of freedom. There's 3,000,000 people and they get attacked by this guy named Amalek.

Again, there's a ton of history that goes into defining who Amalek is, but the short version of it is if you look again at the story of the birth line of the people of God, they go from Abraham to Isaac, and then Isaac has two sons. There's Esau and there's Jacob. Jacob famously

steals his brother Esau's blessing and birthright, and Esau stays angry. And all of his descendants hold a grudge against Jacob and his descendants, the people of God. Amalek, the Amalekites are all descendants of Esau who have been bitter for hundreds of years up until this point. They hear that the people of God,

Jacob's descendants are free. So they attack. Now Exodus 17, it just says that they attacked.

But Moses also wrote another book in the Old Testament called Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy 25, he records this battle in much more detail. And in Deuteronomy 25, he tells us exactly what happens. And as much as it says in Exodus that this is a battle, this isn't a battle, this is a massacre.

In Deuteronomy 25, it says that at night when they were getting ready to go to bed, they were setting fires to go to sleep.

The bulk of the camp was about a day ahead, but there was a group of stragglers behind. It was women, it was children, it was the elderly, it was the infirmed, it was the people who couldn't keep pace with the rest of the tribe and Amalek seized their opportunity to attack.

And what he does is he takes one of the most powerful armies that exists and he attacks a bunch of nobodies in the middle of nowhere and he starts by massacring the women, the children, the old, and the sick. This is a brutal mass we're going going to

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think think the that's that's Bible is very clear midst that there is a real enemy, right? John ten ten, that Jesus has come so we can have life and life abundantly, but the enemy wants to kill, steal, and destroy that life. There is a real enemy that's there, and that's part of what we have to fight.

But I think the other part that you and I have to wage war with, the biggest enemy that we will fight on this side of heaven, it's actually ourselves.

It is our sin nature. It's the thing that pulls us away from the things of God. It's the thing that pulls us into the ways of the world. It's the fleshly desires of the things that we try to get fulfillment out of. And God says, no, no, no, fulfillment in me. Don't lean into your flesh, lean into your spirit. I think the number one enemy we will fight on this side of eternity

is ourselves. It's our flesh. It's our sin nature. And here's the part that's really interesting. As the nation of Israel, after stepping into freedom, right after getting free, they become attacked. Here's what that tells me, is that you and I have to understand that it's almost immediately after we

surrender our lives to Jesus, we begin to live this new life or try to live this new life that all of sudden these new attacks start to come our way. It is not coincidental. And you have to understand who the enemy is and how he will attack you and I. Just like Amalek, he does not fight fair.

He does not come and attack them and give them advance notice and say, bring your strongest, bring your best and let's go head to head. He attacks their weakest point. He attacks when they're not ready.

And this tells us everything we have to know about the spiritual battles that we will engage in on this side of heaven. You and I have to realize there's a real battle taking place in our lives. We have an enemy that's going to attack us. They're going to come at the worst moments, the most inopportune

times. That's when the attacks will come. And the nation of Israel finds themselves in a spot for the very first time they're attacked. And Moses hears that their ranks from behind are being massacred, and so what does he do? He comes up with the first battle plan that we see.

And he tells this guy named Joshua, this is the very first time we see Joshua introduced into the scripture narrative, but Joshua will become one of the most important figures in the entire Old Testament. He will be the future leader of the nation of Israel once Moses hands over the reins to him. Joshua will be mentioned some two fifty times from this moment forward.

But in this moment, he's just a young boy that Moses sees something in.

And he tells Joshua, you need to go take our best and our strongest, get whatever sticks and rocks that we have, you are going to fight this battle. And you and I have to see this. They don't have an army. They don't have structure. They don't even really have weapons. Theologians believe that the few weapons that they had are probably from the Egyptian army, that after the Red Sea washed over them, maybe some weapons washed ashore and they had those. We have a band of misfits that Moses is telling, go and fight one of the strongest, most brilliant armies that we've seen hand to hand. And I imagine Moses or Joshua had a bit of fear in his heart, but he says, okay, I'll do it. And he looks to Moses and he goes, Moses, what are you gonna do?

And Moses says a pretty bizarre thing. Right? He says, I'm gonna go to the top of the hill

and I'm gonna take something with me. He says, I'm gonna go to the top of the hill and I'm gonna take my staff. And I know what you're thinking. You're like, hey, that looks like a little Bo Peep staff. Don't judge me. It's all we can get in short notice. This is a powerful staff of Moses. All right?

Moses says, you go fight in the field. I'm gonna go to the top of the hill, and I'm gonna take my staff. Now again, if I'm Joshua, I'm like, hey man, can we swap places? How about you go fight,

I'll go to the top of the hill and whatever's gonna happen up there, I'll figure that out, right? This is like that moment when my dad is spanking me like, this hurts me more than you. I'm like, we can trade positions if you like. Like, I'll switch. Joshua is told, you go fight in the field. Moses

goes on the hill. Now the thing you have to understand is Moses says he's gonna take with him the staff of God. Now if you read the rest of the Exodus story up until this point, this staff has done some incredible things.

God, through this staff, has done some of the most incredible miracles that we see anywhere in the Bible. When Moses was first called the burning bush moment and Moses said, God, how will I know that you're with me? He asked him, what do you have in your hand?

He says, I have a staff. And God tells him, your staff will be the proof that I'm with you. And at some point in front of Pharaoh, Moses is told by God to throw this thing on the ground. It turns into a snake and it eats all these other snakes. Like this thing can do some incredible things. The very first plague, he puts it into the Nile River and the whole Nile River, the entire water source for the Egyptian people, it all turns

to blood. The Red Sea moment, it isn't just God that parts the Red Sea. God parts the Red Sea through Moses taking his staff and holding it up to the Red Sea, and then the sea parts.

In Exodus 16, we hear the nation of Israel, they have no water. And they go to God and Moses says, God, what do I do? He says, take your staff, strike the rock, and out of the rock water will come. All of that to say, this is a staff

that has done some incredible things. So if I'm Joshua at this point, I'm like, Moses has taken it up on the hill. This is gonna be amazing. Let's see what he does with it. Okay? Moses is gonna tell us the plan in the next verse of what he's gonna do with the staff. And it says in verse 10, so Joshua did what Moses had commanded, and he went and he fought the army of Amalek.

Meanwhile, Moses, Aaron, Hur climbed to the top of a nearby hill. As long as Moses held up the staff in his hand, the Israelites had the advantage. But whenever he dropped his hand, the Amalekites gained the advantage. This is the battle plan of Moses.

He takes the staff. Again, if I'm Joshua, I'm like, he's gonna turn this thing into like a long range sniper rifle, and he's gonna start picking dudes off. He's gonna do some like Harry Potter stuff and he's gonna fly around and wipe some dudes out. But Moses gets to the top of the hill and what does he do with the staff? He goes,

It's like, that's it Moses? You're just gonna hold it up?

And Moses is like, that's all I got. And somehow as he holds it up, the people, the misfits with sticks, they end up winning and beating the army, this powerful army. And Moses is like, awesome boys, good job. I'm gonna go get some lunch. We'll be back. And he puts the staff down and he looks and he's like, what's happened? They were winning and now they're losing. So he goes back and he goes like this. He's like, alright boys, good work. It's happening again. I'm gonna take off. And he puts it down and he goes, wait, they're losing again.

And at some point the bible doesn't tell us this happened but I imagine Moses at some point with his two buddies up at the top of the hill. He's guys, watch this. Winning, losing, winning,

winning, losing. Right? Like imagine, it's like as it's up, they win. As he lowers it, they lose. He's like, what happens if I go halfway? Like it's a tie, you know? And this really bizarre scene unfolds here. This is the part of this story where there's so much insight if we can see it.

This is the very first time that there's a battle plan in place, that there's a use of the staff of God that is not instructed

by God himself. Here's what I mean. In the story we just read, God doesn't tell Moses, hey Moses, go to the top of the hill and just hold your staff up. And as long as you hold it up, I will fight and I will empower Joshua and the men and they will win. That doesn't happen. But Moses began to realize,

I've watched God time and time and time and time again do the supernatural through this silly staff that I have. It makes no sense to me. I don't understand how, I don't understand why, but somehow every time we've been in a tight pinch, God has shown up and he's used my staff. And here's the other part, if you read all of Exodus, every time this staff is referred to up until Exodus 17,

is it's God saying Moses use your staff, the staff of Moses. But in Exodus 17, Moses tells Joshua, I'm gonna take the staff of God and go on the hill and we're gonna win this thing. Here's why this matters for you and I.

What we're seeing happen in Moses is something that you and I all have to go through at some point in our spiritual journey. What Moses is experiencing is what we call spiritual maturation, spiritual maturity. He's going through a process of realizing,

hey, the past faithfulness of God, you know what it really does for you and I? Is it begins to give us confidence that when we find ourselves in situations where we go, I don't know what we do now. I don't see a way through this,

but I know that God has given me this silly thing and he's used it before. Maybe just maybe he'll use it again. And Moses begins to develop a confidence that you and I need to learn to have in who our God is. Because he's done it before, he'll do it again.

And so Moses tells Joshua, get the man, go and fight. Go and wage this war and I'm gonna stand on a hill. And again, this is a foolproof battle plan. As long as he holds this up, the nation of Israel wins. There's just one problem with this strategy.

I don't know if you've ever tried to hold anything in your hands over your head for more than twelve seconds,

but it is not easy, right? I find myself at a concert, I'm like, yo, this is my song. Right? Like I get my phone out. I'm like recording it over the crowd. And then like thirty seconds in, I'm like, all right, I don't like this song this much. Right? I'm putting my phone away. Why? Because my arms are burning. I'm like, man, I'm too tired.

Moses is 80 years old. You have an 80 year old man that's up at the top of the hill trying to hold his arms up realizing like, oh man, should have ran this one by the big guy upstairs. Like this is kinda getting difficult, right? Like what am I doing?

And we'll see in the next verse, Moses has to hold his hands like this all day until sunset. The battle plan for the nation of Israel is relying on an 80 year old man to keep his hands lifted up, holding a staff

in his hands. Here's what the Bible tells us happens next. It says in verse 12 that Moses' arms soon became so tired that he could no longer hold them up. So Aaron and Hur found a stone for him to sit on. Then they stood on each side of Moses, holding up his hands so his hands held steady until sunset.

Here's the picture Moses took with him two men to the top of this hill.

Now again, if Moses knew he was gonna have to do this all day, I would imagine he would have picked two different men. Because if you have to hold your hands up and you need somebody to help you, what you would probably do is pick two strong young men. The problem with Moses is he took his brother Aaron,

who's his older brother, and he takes with him a dude named Her, which is that's got a whole other set of issues, right? But this guy named Her is probably 90 years old based on what we know in scripture.

So what we have is three guys that are close to 90 years old who collectively have to figure out how to hold this staff up

all day. The first thing they do is they tell Moses, take a seat. They get a rock and they have him sit down.

In the nation of Israel's success, you have to see the picture. It's dependent on an 80 year old guy sitting there going, we can do this. And then on one side is his 86 year old brother, like, you're right man, we got you. And then on this side is the 90 year old guy that's like, I don't know why we're doing this, is there a better plan?

Yet this is how the battle against Amalek will be waged. Why do I belabor the point? Part of why I think this story is so important for us to understand is oftentimes the way that we fight, it looks completely ludicrous to the outside world.

And part of the other thing that you and I often do that could have easily been done in this is you can, because you're the Joshua's, you're the younger generation that feels like it's your time to lead, you could discredit the older generation and oftentimes what happens inside of church, again, you look at church, I think Rock Point's a bit of an anomaly. It's part of what I loved when I first started coming here, is we are

kind of an anomaly in that we are a multi generational church. Most of the time churches divide over age. Why? Because there's preferences that older people have that younger people don't have, and that usually becomes a point of division.

I believe that it's one of the most dangerous things that can happen to the church. Why? Because there are people who are supposed to be the Joshua's that go and fight in the land. But we need the older generation that has the wisdom to understand, hey, there's a different battle that we also have to be thinking about.

This picture in Exodus 17 is one of the most important pictures for us to see how you and I will be triumphant in the spiritual battles that we will have to face. The battle will unfold

in two separate fields. There will be two different places that we will have to learn to fight. There is a physical realm. Just like Joshua engaging in hand to hand combat, there are things that you and I will have to wage war with in the physical realm.

But we have to remember that the New Testament tells us that it's not just merely flesh and bones that we wage war with, but it's spirits and its principalities.

As much as it looked like Moses took the easy road or he took the less dangerous path going up to the top of the hill, keeping his arms outstretched. Moses knew that the more important battle here was the spiritual one.

And the next verse tells us that as long as Moses keeps his hands up, that in verse 13, as a result of this, Joshua eventually overwhelmed the army of Amalek in battle. Again, why does any of this matter for you and I?

What is the story of three old men holding their hands up for a day and a bunch of nobodies defeating a powerful army? What does that matter for us living in 2022 living in Queen Creek, Arizona? We have to remember that the story in scripture, the Bible is not just a recollection of what happened,

it is a prediction of what always happens. These stories will play out time and time and time again in our lives. We better learn the lessons

in them. I believe there's three things that we have to learn when it comes to how we fight the battles in our lives. How we wage war with our flesh. How we fight for the lives that we ultimately want on this side of heaven. The first thing we have to do, if you're taking notes, how do you and I practically fight? The first thing we have to do is we have to become aware that there even is a fight.

One of the greatest lies that the enemy has convinced the church of is that there really isn't a fight. You're just kinda going through the motions. You're just kinda playing church. You go to church because it makes you a little bit of a better person. And the goal of this life is to have enough

church and like enough of the world to where you're still satisfied, but you don't become like the weirdo person in church. Like God forbid you're ever that guy that like puts both of his hands in the air. You're like, dude, that's just awkward. Like don't be that guy, right? And the facade

that has been created in the American church is that you can have both.

And that we're just not in a fight and we're just kinda going through the motions. And mostly what our faith does is it informs how we vote. And I'm telling you right now, the enemy is totally okay with us going to church as long as we walk out of here no different than we came in.

What the enemy is terrified of is a church that becomes aware of the power that's within us. And the first step of becoming aware of being able to do it is becoming aware that there even is a fight.

If I could right now peel back the layers between the physical realm that we live in, of what we can see and the spiritual realm that is happening over our lives, we would be freaked out. But there is a massive spiritual battle that's happening.

The reason that this matters for you and I is I hope, my prayer is that you have a vision of where you want your life to end. If not, you need to start there. What is the vision for your life? What are you doing? Where are you going? The Bible says that without vision, we perish. That if we don't have a clear picture of where we wanna end up, we will just meander our way through life. And if you're sitting here, you go, you know what? I do have a bit of a picture. I do have a bit of a vision. If you're here and you go, man, I want my marriage to thrive. I want my kids to grow up in a home that has a mom and dad that loves them. And at the end of my life, I wanna be married to the same person. I wanna have kids that didn't have perfect parents and weren't perfect kids, but they did their best and had an opportunity to pursue God's best for them. If that's something that you want, I'm telling you, you will not just meander your way there. You will not wander and just accidentally end up at a place of excellence at the end of your life.

When I was a young adult pastor, I used to yell every single week at the young adults in this room. I said, if you begin to believe that God's plan for your life is better for your life than yours,

and you actually want to start to live this out and you begin to grab hold of this and you believe that maybe, just maybe, although it sounds like it's from the eighteen hundreds and that it's this archaic thing, that maybe God has a better plan for your sexuality than you do.

And you wanna get to the altar one day and say, I waited to share this experience with nobody other than my spouse. I promise you to do it. It will be the greatest fight you've ever engaged in. And the lie that you will try to convince yourself of is that purity is something you only fight for until you get married.

And all my married folks in the room, know that purity is a lifelong pursuit. You will not just accidentally end up in a marriage that is pure, that is holy, that honors God. It will be the greatest fight that you will ever wage war with.

The second thing we have to do once we become aware of it is we have to be willing to actually engage the fight. Friends, I believe that right now, I don't wanna get too weirdly spiritual, but I believe that the church, that the world is desperate for the church to wake up.

The world is desperate for the church to remember who we are and what we're called to do and be.

I mean, just pull up social media. It is at an all time frenzy and the church is continuing to be pushed further and further out of the conversation. And it's because we forgot what the real battles are, what the real fight is.

And this story tells us that there's going to be a fight we have to engage in and some of it will play out in the physical realm. Some of the battles we need to have are purely physical. To stop looking at pornography,

you need to do some things different with your computer. You need to put filters in place. You need to stop following the Instagram models on social media, right? Because all of it is a stepping stone that leads to the next place. But the real battle that you and I have to engage in

is we have to become a church that prays again. There's a spiritual battle that has to be waged and the people of God are the ones that have to lead it. This is the posture that we fight from. Prayer is not something that we do to appease God and to make him happy with us. No, prayer is how we fight.

Our quiet times in the morning with God is not because we sit down and we go, okay, wanna check the box because I'm really trying hard to make sure that the list of the good things that I've done slightly outweighs the list of the bad things that I've done. And then when I get before God, he'll check out the list and go, awesome, you barely made it but you're in. No, I sit down and I spend time in prayer and I read scripture because I remember before I go about my day, I need to prepare for battle.

I walk in the doors of church not because this is just something that I do and I get a cup of coffee and I walk in here and I just get a good lesson and if it's all interesting and I like the songs, I'll leave them a tip at the end and then I walk out and I go to lunch and I just do the rest of my life.

That's not what church is for. But the enemy has convinced the church in America that that's it. That's God's best for you and I'm telling you, it's a lie from the pit of hell. And we're going to continue to just get beat in this battle all day long if we don't start to realize what the stakes are.

Our families are on the line. Our culture is on the line. Our schools environments are on the line, this battle matters. We walk in the doors of church because this is the place that we remember who we are.

We stand together, we lift each other's arms when we get tired, we put on our armor, we put on the battle uniform and then we walk out this door going, there's a war to be fought. I'm gonna engage in this battle again.

And the most important lesson in this, I think the thing that we have to see in the story of how this battle is fought, if we're gonna win this battle, we can't fight alone. You will not win the battle in your life for spiritual maturity, for purity, for wholeness in your marriage, for your kids'

salvation. You will not win these fights if you try to do it alone.

We have to understand from the very beginning, the way back in the book of Genesis, it says that God made man in our image. We were made in the image of a triune God. We were made from community. We were made for community. The concept of an isolated Christian, it shouldn't exist.

Moses would have lost this fight if he had not had two men with him to help him when he was weak. You and I will have moments where we need other people to lift our hands when we're failing.

Some of the people that are sitting here today, the most practical thing that you can walk out of here with is you need to do a real honest assessment of the people you spend the most time with.

Sometimes we wonder why we keep making these poor decisions, why we keep doing the things that we don't want to do and we know that we shouldn't be doing. And truthfully, it's primarily because

we still haven't taken an honest analysis of the people that we spend the most time with. And I'm not saying that we can't have friends and associates and family members and people that we interact with that aren't Christian, but you better believe that the two or three, four or five closest people to you,

the people you spend the most time with, the people that you go to in times of crisis, if you stand here and you raise your hand and say, yes, I believe in Jesus. I believe that he's empowered me with the Holy Spirit. I believe that I'm called to live a life that is different than what the world is living. If that's you and the people that are around you aren't pursuing the same thing, I'm telling you right now, you are set up for

failure. Do not be shocked when you sit in a barbershop day in and day out when you go, what, how did I get my haircut? Like that's just what happens in barbershops if you sit there long enough.

For some of us, I don't mean to like de spiritualize this, but the reason that you keep making the same mistakes over and over again is because you keep hanging out with the same people over and over again. You wanna know where you'll end up in five years? I've heard it said numerous amounts of times. If you wanna see where you'll be in five years, look at the five people closest to you.

You will be the average of those five people in the next five years. The question is, are the people you're spending the most time with, are they the people that you should be spending the most time with? We have to take an honest analysis because what's going to happen, just take marriages for example.

If you've been married for more than ten minutes, you know conflict is going to arise. There are going to be mostly my wife's fault, but sometimes I do dumb stuff too. But when my wife does something

and I don't know what to do and I don't know how to process it, but I'm really hurt and I'm really frustrated and I go to a close friend of mine and I tell them what happened. And let's just say it's all my wife's fault. I did nothing wrong and there's something that she really did that was her fault. The friend that I go to, when there's this little fire that's happening, is he carrying with him a bucket of water or a bucket of gas?

Because unfortunately what a lot of our friends do is they take what is just this little fire and they go, you're right, she is the worst. You do deserve better than that. She always does that. That's what she's always done. You should get out of that marriage and they take what was just a little fire and they pour a bunch of gas on and you walk out of there completely on fire.

What we as the people of God are supposed to do are be people who carry with us these big buckets of water. And when people come to us that are in chaos, we just go, hey, there's a way out of this. We can forgive. You've made way worse mistakes.

The Bible tells us that if you've forgiven seven times, you should consider doing it 77 times. That God's plan for you is always to engage and to figure this out. And maybe just maybe the answer is not stepping outside of your marriage or ending this relationship. Maybe just maybe it's you

actually becoming who you're supposed to be. Maybe it's you going to counseling and working on you, and it'll create something in her that changes and begins to enact change. And then the two of you can get into counseling and two of you can be healthy. The only reason I belabor the point a little bit is I think we have to have an honest assessment of who are we hanging out with.

If we want to end in a place where we go, man, I'm standing before God one day and he says, well done good and faithful servant, we won't just accidentally get there. It will have to be the most intentional thing we've ever done.

For the nation of Israel, they are learning this lesson today in Exodus chapter 17. Look how the story ends. It's a really powerful end of the story. It says that after the victory, the Lord instructed Moses, write this down on a scroll as a permanent reminder and read it aloud to Joshua.

I will erase the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Moses built an altar there and he named it Yahweh Nissi,

which means the Lord is my banner. He said, they have raised their fist against the Lord's throne, so now the Lord will be at war with Amalek generation after generation. The very first time that we ever see in scripture,

God tell Moses and the nation of Israel to write down what happened today is right here in Exodus chapter 17. It's not after the parting of the Red Sea. It's not after he strikes a rock and water comes from it. It is after this battle God tells them, this is a pivotal day in your development.

Write this down. Remember what happened today. Why is this so important? Because God was teaching them that in this life, we will always have an Amalek that comes and attacks. This battle matters. And then he tells them that I'm going completely blot out. I'm going to completely annihilate every part of the Amalekites.

This is again a massive thing that we have to see. God is telling the nation of Israel what your temptation will be, is to have a little bit of this and a little bit of this. But the problem is if you have a little bit

Amalek, if you have a little bit of sin in your life and you just keep it there, eventually it'll get bigger and it will always destroy you. If you read the rest of the Old Testament, the kings who famously made the worst mistakes were the ones that when they had an opportunity to wipe out the Amalekites completely, like King Saul,

God told them after a victory, destroy them completely, annihilate all of them. Saul was like, no, no, I like some parts of this. I'm gonna keep some of this stuff. He kept all of the choice animals, and what happened to Saul was that eventually

the Amalekites grew and they became powerful again, and ultimately Saul is killed by an Amalekite, or they help him commit suicide. What is God telling us here? The battle with sin in our life is one that we have to wrestle completely to the ground.

You and I will never experience victory if what we think we can do is just dip our toe in the waters of faith and still entertain all of this stuff over here. The problem is it won't stay over here. It will always grow, it will always begin to destroy you. God tells the nation of Israel,

you are going to fly the banner that is Yahweh Nissi.

This is your victory banner. A banner in this time was everything to the nation. It's what they carried with them into battle, and God was taking this band of misfits and he was turning them into a group of people and he was telling them what their primary identity was going to be. And it was going to be God goes before me. God is the one who fights with me, he fights for me, and he fights

through me. Why does any of this matter to you and I? Because for Moses and Abraham and the nation of Israel, this is where they found their identity. What they did not have is what would be the ultimate fulfillment of this battle. What all of the Old Testament was pointing to, which was the coming of the Messiah, Jesus.

The Old Testament for you and I is supposed to be as we read it like a giant Disney Easter egg. And I know we're not supposed to talk about Disney in church, but it illustrates what I'm talking about. If you've ever watched a Disney movie, they'll do this thing where you're watching Toy Story and they'll put like a little Easter egg of another movie. And my kids love finding the Easter eggs in the movie. And it's a foreshadowing to a different movie. The Old Testament is supposed to be that to Jesus.

All of the Old Testament is a foreshadowing of the ultimate plan of God to restore his people. The ultimate banner that would wave over the people of God was Jesus. It was fulfilled in Jesus. There are two Easter eggs in this story that show us everything that we need to see.

You know Joshua? Joshua's actual name, the old testament is written in Hebrew. His name in Hebrew is Yeshua. Yeshua translated in Greek is the exact same word that we use for Jesus. So what we see here is a picture of Jesus fighting in the fields.

We see Jesus fighting and being victorious, and that's the first Easter egg that is foreshadowing to the coming of the Messiah, but the most important one is the one that we saw right in the beginning. Moses,

I don't even think he was aware of what was actually happening on that day, but see the picture. Moses is standing on a hill like this, and it's in doing the most difficult thing that he's ever done with his arms stretched wide, with a piece of wood between his hands,

with a person to his left and a person to his right, and he stands here going, if there's another way, I would do it. But for whatever reason, God, this is your path to victory. And for my people, this will declare to them victory.

But what this was, was the ultimate foreshadowing of the one that would come whose name was Jesus, stepped out of heaven, who lived the perfect life, who died the death that we deserve in his declaration of victory to you and I, is that even when he asked God, if it's possible to make this cup pass, I would do it.

But not my will, yours be done. And on a hill at sunset, he stood with arms stretched wide with a piece of wood between his hand and to his left and to his right was a thief. And Jesus, some two thousand years ago, he waged the ultimate spiritual battle for you and I.

If you sit here today and you go, how can I know that God is fighting for me? What is the flag that I can wave? Friends, it is the cross. It is the sacrifice of Jesus. It's why it's the greatest message the world has ever heard is that God is pursuing you. God loves you. God has a plan for you. And it starts

by understanding what he did that day on the cross. And for you and I who've put our faith in Jesus, you are now invited to wage war on this side of heaven, but you're not fighting alone. Just like the nation of Israel had the staff, you have the very spirit of God living in you.

It is not a spirit of fear, but it is one of power and of self control and of sound mind. Because of that, we can experience

victory. Friends, I have a simple question for you as we wrap all this up. What are the battles in your life that you've just kind of allowed to be there that you need to become engaged with? Because my encouragement to you is that maybe, just maybe, the victory you've been waiting for,

the things that you've been waiting for God to do for you, maybe, just maybe, you haven't seen the victory happen because God's in it. God's waiting for you to step in and play a part in your own rescue. That yes, he will fight for you, but he also wants to fight through you.

So I'm gonna ask everybody right now to close your eyes and bow your heads. And father, I ask right now with all of our eyes closed and heads bowed, that if there are people that are in this room right now that know that there are battles, that there are things that they just have been allowing in their lives,

that Lord you would give us the courage right now, the boldness to ask for you to begin to empower us to step into this fight. Give us the courage to remember that we're not in this thing alone. And that father you would give us the audacity as we walk out of this room to actually change those things.

And for other people that are here that have never had that moment where they've raised the banner of God over their life, that they've never had the moment where they actually swapped the flag that they were flying, the flag that was them their own power, their own pride,

and that they took that flag down and what they put in place was the flag of God over their life. That Lord, they would have an honest moment with you and that they would remember that scripture tell us that all we have to do is confess with our mouths and believe in our heart that you are Lord and we are safe.

And from that moment forward, God, are on your team and we can wage war with you. God, I pray that you would open our eyes. You would let us see what's really happening so that the people of God would step back into who we are supposed to be. It is in the mighty name of Jesus that everybody said,

amen. Hey, would you guys stand with us as we close and worship?

Amen, church. We're free in the name of Jesus. Hallelujah. Thanks for joining us online this weekend. Let us know if we can help you in any way. Make sure to follow us on social media and connect with us on rockpointe.io for prayer and everything happening here at Rock Point.